Kala

by Colin Walsh

“Take your time and be wherever you are.”

You were thinking about how many good things there were in the world and how everyone should have all of them. Even

wanted to see how well each artefact measured up to the emotional charge I expected it to hold, but the room is disappointingly real and ordinary.

Sometimes I’d like to live out in a place like this, you know? Bit peaceful.” Kala laughed. “Quiet’s not peaceful, man. Quiet is when the monsters come out.”

Grief is like falling in love; it is always narcissistic. Some catastrophe cuts through your life and immediately you reshape the world to make this disaster the secret heartbeat of all things, the buried truth of the universe. Everything is enchanted with her now. The sun, the breeze. When I sit in the mucky mess of the garden, swiping between newspapers on my phone, Kala is in the birds in the hedge. The distant sound of children, laughing and screaming.

Everything about them was thud and noise. More voltage than they knew what to do with.

The relish in their voices. Luxuriating in their closeness to disaster, safe in their distance from it.

She has to dress up her emotions in attitude, the way I dress up mine in quiet.

Tonight her arm feels good around mine, and she leans on me as we sit, and the soft part of me, the part that only ever makes me sad, feels happy.

Tiny arteries of moonlight bled between branches. Our torches only caught glimpses. Twisted fingers, tortured limbs, trunks pushing up through the earth. Haunted, moss-bearded rocks with warped faces.

“Sentimentality is for people who want the luxury of an emotion without paying any price for it.” “Oh, that’s clever, Helen,” you say. “That’s Oscar Wilde, Joe.”

home, darling, is a mirror to your inner life.

will never have what he has. The contentment of a horizontal life, a world where there’s no need to keep climbing.

But they don’t know you. They know Jungle Heart. They know the mask. Sometimes you think you’re not really a person. Just a composite of other people’s opinions about you, a Frankenstein built of bullshit.

déjà vu.

Her idea was that everything that happens only takes place in the present. There is no past or future: when we think of the past, our memories occur in the present; when we imagine the future, we only do so from the standpoint of the present. Everything is always happening simultaneously on this one plane of existence, but we experience it as a flux. “The churning surface of an infinite ocean.”

Mam called him harmless, which is one of the worst things you could say about a person.

do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Somewhere around thirty, hangovers become apocalyptic events.

Thing was, I could see it in Rossie too. Both of them, these damaged people, curled up in hurt, slowly unknotting themselves to each other, to face the world.

I didn’t realize then that the moments when you can say something are just that—moments—and once they’re gone, they’re gone, and you’ve added another brick to the wall.

I just fucking let that all slide as they got older, telling meself all this bullshit about how everything’s like rivers, only going to trickle away from you, between your fingers, and sure there’s no use trying to hold on to rivers cos you’ll only end up drowned,

Your self isn’t some ‘deep down’ thing that exists, away in some other place, separate from your day-to-day. Like, there is no other place. You’re always here. Becoming what you are.”

She’s strong, but fierce defensive. Shuts down whenever she feels vulnerable. Lashes out. And I get that. I’ve earned that from her.”

“Basically, it’s this idea of how all suffering people project their ideas of something better into the future. So by being alive now, we all carry this redemptive promise that was dreamed into time by the suffering people of the past.