A Litany of Breaths

[Leila]

Moving into the apartment in the island arranged for us by a woman that I immediately named Mrs. Omega because each of her facial features resembled the letter O, proved to be interesting. Though repugnant by even the standards of my almost negligent nature, everything came in twos, which in turn made the apartment seem... orderly, even taken care of. The space consisted of two pillows each (it was arranged for us to enjoy these little commodities), two nightstands, two chairs, two TV’s (I was told we were lucky we had one at all), two couples of towels each, and all arranged together symmetrically. From far away these twos of everything seemed be just pixels for illustrating a bigger picture, a masterpiece of some sort, that I intended to interpret as depicting life blatantly relieved, untouched from the time to time polluted flow of other lives and free of their baggage. The apartment was inspiringly pitiful. And I was inspired. All it took to have such a life was to submit to the spirit of amative and ineluctable pairing that had contaminated all means of life. After all the tiresome traveling, miserable chairs that vibrated when carrying the slightest weight, doors that squeaked with every movement of the wind, windows threatening to rust, and TVs that no longer helped me make sense of the outside world were more than enough.

Mrs. Omega apologetically explained about the stained walls that the couple living there before us were artists. The end. As if artists are unquestionable and can't be blamed for anything they do. "The gihrl, Ameerican, like yu," she pointed at me, dramatically raising her O shaped eyebrows, an expression she would later continue to do whenever she wanted to provoke a response from my blank face. My fiance asked some questions about them as I wandered around. I had seen Him speak in the islanders' native language enough times to know that all I would do was stare mindlessly until they were done. At best, I could provide a third wheel-ish distraction to the conversation, which in turn would make them talk about me only that I wouldn't know it. The bedroom had a balcony from which I could see the street and the little shops or coffe places. The merging of the horizon with the sky was disturbed by (what seemed in the dusk as) an intrusive black mass. When I asked about it, Mrs. Omega smiled the kind of smile a teacher serves an overly diligent student asking about next month's assignment. No. Now that I think about it, she smiled a protective smile that made me feel like an outsider who is overstepping their boundaries by asking questions they shouldn't ask. Either way, she made her point about my foreignness, and pronounced its name in such a way that convinced me that it was a historical landmark, one of which regional legends are made of. He translated it to me as "Last Breath." Such a dramatic name for just a rock. I told Him this.

(vazhdon...)

[i_pakapshem]

very rich (where did you find it?)

p.s. ke bo mungesa lal ;)

[Leila]

very rich (where did you find it?)

p.s. ke bo mungesa lal ;)

E gjeta ne nje cep te pallatit tek kullat te rruga e Barrikadave. :)



For the next couple of days, He showed me around the island. He, himself, hadn't seen it in years, while I relied on an image or a collage, rather, composed out of His memories, traveling books, and the internet. Late mornings, sightseeings, and shopping sprees for the apartment took up most of our day. Late at night there would be singing and dancing around fireplaces as the tourists looked on from a distance, clapping their hands, the unknown enticing them with each flickering of the dancing shadows across their faces. I would stare at them as their hunger, the color of faded blood, betrayed itself openly on the surface of their skin like a Jack O' Lantern in Halloween. It was a matter of where and how the pumpkin was carved, but you wouldn't know what it was like until the candle inside was lit. Married men were the best to watch. Newlyweds even better; they are the ones who haven't made peace with the concept of "till death do us part." Girls danced nonstop, the island's numinous sirens to the tired Odysseuses. Men are so dramatic in their self-drawn portraits. And the sirens feasted on this weakness. I could almost smell the faded blood.

