noahj

I really do. I ruminate over the word "miss" when used in this context and find it utterly appropriate. I feel her absence like a horrifyingly painful lack, like waking up to find I'm short of a few fingers, an ear and most of a leg. If I close my eyes tightly and concentrate on every detail of her hard enough I might be able to make her walk through the door of the study with a smile and a bounce -- if only I could get every detail right in my mind. Her smile and her red, red hair and her curved brows are the first things I can pin down. Next come the convex curve of her forehead and the volume of her cheeks and the way her chin comes to a subtle point, giving her face the shape of a heart. Returning to her forehead: I see freckles on pale skin that run from the tip of her scalp and constellate on her nose. I see soft pink lips in a lopsided smile -- the same smile I wear when I see her. I see curves: the hourglass out-in-out as my mind's eye constructs her torso, waist and legs. Now I see her eyes: blue/green with a circle of gold around the black dot, as though the light were resting for a moment on the very edge of the pupil before it makes its way down to the retina.

22nd June, 10:45am:

We drive down Ulu Kelang. We're running late: I'm supposed to be at KLSMC for an 11:00am appointment with Dr. Ong.

Someone beeps at us as we mount the curving on-ramp onto the DUKE highway. "This guy is tail-gating me," says Mum. Sure enough in the rear-view mirror I see a white hatchback VW sticking to our rear, beeping angrily at us. It's not like we can do anything. We're boxed in with a green Kancil in front of us and a moped to our left. It's a 40 km/h curving on-ramp. What the hell does this guy expect from us?

"What an asshole," I say.

"I'm going to give him the finger when he passes us," says Mum.

"Quite right." I join in on the one-finger salute just as the VW roars into view through Mum's window. His own windows are tinted black -- we have no way of knowing if he's seen us.

He revs his engine and swerves into our lane, forcing Mum to slow down. A manic kind of nervous energy takes her: she starts to laugh. The VW pulls directly in front of us and slows to a crawl, revving his engine to let us know how angry he is. A black window rolls down and a pale hand shoots out: he gives us the finger in return.

"We shouldn't have done that," Mum says. She's no longer laughing. The VW slams on his brakes -- Mum utters a sharp gasp and brakes just in time. She tries to pull over to the left lane but the VW evidently isn't done with us. He sees us turn and turns with us, revving his engine again and again.

In her terror, she calls out my father's name. "Oh Jimmy -- Noah -- what do I do? What do I do?"

Nine hours from now I will be lying face-down in an operating theater, breathing in the knock-out gas. I will wonder: of how much of the procedure will I be aware? Will time blip forward between closing my eyes and opening them again, or will there be some strange traversing in between? Will I dream? When I am awake again, will I notice the difference instantly?

For the past several days I have felt the chest-tingling beginnings of apprehension but never full-blown FEAR. I feel neither panic nor anxiety -- only the rumblings of a certain unknown fate lying in wait for me. If all goes well, then that fate will be a good one. If not, if there are complications, then they will present themselves as yet more hurdles.

They will cut out the part of the disc at the L5 S1 area that is jutting out and choking off the nerve. A micro-disc-ectomy. I haven't been operated on in 16 or 17 years. I'm glad for it. The pain has gone on long enough.

I probably won't get to write anything else before it happens, but I will try to write something after. I will try to remember.

See you on the other side.

Writing is harder.

I write these words in the hope that the expression of this sentiment will necessarily dispel the problem it describes.

Zizek says love is evil because it is a preference for a single thing as opposed to any other thing. For Zizek, the evil of love is that it is an exclusionary force. A love for one thing saps away a love for any other thing.

But I have found that my love for Kat, and indeed my love for anything, motivates by extension a love for the world that brings the object of my love. I wish to live because I love. A love for the one becomes a love for the multitude.

Mickey the cat is a being of pure love. He lives to love. He licks the other cats. He snuggles with the dog. While the other cats will circle whenever there are scraps for the table to be had, Mickey will always abstain. He never begs. His love is never selfish -- he does not live to receive, only to give.

He follows me around. He looks up at me knowingly, like an old friend, which I suppose he is. He shows up when the black mood hits me, especially at night when all is quiet and I am left with my thoughts, and the pain. He nudges me. He makes me think about flaws.

He has six toes on each foot. If pets come to represent their owners in some regard or another, then to me Mickey represents physiological aberration. He is asymmetrical, malformed. His paws are clumsy. His body rebels against him.

He nudges against me on the landing. He looks up at me, circles around me. Sits close by and stares at a patch of wall. I know that he is waiting for me to get up, and that he will follow me. He would follow me anywhere. It breaks my heart that I can't allow him into my room. I'm allergic, and one bad sneeze is enough to set my sciatica into a spasm that can last up to an hour. My body keeps me from accepting that which he is so eager to give. It would be so easy to ignore him and close the door in his face, if only he didn't look at me like that.

