Jasmine and freshly pressed cotton
He fed me lime juice and honey from a silver spoon. His hand made a cradle cupped gently beneath my chin and as sweet acidity ran from the curve of metal to fingers he scooped it up deftly, dragged it across his mischievous licking lips and said, ‘Mima…be good and rest. We are going to get you well.’
I had woken in the night from a lingering cough and without complaint he brought me that homemade caribbean medicament. Earlier in the evening he had grocery shopped, poured me a hot bubble bath rimmed with candles and a 13’’ laptop balanced precariously on our most functional piece of furniture: a reinforced cardboard box printed with pictures of books, two small handles cut out on either side. The box appeared at dinners as extra seating, by the bed as a nightstand table, sidled up to the piano bench haphazardly piled with music scores and now; in it’s most stunning appearance to date, as a compact entertainment center in the bathroom loading a movie I had begged him watch with me a week ago. He wrapped me in a warm robe pulled off the heater in our one room flat, dressed me in soft, white cotton bedclothes from his sainting ceremony in Havana and put me to bed. In that moment I feared and envied no one; and against brown skin smoothed with coconut oil and smelling faintly of fried plantains and flowers offered to Ellegua I fell asleep.
He fed me lime juice and honey. And on some other night he would find me in our stairwell, leaving with a small bag to stay with friends. He chased me down three flights of narrow neubau stairs, caught my wrist before I could reach the door, and with disarming calm placed his very final weight against my route of escape. ‘This is not the way Mima, not like this,’ he said as though to a child. Who was he talking to? I wondered as I slipped out of myself and hovered above in the timeless, disembodied calm of my mind.
In the preceding months I had begun to inhabit this place more and more often, until the balance tipped and I furrowed away to watch my life like a movie. But the thrill of vicarious living was replaced by insipid numbness, a blot of ink diluting into so much water as I felt things more and more faintly. My life became constricted routine wedged between a series of unpredictable vignettes: A bag ripped off my shoulder and thrown across the flat, it’s unzipped mouth aghast as contents scattered about the room. This for wanting to visit a friend. Searching the streets of Pankow alone after he had jumped spitefully off a moving tram into the snow and finding him hours later at home in a steaming bath, unanswered calls blinking placidly up at him from his phone atop a pile of clothes. This for plausibly looking at him like I would look at a stranger. The embarrassed expression of a police officer on the dock of Stockholm come to remove us after twenty minutes of screamed, scathing public humiliation, ‘Sir, I’m sorry, you cannot be here.’ This for paying too much attention to his niece at her first communion.
‘Not like this, Mima,’ he says again, demurely. ’He sounds so reasonable,’ some part of me thought. ‘He is bruising your wrist, shoving, and terrifying the shit out of you,’ the reptilian brain snapped back and snatched me deep down into my senses with a cool jolt of air.
The outline of our well-dressed, middle aged neighbors returned home from dinner appeared through the frosted entryway glass. They pushed and bickered about richtige Schlüssle versus mehr Kraft while the door stuttered open and shut until, unnerved, Leo hesitated. And in a single gasp the entry burst open while forces of physics deposited neighbours to Flur and me to the quiet chill of the street. I saw the glimmer of lamplight on cobblestone and I knew this would never again be home. And though I abide in the pristine echo chamber of my personal consciousness, I also inhabit a body. And my life is no movie to be watched, nor pride to be salvaged, nor lover to be saved. And as he screamed stalked, shook, shoved and reasoned with me down the street, I let go of the idea of a person I had thought to make a life with and began the journey back into being.
I had woken in the night from a lingering cough and without complaint he brought me that homemade caribbean medicament. Earlier in the evening he had grocery shopped, poured me a hot bubble bath rimmed with candles and a 13’’ laptop balanced precariously on our most functional piece of furniture: a reinforced cardboard box printed with pictures of books, two small handles cut out on either side. The box appeared at dinners as extra seating, by the bed as a nightstand table, sidled up to the piano bench haphazardly piled with music scores and now; in it’s most stunning appearance to date, as a compact entertainment center in the bathroom loading a movie I had begged him watch with me a week ago. He wrapped me in a warm robe pulled off the heater in our one room flat, dressed me in soft, white cotton bedclothes from his sainting ceremony in Havana and put me to bed. In that moment I feared and envied no one; and against brown skin smoothed with coconut oil and smelling faintly of fried plantains and flowers offered to Ellegua I fell asleep.
He fed me lime juice and honey. And on some other night he would find me in our stairwell, leaving with a small bag to stay with friends. He chased me down three flights of narrow neubau stairs, caught my wrist before I could reach the door, and with disarming calm placed his very final weight against my route of escape. ‘This is not the way Mima, not like this,’ he said as though to a child. Who was he talking to? I wondered as I slipped out of myself and hovered above in the timeless, disembodied calm of my mind.
In the preceding months I had begun to inhabit this place more and more often, until the balance tipped and I furrowed away to watch my life like a movie. But the thrill of vicarious living was replaced by insipid numbness, a blot of ink diluting into so much water as I felt things more and more faintly. My life became constricted routine wedged between a series of unpredictable vignettes: A bag ripped off my shoulder and thrown across the flat, it’s unzipped mouth aghast as contents scattered about the room. This for wanting to visit a friend. Searching the streets of Pankow alone after he had jumped spitefully off a moving tram into the snow and finding him hours later at home in a steaming bath, unanswered calls blinking placidly up at him from his phone atop a pile of clothes. This for plausibly looking at him like I would look at a stranger. The embarrassed expression of a police officer on the dock of Stockholm come to remove us after twenty minutes of screamed, scathing public humiliation, ‘Sir, I’m sorry, you cannot be here.’ This for paying too much attention to his niece at her first communion.
‘Not like this, Mima,’ he says again, demurely. ’He sounds so reasonable,’ some part of me thought. ‘He is bruising your wrist, shoving, and terrifying the shit out of you,’ the reptilian brain snapped back and snatched me deep down into my senses with a cool jolt of air.
The outline of our well-dressed, middle aged neighbors returned home from dinner appeared through the frosted entryway glass. They pushed and bickered about richtige Schlüssle versus mehr Kraft while the door stuttered open and shut until, unnerved, Leo hesitated. And in a single gasp the entry burst open while forces of physics deposited neighbours to Flur and me to the quiet chill of the street. I saw the glimmer of lamplight on cobblestone and I knew this would never again be home. And though I abide in the pristine echo chamber of my personal consciousness, I also inhabit a body. And my life is no movie to be watched, nor pride to be salvaged, nor lover to be saved. And as he screamed stalked, shook, shoved and reasoned with me down the street, I let go of the idea of a person I had thought to make a life with and began the journey back into being.