I was one of the Jack O' Lantern faced tourists. For Him, however, this was a socializing event. Before the end of the week, He had made friends who stared at me like an unwinded doll that would at any second demonstrate the reason for having been manufactured. When I didn't provide that much-needed climax for socializing, they chalked it up to another reason why He was so great: having to put up with me. Before the end of the week, we had polluted our apartment's former virginal air -- it was painted. The bedroom was painted a crisp white, the living room was done in deep red and smudged yellow, while the kitchen was painted in an old faded yellow, something reminiscent of American vintage pin-up art. The bathroom remained untouched, ever since we found an erratic, hugger-mugger writing in English at the inside edge of the door, "i lived!" If that comment brought a scant of solace to someone and it wouldn't kill us to keep it, then we'd leave it alone. Before the end of the week, we started living before our financial well dried up. After all, we spent a good chunk of it mobilizing the apartment. He didn't enjoy working in a pharmacy. It was too technical worrying about chemicals, side effects, sicknesses, poisonings, and all. So He picked a less macabre job -- a butcher, a very flexible job with lots of people interaction, not to mention a nice supply of a la Carrie pig's blood at hand if the occassion called for it. But it was great. It was a job that benefited us both, since I could walk to the store and we'd get to eat our meals together every day.

(vazhdon...)

[Leila]

He is God, or maybe the closest paradigm of a God I’ve ever concocted. I think sometimes about the appropriateness of the relationship but that is only when memory pokes holes in the opaque indifference that has now become my life and nostalgia serves as proof that I used to have another life before this one. Truthfully, He found me one day as He was slicing a pomegranate, His knife merely missing the embryonic sac that cultivated a cleft chin, a folded ear, a beauty mark, and a scar on the wrist. In short, genetic traits that aren’t uncommon among pomegranate children. He then timed the Big Bang on my forehead, arranged five moons for a mouth to have for kissing, and willed strings of latitudes and meridians to burst from my neck as if for orientation. Eyebrows are a luxury, but being the generous man that He is, He gave me his own. Sometimes He regrets His decision but every now and then, half-pleased at His creation and half-teasingly, He'll say, "Have some pity and lend me an eyebrow, darling." A sarcastic, albeit obvious, shot at my vanity. But that's love for you -- vanity's sycophant.

When He leaves every morning I can’t bring myself to wish Him a good day. There is something almost distasteful in wishing a good day to the man whose good day determines your own. It’s literally telling yourself, “Self, have a good day!” While it’s a normal bad habit to hope and thus assume a good day for yourself, wishing a good day to the man whom you wouldn’t have bothered with if only your life wasn’t entangled with his seems almost hypocritical. If it isn’t hypocritical then it borders on worship and deities stand on the ficklest grounds, fickleness establishing its importance. The most important (and practical) thing is that He’s not an outsider to this island. He sticks to the world, happily and without much effort, like anyone should, and I stick to Him because it's a rewardless task to stick to the masses. It's hard enough to stick to an individual… unless of course, one needs you first. In all my detachment towards breathing beings I only wish my needs were important enough for me to feel like I have a right to stick to the one who will satisfy them. Maybe even to guilt or order them to obey my needs to need me, or even love me by recognizing in me their own sticky human disposition to stick by need and maybe sympathize with me because of it. And why shouldn’t I? They’ll respond to orders just like I do, maybe even more willingly so. Instead, I wait to be needed in order to need. And pride sits there with me like a secretly-repentant but obstinate parent whose child has shown them the error of their ways.

I rarely let water overflow any container in the sink, unless I’ve left fruits in a bowl and wandered off around the apartment mindlessly. He terrifies me in the strangest ways. He has instilled a fear in me, as if He pours into me constantly and I’m not nearly enough to store His discharges without overflowing. And then the idea of a love refrigerator amuses me -- what we need is a refrigerator for love to average out our love intake and never have to choose to either let it rot or consume it all at once, risking hunger pains or a heavy stomach. And it’s such a pity to let it all go to waste. A pity that it can’t be donated.

He thinks these thoughts are macabre. Even more so if I find them amusing.