I close the bedroom door, feeling a heaviness behind my eyes and a choke in my throat. Tears in my eyes but it's too soon for it to be allergies. One more reason to hate my deformity. I lower myself into bed and bang the funnybone of my arm against the bedpost. You'd think with the sciatic pain, something stupid and common as banging my funnybone would hardly be cause for upset, but here I am, cradling my arm, moaning in defeat.

The door swings open suddenly. Mickey pushes his way in. Funny; I thought I'd closed it properly. He pads over to the bed and leaps on.

"Determined little sod, aren't you." He purrs by way of response. He steps onto my chest, rubs his forehead against mine. All he wants to do is love. He curls up by my side.

"I'm sorry. I can't. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." More heaviness, more choking.

He stretches, flexes his six toes. One claw catches on the pillow case: he looks alarmed. He struggles to free himself, but only manages to hook the claw against a loose thread.

"Wait, let me." He lets me pull his arm in the opposite direction, away from him. I unhook the claw. I didn't think cats could look grateful, but that's the expression he gives me. It's a single slow blink. Then he bends low to rub his cheek against my arm.

"I'm sorry, old friend. I can't. I'm flawed. Just like you." I get up and open the door. "Come on. Out you go." I wish he wouldn't look at me like that. I snap my fingers; he hops off the bed and comes to me. I step outside. He looks up at me again. I wonder what he'd do if he were alone, with no one to receive the love he is so willing to give.

I step back inside and shut the door. This time I make sure it's closed for good.

On this yearly time
a lady may expect a
Happy Birthday rhyme.

But a rhyme's tricky
...when fingers are sticky and
there are wolves about.

Please send help, rhyming
cannot be written while wolves
nibble on fingers.

Also: happy day
for turning twenty-five and
for valentining.

Dark chocolate loves
no tender tongue or tastebud
like I love you, doll.

I:
The loveliest girl
Eyes like a solar eclipse
Pure, unbridled joy.

And she:
My companion
As loving as he is kind
gives the best snuggles

And I:
Bedmate, I love you
Love you, even when you take
all of the blankets

And she:
I steal the covers
Because I love you and my
feet are very cold

11ish: Kat wakes me up with a phone call. It's good to hear her voice. It's the first thing I hear as I wake up to a day without an essay on which to work and worry.

I take care of dishes, laundry, garbage. Send the last three christmas cards. Pack, tidy. Think about solitude and how truly quiet a home can be, when it's missing a vital piece.

A busy day. I return a mysterious key I found a few days prior which does not fit into our keyhole – someone must have dropped it there by accident. I keep trying to imagine how it might have happened: did they realise they had lost the key straight away? Did they panic, did they look in every place except for my front door? I give the key to the landlady's son. The landlady thanks me later – she and her husband have been looking for the key for a few days.

“Thanks god you found it,” she says. “Jean-Guy and I, we were looking for it. Thanks god, thanks god. You and your lady.” A tender smile. I wonder if she only ever smiles that way when she thinks about us. “You are such good people. Your christmas card was so lovely. I showed it to Jean-Guy.”

I tell her I'm the privileged one. It's Kat who makes me want to be good. She's joy itself.

“I could count,” she says. Her name is Muriel. “I count maybe five people in the building as good as you.” The smile is gone. Now she looks as though she is past the point of exhaustion – past the weariness, past the heaviness, past the steady beat of lethargy. She is past all that and through to the other side. I wonder how much is left.

Later I meet her son again. I want to say his name is Shemie, but if it is I certainly don't know how to spell it properly. We're in the basement. I wait for the elevator and hold the laundry basket to my waist. The son pushes a broom. He walks up to me meaningfully. He is short and handsome in a very quiet way, with red-brown hair. He tries to thank me for bringing back the key. His expression says more than he ever can. He struggles through his crippling stutter: “Nuh-nuh-nnno wuh-ww-wuh....” He takes a breath. Every word has to be forced out of his rebellious mouth. “Nuh-nuh-nnnot muh-muh-many pee-pee-people wuh-wuh-would do sssuch-such a, a good th-thing.” It's more than he's said to me before. A monumental effort, all so he can convey his gratitude to me. I don't know what to say.

“No worries, man. It wouldn't fit in my door – it's no good to me, so I figured someone else needed it more.”

