I opened the door with my hands that had by then taken the temperament of a log of wet wood- soaked yet thirsty, beginning to smooth out on the outside but on the inside falling apart like a web of dead blue nerves, shivering like wreckage of autumn shrubberies. I sneaked in with my eyes unable to gauge everything of the darkness, with a thunderstorm in my stomach- as if in a while- I’ll be an infinitesimal part of all the gloom in the air surrounding my shivery body. The stillness of the room was sinking in my blood with adlibbed goose-bumps. I was in those moments when the faintness of a dark space bloats itself bit by bit and makes one feel as if it’s coming towards you like an adventurous swing from a soaring height and it will hit you in the face with absolutely nothing but it will hurt and bleed like a severe accident.
In a fraction of a second, I heard a strange voice, at first the voice collided with my heartbeat and vanished unnoticeably and then it remained the same way- a streak of golden light does in a flickering bulb. Half of my heart throbbed in my stomach and the other half was hung in the middle of my dried throat; my head felt submersed in a huge helium balloon, unable to move, blink or breathe. I heard an unsteady, cracked female voice. As soon as I heard the voice I stood frozen since it felt like a voice of my own- not the voice that comes out of the rolling tongue made sensibly heard using syllables but a voice that’s of a hungry stomach, unconscious and alarming. I saw a silhouette of a woman sitting on my bed.
From the tips of her blonde hair rolled underneath- kept neatly on her forehead, a vintage shirt with fluffy sleeves and a cargo pant- to the limitlessness of her aura – she looked like sunlight breaking out of labyrinth of silver linings of besieged clouds in a bereft sky. She made me remember of someone important- someone I know as intimately as myself; someone I remember like the lyrics of an overplayed song, recipe of the special dish Amma cooked every Sunday, alphabets and numbers I learnt as a kindergarten kid- like the things you never notice but they are embedded like stones in your memory.
Conspired by what my eyes could see, my dysfunctional brain struggled to push my calves to move ahead and look closely at this woman but my bones were as usual stubborn. In a small second the woman disappeared and I frantically started moving in the darkness- suddenly my fear disappeared and I turned into a mad lover looking for a closure to a mystical heartbreak. I switched the lights on to find a neatly folded yellow letter kept on the bed.
“My dear reader, I want to tell you, that night my thoughts had ensnared me beyond the capacity of a cage. The flesh holding me together withered like embers falling from a forest fire. I looked at the mirror- I saw my flesh torn apart, rotten and dull- I appeared to myself like those scary sketches artists draw of half eaten bodies. That night- like owl’s talons clenching my heart- I belittled every reason of my life, then I saw a never-ending sea through which I dawdled- with each footstep my body becoming heftier and that sea was my pain: the pain was me; I had become it and I had to go for I could see nothing else but this sea going up and down holding my pain across its waves. I had to drown my own sea. In the moment of my own murder, I was free. I saw the sky- after years of looking at it, I saw my widowed sky and a regret ached in me. I wish I had been the seeker of its vastness since the beginning of my life but I was free of this colourless world only when I turned blue in the shadow of the sky casted upon the sea. I am Sylvia Plath, your Sylvia. You’d grieved when you first learnt about my loneliness, you’ve loved me even when I never touched you, I never spoke to you but you told me how they try to shut you for your madness. You’ve screamed at nights your lungs out and looked for someone to give back to you- the mute laughter you crave for. This is what I give to you- be the sky and live me from here. Choose the madness, the sky, the sea and come to me, here I lie like a solaced wildflower.”
As I finished reading the letter, I was drenched in sweat, a million voices echoed around me, my presence juggled between death and life in a micro-second. Suddenly, someone jerked me like an electricity wire and a jot of my senses came back.
Marina, my 9-year-old cousin, tried snatching the paper from my hand but I refused to give up as if it were a key to my own grave.
“I want my sketch back, Didi,” she almost yelled at me.
“That’s not your sketch,” I said and looked at the paper.
It was a beautifully drawn sketch of a caterpillar. She had coloured it so uniformly that it seemed like the caterpillar was dancing on that piece of paper- maybe it was happy- its life would last just three summer days.
Prachi Bhardwaj 