Fuschia Rain

A note to the future:
I want to do insanely sexy things with your blue eyes. Tossed onto foreign shores by a fuchsia rainstorm and dripping flowers I want to hold your ribs above mine and crash into those shores, high tide.

Where shall we run away to? Where is the sky blue enough, where is it littered with stars, god an errant cleaner who forgot to sweep the floor. Trapped in fluoresence and words about faraway worlds, the girl hears the runaway sounds of: seashore, breathing, wooden beams creaking, high tide, low tide, crabsong, flute dances and the vibrations of rain-soaked fuchsia flowers humming their brilliance into an acid blue sky. Leaching delicious desire out of your finger tips. Against the hardness of cushioned computer chairs, she feels: The edges of wet leaves, dark green as forest hearts. The silkiness of warm saltwater in rock pools. Sand. The edges and crenulations of the landscapes that hide underneath your skin.

How do I stop planning holidays with you when all your colours are runaway gypsy songs?
The lover in me wants to roam the world.

Some day, far away, if I am ever left behind, I will dance across the silkiness of a map - a map of countries, or of sky - and pretend that it is your body that I traverse.

Absolutely my dream drawing room.

... minus the styling on the white pillars, and walls two shades ligher.
Is it tragic that I have ten pounds to my name and I'm browsing the New York Times style section over my cornflakes?
Image from here

It has taken me 15 years to say this. Long periods of forgetting in between, but beauty is an ever present sword waiting to tear open any wall of time: What you were to me, what you were to me: Pure and startling and piercing beauty. Like chancing upon a swan nesting behind the rushes. Like looking up from a drink and seeing the love of your life. Like opening and old book an seeing a love letter hiding there. Each time, these things go right in, right away and stay there.

You did the same to me.

But you were so much more, so much more than I can ever list:
Prayers and long summer nights and praying like I've never prayed before for more time, more time. For somehow, death and time to be reversed and overturned. Just for me. For us. For butterflies and Russian and ice-cream and Camay soap and the sight of you smiling. For listening to you and talking to you and realizing that you never once talked to me as if I were a child, even though you called me Baby. Your white wicker basket that I swung from my arm as we walked through the garden, me pretending to be a big Parisian lady, or a raani, or both. Oh how I prayed for more time for us to pluck every single yellow leaf off the hedge. For more time for your flower filling and your tea drinking and you giving me cubes of cheese or strawberry jam. For the peace of those afternoons, the scent of those nights when we slept outside on the veranda under the mosquito net and the owlets in the trees broke up the songs of the crickets and chattered at us well past dawn.

The sounds, the smells, the feel of your cheek, the smoothness of your hand, the love I felt coming from you, the love I felt flowing out to you, the dizzying beauty in each thing you pointed out to me: each leaf or petal or movement or colour. Your stories: of Europe and love and clothes and the theatre and ballet and picnics and growing up and mama and the grandfather I never met but who I feel I know because of what you told me about him.
I prayed for more time for each of these things, each of them deep and wide enough for there never to be enough time.

You are my love of: Pink and rose and Central Asia and Kazakhistan and Mongolia and Italy. Italy! And the moon and stars and fresh air and God and good food and ballet and fashion and violets and pansies and poetry and writing. My patience with my own pensiveness and mama's pensiveness. My ability to sit by the garden pond and let the rain tree flowers land soft and gold on my hair and watch the tails of the fish flashing this way and that.

You still are all of these things to me. All of them and more.
Love and beauty and searching.
Is there anything else?

Somewhere out there you're walking or watching and pulling me; I can feel you. And each time there is blue or gold or green or pink or roses or music or cloud or flowers or steppe I feel the pull all the harder.
Tug, why don't you - I'm so tired of waiting to see you again.

Amy again.
It seems I cannot look at a single beautiful thing without thinking about you. Especially the kind of soft, indigo beauty behind the haze at the end of a warm spring day. When the vine outside the window rustles with the noises of opening buds and baby leaves and feathers. Nest building. And sudden birdsong like an exclamation point to the silence, the peace.
So many, many years ago, I felt exactly this kind of peace. When we read together, but apart, in your bed in the afternoons. When you laid a hand on my cheek and kept it there, cool and camay-scented, that afternoon that I had a fever and slept with my head against your shoulder. Like that afternoon when I was reading one of my nature books, and you were reading a large green leather bound one that I couldn't read the name of. And suddenly in the middle of the silence, you read out a sentence to me in Russian. And I couldn't understand it of course, but I understood it was something beautiful you'd wanted to share so I smiled up at you and you at me. And we spoke that afternoon about the Steppe, about long yellow stretches of grassland curving up and away into an immense vault of sky. About herds of wild horses thundering across a sharply empty landscape tipped at the edges with a ring of bare mountains. And I scarcely noticed where I was as you talked, until the smell of Janardhan watering the lawn wafted in through the window. That exclamation point, this time of the scent of water to punctuate the dry yellow stillness of the windswept Steppe.
The air around us heavy with beauty. We imagined it together, we smelt it together, we breathed it together.
Or that night when you were lying in bed and mum was on the phone in the other room, crying, and my father was driving over from the hospital and everything was very dark and quiet except for the crickets in the garden and the moths near the bedside lamp. And you suddenly squeezed my hand and opened your eyes and said 'Darling baby. You're here!' and put your hand against my cheek and wiped away a tear. And that sound right then was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard and I smiled our smile at you but couldn't stop crying.

I miss you so much.

Totally Random

Is it wrong that I just watched a clip of Jon Stewart bashing the panic-mongering fools from Fox 'News' and totally got turned on seeing him skewer them?
Ooh want to kiss his face off.

which brings me to this thought:

For someone who thinks about death and what it means so much (and I do): I have never actually thought that it will happen to me one day.
I can't fathom that and don't know what to think of it aside from a vague feeling of excited curiosity and homecoming.
So I kind of get what it means for Me. The wider, deeper Me.
But what does it mean for my this-life?
What should that knowledge, that my time too is limited, propel me to do, think, be?

Papa

The pa is well again. But not allowed to sit up too much, walk too much, talk too much, at least until the end of the weekend.
But today he was on the phone to me and said he loves me.
And my mum said that there was a cat outside his hospital room these past three days, just curled up on the bench or mewing at the window. So my mum took some cat chow for her, a bowl of milk to soothe her mews, a gentle pat on her head to show her we recognise and accept her kind offer of companionship in this hard time, and would she like to come home with us?
She climbed into mum's soft warm lap and went to sleep.
A blessing, a companion, a guardian angel outside my father's hospital room.
Sent by Amy, or Jenny, our white angel cat who died so long ago, or some other One we knew and loved and who is still protecting us with their love.
Who knows? As my mum said: 'She found us and she feels like a friend.' Sorely needed, that, in hospital wards - friends.
But a blessing she is, this little cat mewing outside his room. She hasn't left for three days, she's always peeping into his room, there through the quiet of the afternoon at the window sill, dozing quietly on the other side of the jaali. There through the night on the wooden bench. And my mother felt a surge of love when she held her. That's good enough for me, I'm so inclined anyway.

So.
My father sounds like himself again.
And he said he loves me.
And there's an angel cat outside his room.