[Leila]

Margarita is the epitome of a girl-woman, if I ever saw one, frozen youthfully at a precise point in life where she shines brighter like the dying Niobid, a time that every woman yearns for eternity. She has a dark complexion, soft, long limbs like a cat. She's 5'8 with a thick mass of pitch-black long hair and makes men drown in the arcane pool at the base her throat. Her ribs come together to form little blackberry bumps that poke through the steep slope down in between her breasts. Sometimes I think Margarita's chest looks like a photograph recording the movements of a delicious berry having spilled out from her throat, dropping-bopping-bouncing-rolling-skidding on the surface, and disappearing at the abyss inside her pyramidal stomach, tomb of kings. She could be the reincarnation of the woman on whose ribs Pythagoras came up with his famed theory. Margarita the Sphinx. What use has a king -- not just any ordinary man -- for treasures and weapons in his underground tomb when he's eternally fed Margarita's berries? Naturally, Margarita doesn't need weapons. She does, however, make good use of her long nose and chin -- what luxuries for people like me! -- her double-edged knives, faithful to her since birth. Make no mistake; Margarita isn't a kind of beauty unlike any special faces in a magazine here and there. Her beauty stops short of making her an apparition or a figment of one's imagination. In other words, she is humanly beautiful. But it turns out this kind of beauty is terrorizing because an apparition is nothing, whereas a human being beautiful enough to capture any man she wants is something of a nightmare. I suppose subconsciously we fear each other. Humans have a vengeful nature; they have weaknesses, fixations, resentment, beliefs and worst of all -- at least in combination with these four characteristics -- goals. So should Margarita make it her mission to make someone pale in comparison to her, you're done for.

The Sphinx lives down the street from the butcher's shop and comes a few times a week to buy meat. I saw her less frequently during my twice a day trips to the shop (my immediate concern was that I'd go hungry without Margarita's blackberries), and eventually realized that this was a conscious decision for her. She hadn't all of a sudden become a vegetarian; she simply bought her meat when I wasn't there and it wasn't such a hard task to pull off since my trips followed a fairly rigid routine. He said she's an old fox, dhelpër e vjetër, as He termed it one night while we were cooking dinner. Well... He was cooking dinner while I, being domestically-challenged, mixed drinks from a recipe book and made salads. She's enough of a woman to intuitively measure up a man just by his looks alone. Understandable. Women ultimately reach an age where maybe they're biologically programmed to know men this way, as to not waste time in order to procreate. Few of them gain these instincts while they're still girl-women, like Margarita the Sphinx who feeds the dead. He knows because he's an "old wolf." I picked out two CDs, Dredg and Frou Frou, to play throughout the night. I bet Margarita is a good cook.

Bitch.

[Leila]

Someone stole my chocolate.

(vazhdon... with a vengeance)

[Leila]

Crossing a bridge that brought me into the city, I wondered why it no longer had the rails on each side like it did a few years ago. No biggie, though. I would just have to walk very carefully as to not lose my balance. It was a beam bridge made out of steel and concrete, and it seemed strangely narrower than I remembered it. Perhaps it always was narrow and I was too small to notice back then. Shtriji këmbët sa ke jorganin, they say, intending to stimulate the natives' peripheral vision, I guess. I looked down to admire the unusually clear water. I remembered the river blue-green with slippery algae at the spots where the water was shallow enough. It was regarded as the Devil's Lair by even the least authoritive mother, a nudie beach for repulsive prepubescent boys, and a source of veneration for the rest of us who spent springs collecting frog larvae in our buckets. Looking closely, I noticed neat rows of cooked eggplants at the bottom of the aberrantly tranquil water stretching far and wide as if the riverbed was a cooking tray. Enthralled by the delicious sight, a spoon fell from my hand and landed in the water clouding the view. As the water cleared up again, my spoon revealed itself as a fork (natural, since I eat the dish with a fork anyway) having landed at the edge of, not an eggplant, but a black coffin. They were all coffins! Horrified by such an eerie spectacle, I regained my posture in a hurry and retreated back into the woods at the other end of the bridge. He was waiting there, grabbed me by the arms and pulled me off into safety. I couldn't breathe and as I woke up I realized I had been sleeping in a position that crushed my chest and was suffocating me slowly in my sleep. My gasp had woken Him up because He lifted His head that was resting at the back of my neck and refused to lay back down for a good while. When He finally did, He nudged me with his leg, a gesture to show that although he was lying down, He was still awake. I retreated silently back into the woods, into the dark, into the familiar red-yellow-green subdued fireworks inside my eyelids. Why did I need to go into the city, in the first place?