Later, the sink clogs up. I've taken care of everything else. My exodus isn't the usual chaos. I am packed, everything's switched off, the laundry's done and so are the dishes. But with two hours before my flight, the sink clogs up. I need to be out of the house. I was supposed to be out of the house at 5:30, to give myself enough time to eat and have a cup of tea. Instead I'm plunging our little plunger into brown, soapy water. I pump. I can't tell if it's even fixed over the sinkhole. No good. I boil the kettle and pour it out into the sink. Then I squeeze some dish detergent into the murk and add some of our miracle cleaning fluid made from oranges, working on a half-remembered memory. “It'll wash dishes, scrub floors, clean any surface.” I'm sure he said it would unclog drains too, but I can't be sure. This is the last thing I can't resolve in 2010, apart from my pain. A sink obstinately full of brown soapy water that smells like oranges and lemons.

The first taxi I see doesn't even look at me as I wave from across the road, bags in hand. He just sits there. I think he's picking his nose. Seconds later, another taxi comes ambling by. I wave it down and walk along the pavement, indicating that I'm trying to find a clear space to get across the snowbank. Eventually we come to a clear spot; I hoist my bags over. He loads them up. “Trudeau airport,” I say. “Airport,” he says. I climb in. He speaks to me in rapid french. I apologise: “My french is very bad.” He understands. He asks me in broken English where I am flying. “Vancouver.”

“Vancouver! Very beautiful. Very beautiful.”

“Yeah? I've heard that. My sister lives there. We're meeting for Christmas.”

He doesn't show signs of comprehension, but that's alright. I watch the road. I've been making this drive multiple times a year for five years, always in a taxi.

We arrive. He helps me with my bags, and I ask him how much it will be. He holds up four fingers. “Forty?” He nods. “I only have thirty. I... do you have an interac machine?” He shakes his head. “Here, tell you what, I'll just go inside and get some cash out, you stay here. Is that alright?”

“Ah, machine, machine,” he says.

“Yes, I'm just going to the ATM. I'll be right back.”

“Machine, machine,” he says. He goes around to the driver's side of the cab.

“Yes. ATM. I'll be back in a bit. Is that alright?”

“Machine, machine.”

“Ah.” He has an interac machine after all. I slide my card through the slot a couple of times to get it right.

“Have good trip.” he says, and then he hands me a clementine. An impromptu gift. I'm a little taken aback. I thank him. He just smiles. It says enough.

I don't eat it right away. I wait until I'm sitting in the lounge by the gate. I feel the significance of the gift requires some ceremony.

I peel it slowly, carefully, in one long thin orange ribbon. I eat each slice one by one. It's sweet and delicious – as I suspected. And there's one solitary seed. Of course there is. I catch it in my tongue and work it out to my lips, and then I wrap it in the skin and throw it all away in the nearby bin.

Later, I wonder if I should have kept the seed. I wonder if the seed was the true gift. But no, no that's not right. The true gift was the giving of the gift, and the feeling behind it. Enough to make any misanthrope want to believe in human goodness.

I sleep my way across half the continent, and then I watch Inception for the remaining half. It's just as good as I remember. When my family meets me at the airport, I hug every one of them. And I don't feel alone.

As I come out of the elevator I hear voices in the hallway around the corner. The little blond kid from down the hall is racing his dad up and down the corridor. The kid rides a little pink tricycle. His dad coasts along behind him in a wheelchair.

I say hello to them as I walk by. I turn the key, open the door, and just as I'm about to close it I hear the little blond kid trundle up behind me.

"I'm not supposed to go into people's houses," he declares. He peers into the apartment from the doorway. "I don't have one of those things."

"Which thing?" I ask.

"One of those, those black things that holds up the man," he says.

Black thing? I try to piece this one together. Holds up the man... I peek back at my place. By "man", does he mean the Batman piggybank on my shelf? Is the shelf the black thing he says he doesn't have? Seems like kind of an arbitrary thing to notice; and besides, I doubt he can see the Batman piggybank from the doorway. I look back at him; he's staring at my cane.

I hold it up to him. "Do you mean this?"

"That's his cane," says his dad.

"It's my cane," I say.

"Yeah," says the kid. "I don't have one of those."

"Nope," I say. "Well, I'll tell you what, the reason I have one is because my leg's hurt. I'm using the cane for now until I get better."

He looks deeply suspicious, but there's a sadness on his face too. He frowns. He says, "Your leg isn't hurt."

"I'm afraid it is. But it's alright. The cane helps me. And I'm feeling so much better these days."

"My legs don't hurt," he says with a proud little grin.

"I noticed! You were peddling really hard. You're really fast on that thing."

"I can't keep up with him," says his dad.

"My legs beat really hard!" says the kid.

"He means his heart," says his dad.

"I can punch really hard," says the kid. He demonstrates by taking a swing at my door.

"Wow!" I say. "You've got a lot of power. I hope you use that power responsibly. That's the, that's the main thing, right? Here." I bend down and stick my hand out. "You can punch that if you like."

