All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit.

I should pause to say that so far, all this has been me casting fishing line into memory’s river, reeling in what bites.

This is what I felt: the shock of how your life’s longing can sometimes be smoothly realized, without great strain or cost, easy as buying a clock.

Streetlights turned the night the dark orange of a bee’s thorax.

Sneezeweed and tansy brightened the sidewalks and my mother called to say my uncle had died.

He was fond of me, in his way. An affection emulsified with something dark and rancid.

The memories tumbled back to me, rolled into each other like socks.

He would play Legos with me, then stamp on the house I had built.

Once the phone went quiet I felt a wicked pang. Thinking of my parents, living two oceans away, with their slackening bodies, their private burdens.

I wanted a friend. I wanted, too, a woman. I did not know if these longings were separate. Someone who would roll with me. A laughing woman, dapper, with a car.

Without specifying a timeframe, I wondered what would happen to me.

Some people look at your skin as if they are preoccupied with how best to scrub it without being rude.

Still, writing it out, making bald my desires, my preferences mundane and not, was for me unavoidably scented with shame.

Don’t assume anything about my loyalty, I said. Less because I meant it, more to sink nails into the power of being cold.

It’s truthful, this cliché: my heart was pounding.

I thought of how in childhood I would fold into my mother after tantrums and punishments, how she would envelop me. Stiff bright fabric, soft ropy arms.

Had a big vase of a laugh, one that seemed large enough to hold my own.

To be generous felt like the best thing you could be.

I made to touch the windshield of the tiny car, where small pale flakes were dying. The sight of it, even after years in this country, left me drenched in wonder.

I never knew someone could be so smart while knowing almost nothing, she said.

Desire, though, burst through the word should, water breaking down a flimsy dam.

I like your mind, she offered. You see through things, even if you don’t always question them.

Meeting Tig had made my own life slow and thicken, seem for the first time worth noticing.

It’s distressing, how many people elect to be boring when they have the option not to be.

Her response filled me with a deep desire to drop my skin to the floor in a baggy puddle, then keep walking.

A smile cracking her face like an egg: a sweetness concealed in it.

I did not know how to explain this stubborn love for my parents that I staggered under, iridescent and gigantic and veined with a terrible grief, grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

I closed my eyes and smiled to the cold sky, holding my friends and these kind strangers in my arms.

Ambition was a shiny layered geode of a word. Cut it through and you would see its variegation.

We feel so much, most of us, and different layering things, like you can’t feel only one thing ever, you know?

Perhaps I was a man all along, and this was the heart of my problem, my inability to be soft like a fruit, open like a flower.

Like a child I imagined the world gone dark, everyone vanished, and myself safe.

It did not matter that my parents were working long hours and so not in the room with me to be scandalized. My shame lived on independently from them.

The sight of her face sliced open my pretending. This was, this had become, a person I cared for.

You don’t want me here, I said, and in that moment my old accent came back, like some dam had been breached and the warm and hot and round and jagged tongue I had been raised with gushed in, laden with consonant and debris.

Two friends locking into each other, choosing what seemed so rare to me: to trust and to forgive.

I did not know how to reconcile my love for Tig, the shimmering regard and gratitude I held for her, with the frank slime of want.

As their friend I was my better self: dry and laughing, spiky but kind, trying to peel the world like an orange, eat it by the segment.

How will we learn about the world if not from each other? she intoned, eyes widening.

While two people are still alive to try, he said, it’s never too late, and it’s never the end.

I saw it in her face: she wanted to run to me, but I was the child, and the parent does not run to the child. There is a way things are done.

By the way my mother moved I could tell she was ashamed of me.

But when I am back, I remember how the people treated us, what my own kin did to me, become reacquainted with how much I wish every single one of you would fall down dead. And to escape my hatred, to stop it from burning me up, I jump back where I am stuck, between these worlds, in thick, dusty space.

I laughed while feeling a cold pale vine creep around my ribs.

I looked at the trees, some of them my height, and thought, You are here because I was here, because I made a choice that I barely considered.

My father and I are alike: tall and reedy, loyal to those we love, broken by the hint of failure, alternating soft and ornery.

My family is a geode of silences. You would need a hammer to smash it open.

Don’t end up like me, he added with an attempt at an ironic smile, his large eyes narrowed and unable to meet mine, and in that moment I thought my heart would fissure, shatter outward like a dropped clock.

But nobody consoles you after a rupture with a beloved friend. There are few movies ideal for watching while your tears salt pints of ice cream, no articles in women’s magazines that you can skim at the hairdresser’s. You have only the ache. No script to accompany it. No ritual to give it shape.

Why are we always running after dead people, carrying them on our heads? Let them be dead, I say.