[Leila]

The day came for us to tear down our self imposed ephemeral walls and to finally make ourselves available to the world. It's (global) common courtesy to vilify one's newfound sense of purity with the leftover thoughts and self-personifying possessions (be they imaginary, emotional, or physical) of whoever may surround them. Phone calls from around the world immediately poured in as soon as our phone was hooked. According to Mom, having been the third generation who had an opportunity for an education, I had no excuse to ignore my schooling. I told her that I wanted to be a nun once but she mentally snipped that part off with the ease and experience of 19 years under her belt and discarded it in her mental vortex, a Black Hole designed for just for my hellraiser edges. Fearing that she'd discard my arm as well, I held off telling her about its (unreported) throbbing pain from my previous car accident. The rest of the phonecalls went something like, Darling, you're in Heaven! Maybe we'll come visit in the fall. Hell, I'll move there when I retire. Enter jokes about us in old age that I'm forced to giggle at. When are you coming back? Send lots of pictures of your vacation. Don't forget souvenirs. Well... till next time, love! A tornado just blew in from one ear to the other and by the end of our conversations I felt empty, like they ate something out of me. After answering the first few phone calls, I realized (very regretfully) that I hadn't been genuinely asked anything, not even my well being. In fact, I wasn't even given a choice where I should live. In resignation, I stopped satisfying their curiosity about my momentary lapse of a "vacation" and began to screen calls. I live here.

(vazhdon as always)

[Leila]

The laptop, my binoculars for living once-upon-a-time since I didn't watch TV or read newspapers, began to lose its priority in my daily routine. For a while, I received reports of the lives of everyone I knew and replied by writing a letter by hand and scanning it. I liked the decadence of it all and each scanned letter gave me the sensation of being photographed moving. A family friend just finished filming something, political upheavals, job changes, more political upheavals, another shared her psych diploma with me as we'd (shamelessly) discuss her patients, although I've always entertained a suspicion that she majored in psychology to keep herself sane. Nothing wrong with that; she simply possesses an overdeveloped sense of what's normal human behavior and is armed with an array of healthy ways to deal with problems. An e-mail from my sister informed me that I should have an ICE number in my cell phone, In Case of Emergency, and that it's practiced in the UK when people get into car accidents, for example. She procured this bit as she was applying to school there. We were puzzled with the troublesome placement of the ICE, whether there should be a slash following it and then the person's name, or if ICE would be better off following the person's name as in calling "John Doe In Case of Emergency." If so, it would take the searcher a long time to find the ICE contact in that minuscule cell phone screen when they could just press "i" and skip to the listings starting with that letter.

[Leila]

Soon, nobody had anything substantial to offer. Not that the letters came hastily written or shorter than before but because I had grown impatient and intolerant to reservations, and felt more and more put off by being thrown the left overs of their lives -- the things that didn't affect them either way in telling me, insipid information about their lives. Nobody said what they thought. Tongues were bitten so much that I was sure I could taste iron while reading their letters. What I did understand from the letters was that they were all stressed. So much so that, in comparison to them, I didn't feel like I was living anymore. I was in Heaven, I had heard. But where would one get the idea that to live was to worry, to meet deadlines, to stress, to rush and finally go to bed heavy with worrying about yet another goal they didn't accomplish by the end of the day? That if one was content, they were just... taking a break, vacationing rather, but not living. The last e-mail I read was from someone explaining how by the principle of the 6th degree of separation, anyone can be related to any person in the world.