He takes a swing at my hand and nudges it a little.

"Nice!" I say. "That's an awesome punch."

"Alright," says his dad. "We should let the man eat his food. How about another lap?"

"Yeah!" says the kid.

"Say goodbye."

"Goodbye!"

"Goodbye," I say. "Always a pleasure. You guys have a good evening."

Wheelchair and tricycle do a 180 and race off down the hallway. I close the door.

And I smile.

It did warp me.

It did affect me.

Those moments where I've paused mid-sentence, waiting for the right thought with which to drive home an argument or a point or a note or a joke or simply a comment in a conversation have been, so very often, derailed by a hot flash of lightning just where my leg meets the hip. It shoots down to the knee and lingers in the thigh as a buzzing, insistent sting. A magnified ant bite.

Now I find myself more given to awkward moments and slipped conversational opportunities. These days all too frequently I'll walk away from some social thing or another feeling that I have surely, utterly, irrevocably made an ass of myself. I will obsess in some locked-up private space in my head to the tune of a particularly nasty flair-up, about one incompetent remark or another, or an unintentional offense given, or some mindless slip of the tongue that must surely have conveyed to the listener that I am dangerously overvalued; that they ought not to speak with me again.

And if it is not something current against which I flinch, then it is a memory dredging itself up from the murk and making me cringe, or verbally cry out. What a sight I must be, in those secret moments.

But this must be a psycho-somatic side-effect. It must be. There's no other explanation. The crippling self-doubt, the sudden inexplicable conviction that my self-worth is grossly inflated... these gnawing self-loathings must surely be the pain derailing me at critical moments.

Ah, but then come those moments where the pain never entered into it. Then come those moments where my leg has been peacefully ignorable, and still, and still, and still. I come home fighting back the urge to denigrate and obsess. These thoughts are irrational. I must benefit from them. I must resist paralysis.

She makes me feel as though I am worth loving. There are times when I feel like an insect under a magnifying glass, suddenly unsure of my place. The doubts start to creep in and I wonder for two horrifying seconds if there will come a time when she realises what a mistake she is making.

But these moments pass all too often. She'll break into that perfect bright smile of hers and tell me that the thing she's been thinking about is how happy she is with me and my head starts to fill up with one wonderful cliche after another. It's like the sun just started shining. It's like the stars came out after all. It's like the cloud passed. For a moment I can breathe deep. I feel as though I have pinned down the source of these vexations. I feel as though I should be able to ignore them.

And still.

And still.

Tonight we watched The English Patient. I'd never watched it before. She has been wanting me to watch it since last year; at long last we finally did something about it and watched it.

We watched it side by side on the futon from her old apartment. It's a creature that is half sofa, half bed, and all orthopedic. It's an object of hers with which I've formed so many memories, built up so many contexts.

Tonight there are new memories. Tonight brings me the memory of folding myself around her as she curls up on a pillow. She thinks I am trying to wake her up and insists that there's no need, she's seen it before. In fact I'm beginning to cry as I watch the film, and I feel the need to hold her. I'm made to feel the dread and sorrow of Almasy as if it were my own. I cry hot tears, softly. I've never cried during a film before.

This has been a summer of memories. I have been in pain every day since the snow melted away. Sometimes it's been such a slight thing, such a terribly minor and pathetic thing, a minor hitch in my step. Sometimes it feels as though my leg is being pulled gently away from the hip, as though a giant were pulling it off my body. And, on some days, when I have been too careless or too stubborn, the burning.

The doctor tells me he is optimistic. He tells me I am likely to fluctuate between good and bad days in the time ahead; each time the good will be progressively better; each time the bad will feel like a return to a hellish state. There may come a day when I can run again, climb again, jump again, dance again. Perhaps I'll lose ten percent of my original mobility when the healing is done. Perhaps I'll be lucky.

And you know, a few years ago this would have warped me completely. A few years ago this probably would have broken me. But I am not the poor, crippled wretch I could have been. I have so much to smile about. If I concentrate I can feel the ground beneath me, feel the weight against the surface of the earth where it meets the skin of my feet. I can feel the pull of gravity radiating up my calves, through my knees, catching in my hips. I feel it in the pull of my asymmetrical shoulders. I feel it in the way the air fills me up. I love it so.

It feels like gravity when she's around. It feels like falling a little sometimes. It feels like I am being given something so that I know what life has to offer, what the world can give a person. It feels like something precious. It feels like something that can only last as long as anything that we do lasts; for the infinitesimally small amount of time that we have. Seventy years for the optimist; barely a dream in the universal timespan.

And each morning when I wake up and see her, I am thankful that the dream continues, and that it remains, for now, for a while, forever, a fine one.