biting into august

and loss that leaches colour

I underwent an eye procedure earlier this month. Not an emergency at present, but could have devolved into one, they said. This is how it goes: you are asked to look at the light. Look at it. You’re doing great. No, keep looking at it. Very good. And again, and again, and again.

When the light is suddenly gone, you can’t see anything. Blinded by the light is all very well when it is a string of words backlit by the blue-white light of your device, but it is not a concept that strikes you with your arms pinned to your side and a blunt plastic shard nestled between your cheekbone and the hollow of your eye. Like any functioning person who has read How Some of It Happened by Marie Howe, I panicked. It was not pretty, and I couldn’t very well quote Howe to a doctor with next to no bedside manners. Well, I couldn’t quote Howe to a doctor. Period.

It was not pretty, my eyes felt singed, they still occasionally grunt a sting. But it is grounding, weeks after that fifteen-minute spell where I thought I could no longer see. Now, when it stings, it is a reminder of light.

The procedure, dated the fifth, set the tone for August. Thrilled to announce that August, all in all, has been bad. What else is new. I could watch only one film this month (Primal Fear, 1996). I was on the receiving end of news of more people passing than I can count on one hand. I do not deal well with loss. Which is to say, I do not deal with loss.

I take the news with a curt nod and power on like the jigsaw puzzle that is my life will not be missing hues the shape of people I can no longer reach. Till the blistering August sun (hey, Chennai) drives me into my room on a Thursday afternoon. And then, I cry. This accumulated reckoning of loss amounts to tears that feel oddly like an exorcism. Not that I would know how an exorcism really feels.

I dream of death, of dying, and all in between. It is a recurring pattern and I have no lesson I can wring from it. Dreaming of death and thinking of love paves the way for thoughts that’d make people balk if they heard; which is why they aren’t hearing it.

I have a thing against dirt on the ground, dirt in the grout. I have a thing against mess in my mind. When I let people die a silent death in my heart, in my head, it is this: They are blood on the tiles, inextricable from the plaster, from the sand, from the sunmica. Even in death, there is existence. Being loved raises you to indelibility.

I love a great many people. This month I’ve lost a few of them to death, fewer to time. Death is a time machine of sorts, it blurs recent past and highlights the foundation of your relationship, the way the Photoshop clarity setting ramped to a 100 would.

Grandma’s friend, four-year-old me on the dinner table, her on the chair, hands on both sides of me to keep me from toppling over while I laughed at her very warped rendition of Goldilocks. I miss her. My mind skids over the part where she couldn’t recognise me the last time we met. I remember how her warm palms felt against my always cold ones. I miss her potluck of stories where she’d throw in everything she could think of in the hopes of me nearly, just nearly, tipping over the table by the sheer force of laughter.

Friendships you lose to time, to circumstance, your memory distorts less. Maybe one day they won’t rankle anymore, maybe they still will. Who’s to say? Maybe even scabbed over, there’ll be an occasional grunt of a sting. A reminder of August twenty-twenty-five.

I have no neat ribbon to wrap around this month. Even if I did, I do not have the width, the range, to reach across its ends and tie a bow on top. This month, at the brink of autumn yet burned by the heat that typifies climate here, has taken too much from me, I am lesser for it. It is bitter in my mouth, curves around my molars, and burns down my throat. I wish it were lodged in its path, in wait of a reflex that would purge it. Instead, it is part of me now.