Scream

A scream.

Into the world.

Through the curtain of air and atmosphere that surrounds the physical form of a life. Our bodies are vessels that carry a whirlwind of emotion. Our bodies are purely things, and we are the life that hums through our cells.

Vibrations through the earth and through our bodies and from our mouths to our ears, all the way to our minds.

A life is only a life because other lives are living to see it so.

The classroom was lit with four tubes of florescent, cold, white light. It’s harsh blue tone filled corners and silently combatted the deep, dusty yellow that filtered in through the layers of dust on the window. Dust that reappeared the moment you cleaned it, settling sleepily into the damp smear your cloth made on the glass, so that the next time you cleaned it would be hard and clumped to the glass in that stubborn, Arabian way.

The teacher, in a sari and bright pink lipstick wrote words on the board with a fading whiteboard marker, and I was disinterested. English as a second language, in a class full of second language speakers. English is my native tongue. I think in English. My mother speaks English and my father lectures non English speakers in the art of speaking English, and the nuances of phonetic English, the harsh science of linguistic English. I was bored out of my skull.

A blank paper on the desk in front of me. Ridges created by pens digging deep into the wood, small signatures of years of educational boredom. I pick up my pen and start to scribble. A shape forms under my pen, the lines scratchy as the pen tries to deviate and follow the texture of the desk beneath the thin paper.

A figure, with a long, skeletal face. Large, black oval eyes, the scribbles in circle formation to fill the holes. No pupils, just blackness. No nose. Jutting cheekbones, and a mouth open wide. A pair of hands, with long, bony fingers, on the cheeks. A hood, covering any hair, and the sleeves hanging out over the thin wrists.

The mouth releases a scream, loud and raging in my head. A scream to rattle the obstinate dust on the windows, a scream to make my sari-wearing teacher stare at me in shock. A scream to explode from my lonely soul and shoot through the thick air around me, humming with breath and eye contact and whispers and heartbeats and sweat and particles of skin and life. 

I don’t scream. I let my picture do it for me. I put my pen down and stare at my scream for a long time, until the black lines of my drawing start to pop out starkly on the white paper, and the light around me dims in my vision. Until my eyes are watery.

Endings

Every happy ending is just a new beginning.

Things don’t just end. Even with death, things don’t end. The world started a horrendously long time ago, and its heart does not stop beating for anybody. People have come and gone, and a small percentage of those people have made their global marks. The rest have sparked tremors in their localities, small throbbing circles of red encompassing the hearts and homes they have touched, not quite big enough or important enough or broadcast enough to spread any further.

People get married – the sweet ending to a romantic, if somewhat tumultuous in some cases, courtship. People graduate; an exhilarating ending to what appeared at the time to be years of tedious struggle. People buy houses, the satisfying ending to years of scrimping and hours of anxious waiting and searching and tapping uncomfortable heels on the stained carpets of pristine banks.

These endings are just beginnings, though. The beginning of a marriage; what happens next? Does the husband turn into a dragon? Does the wife file for divorce? How many kids do they have? What do these kids end up doing?

The beginning of true adulthood after graduation; do they get a job? Do they travel anywhere? What exactly did this pathway lead them to? Do they regret not studying harder?

The beginning of a new house. Is it haunted? Is the boiler broken? Do they renovate? What if they don’t end up together, do they cut the house in half and carry the other on a mobile home, the rooms gaping into the wind and slowly growing into the elements?

Life is like a multitude of circles. Venn diagrams connecting people and places and memories and things and dreams. These circles are contained within bigger circles of lives and generations and ancestors and descendants. People merge together then drift apart, lots of smaller circles spiralling away from their union. People die, but their circles are continued by those who knew them until they, too, die. But oops, others knew those dead people and so on and so forth.

There is so such thing as an ending, I think. It is more like, goodness, I have closed this chapter now because I really cannot go on reading this story. I have learned all I care to learn from it. So, they get married. Good for them. Now I shall have some jam on toast and figure out why this equation makes 12 when I could only ever make 8.

And I would complete the equation – happy ending! Only it is the beginning to new equations and new horizons and more mathematical problems.

This is where I choose to end this train of thought.

Perhaps you would like to start a new beginning by sharing yours?

I didn’t SORN my car.

I only have forty minutes left to do something productive. Writing this blog post is as productive a thing as any, eh?

In four days it will have been an entire month since I have left work. I have not done much since then. I have slept a lot and have vamped up my fitness regimen, but I still haven’t pumped my bike wheels (I keep leaving the pump at my mum’s house which is two hours away) and I still haven’t joined the gym. I wrote 5600 words in my ‘novel’ and I baked plenty. I also applied to plenty of jobs but nobody is hiring so I will inevitably have to wait forever and just keep trying.

I am being extortionately lazy and unproductive.

It’s becoming a little desperate.

I put off SORNing my car for so LONG that now I have to pay £50 in addition to filling out the SORN form. My front tyre is BUST and I can’t pump it up because there is no petrol in it and it is not insured so if I am caught driving it (which I can’t because the TYRE IS BUST) I will be fined £1000. Also have six points taken off my license, right? Oh I don’t know. Bad things will happen.

I kind wanna blame my husband, though? Even though it’s my car?

Listen, before you get all angry and het up about my ‘men-mysogyny’, here is why:

1. He forced me to cancel my insurance because he was going to insure me on his car.
2. He decided he didn’t want to insure me on his car, and refused to let me drive my own car home saying it’s too dangerous since I have only done motorways thrice.
3. I had no car so I gave him two options, 1. either sell my car or, 2. let me pay for insurance and just drive home.
4. He said he would sell it, but failed to do so.
5. He said I shouldn’t insure it because he was selling it, BUT HE DID NOT SELL IT. So I didn’t SORN it thinking it would be sold. BUT IT WAS NOT.
6. It is all his fault

Now he will be mad at the fine because it was my responsibility to declare my car off road (SORN) but HOW COULD I DO THAT WHEN HE SAID HE WAS SELLING IT?

See? So confusing.

Here is what I will inevitably have to do:

1. SORN my car.
2. Pay the damn fine.
3. Smile at my husband  and pretend it was not his fault. Also don’t tell him because he will have a fit. EVEN THOUGH IT IS HIS FAULT.
4. Sell my own goddamn car regardless of my husband’s controlling protests about my incapability to do it to his standard of perfection *rolls eyes*.
5. Buy a better car and refuse to listen to my husband’s protests about insuring me on his car (Which he won’t do because he doesn’t trust his WIFE with his PRECIOUS). *ROLLS EYES HARD*
6. Feel relieved that I now have my own car and don’t need to keep wasting money I am no longer earning on those damn trains.