Of Mansi

Allow me to tell you about Mansi.

She glistens at me as I sit across her in our silent reverie of each other. There is no romance like no romance. It would be poetic otherwise. But she is poetry. Allow me to tell you about her hair. Of which there is none. About her eyes, which droop from a narcotic stupor discounting both our pain. About her ways, of which the most recent include being able to sit up and walk. About her. And what she is and was.

She drags her second consonants across milky stars of tears as she wails into the nights about how her love died and wasn’t born again as me. I laugh. We share and disappear from each other’s sights for a glimmer. It is wet this feeling. I remark on the dexterity of her hands, she replies to the countenance of a slap across my face, bleeding; her hands, not me. I abandoned panic about an hour back. And the IV tugs gently as I sit her down again in a soft corner of my room. She shouldn’t have come. But time is not for regrets.

And she is her once again in the nights. I yearn for her mornings when she will live again outside the painful walls of certainty. I shared those confines once. Now we each sit alone juxtaposing our destinies. Made and unmade, known and unknown, laughed and cried, tear by tear by tear. Some might challenge the status quo, not us.

Perhaps her eyes will shine once more tonight. Her voice, more than a semblance of dragged syllables and drool. Her enchantress will emerge from the ashes of this night. The morning for some a reminder of night; for her merely the way to drag out another day. There is no futility here much against my words. No recognizance of an inevitable so far reaching that the soul shrivels under the burden of realization. No. There is no fear, there is no pain, there is nothing that divides the living from the dead, merely the fact and nothing more.

I pale once again to see here. This is all her. Remaining as she says a ‘shell of herself’,’ a cliché’, I tell her even by my standards. She smiles. I remain unsure. I am here but not here. She knows where she is. Her hair once wrung around her fingers playfully the closure of a determined age. She sees nothing. I see no one else. We remain much into each other’s arms in descent. I breathe in her moistness as alone we compare ourselves, after all who else is there? Questions she says are irrelevant, answers even more so, no sage at her age she wrinkles against my skin murmuring that I take life too seriously. I agree.

There is a dripping in her corner, her tears, my sweat, her blood; my ink on her forehead where I plant my face. I feel her limpness against my lips as she grasps at memories. We agreed never to be ashamed together. That was after our mutual incontinence. The smell remains with me like a pleasant reminder of freedoms disbanded and lost millennia past. ‘It is what we will search for each other with’, she said ‘when we tumble our way into paradise’. I don’t have the heart to tell her of my purgatory. I swipe her head with my sleeve and lift her out.

But to Mansi there is more. There is the morning which she says she so despises. She says. I know her words from her thoughts. Her eyes betray her much as my actions betray me. The morning tea seems years away on both ends. She enjoys the warmth of three cups every morning and watches me drink. A rapturous shine in her eyes treacherously lustful about the act itself. ‘Taste’, she muses, ‘is what separates woman from man, we like to taste…’ I step across the table cold cup in hand, pouring drips across her neck as my tongue savors her sweat and sugar. ‘I agree’, I confirm. Staunchly sitting down as she erupts into laughter. There are moments when life dares to have meaning but as I was once told, our only consolation could possibly be that life’s futility serves some purpose. Although I can’t see it just yet.

Her body slumps into the nightly corner of my form, heavy and wet swaying with a rhythmic tone that reminds me of lullabies I wish I had slept to. I lay her gently across the bed, head in lap as she hums the tune to a Sinatra melody I have come to praise her with. “Someday when I’m feelin' low, and the world is cold, I will feel a glow, just thinking of you and the way you look tonight…” I stroke her arms as the electric current of rest sweeps up against her bare skin shivering in the warm night, my mortality withers under such beauty. I dare not shed a tear in remorse or regret. Promises amongst dead friends reach farther beyond the grave.

Mansi lives the daylight songs in a haze of bright lights and joys. At times I’m one of them she affectionately mentions. I ask her of other things. She can only see one person at a time she says. I know. I know. I know of all persons waiting in line for the audience. I ask her how she feels and she replies with fewer words than I ever could – Alive, she says. Her face crinkles against the dawn incapable of yawns and yearnings but alive with the memory of what they were like. ‘I refuse to be a participant in my destruction’, she screams, mercilessly shattering my ears as we hug in our waking ritual. I wish her parents could be here to see her live.

-

Madness is not a prescribed treatment for death I’m told, but it doesn’t hurt. Our attempts towards reason and meaning, we agree, are symptoms of nothing much else. We will both fade from each other. In days and years. She never wants to be nostalgisised about in pictures and brains. Give and receive no grief. Give and receive no pain. I wonder about the majesty of her life so far. The odd 23 years in this world, a curious 5 in pain and the last turbulent one in acceptance. And now only fractions fill the void of time.

The meager wages of life collected in savings accounts across her limbs and learning find themselves diminishing at a steady current rate. She finds my puns very annoying and weak. Much less of any rhetoric vigor that she finds worthy. ‘You read Archie’s.’, I bluntly reply. Even so, I’m sure she’s right. Do the scribbles of Riverdale pale to Verona or Reggie fail match against Iago? I’m distracted by a cupcake being flung at my face. I guess that’s for the Archie remark. If this isn’t a weak irony over humble pie, I don’t know what is, but it’s without nuts so the damage is minimal. It’s at least worth the trouble since she agrees to eat the bit off my nose.

Now her body still tepid against my skin. I slip a pillow down under her head and pull another blanket across her. I watch as she shivers and silently convulses grasping for something to hold on to. I shouldn’t. I do. I lay down behind her pulling up another rag over this heated night as the morning dew glimmers across the window sill distant blue in its refractive horizon. I kiss her neck and hold her gently as my lungs follow hers and I can feel her dreaming of better things than IV drips and morphine illusions to cloud this absurd word from her.

I see futility, I see divinity, I see chaos and I see magnificence that even a god could not phantom. I see the inconsequence of life and its insane traps and trappings fall all around me in a cancerous cacophony of insane delirium in a vengeful rage against reason. And then I see an angel, lying next to be, immune from it all forever, very soon.