LXVII | Some Consideration
❦
Watching Tammie
ignore me
is an excruciating
experience.
It’s more familiar
than I’d like it to be.
Somewhere
in my repressed memories,
I’ve done something
unforgivable
to make her
abandon me that way.
Now,
it’s happening again.
What happened?
I think about
peeking in while she’s pole dancing
to see if it’ll come to me
but when I see her
in that ill-fitting
leotard, wrapped
indecently
around the metal pole,
my mind goes blank
and my heart aches.
So I hide
in her favourite place,
staring at the rowan
trees
and punish myself by remembering.
❦
Asher finds me
in the greenhouse
again.
He sits on the bench
next to me,
without a word.
We haven’t spoken
for as long as Tammie has ignored me.
If only
he could be Tammie.
Then it doesn’t matter
if she never
talks to me again.
I’ll do anything
to have her be close by
again.
Zuraida said
rowan trees can’t grow in Singapore.
Asher doesn’t react
so I don’t realise
the one speaking
is me.
After a pause,
he replies
without moving
(as if that will scare me away),
She’s right.
I stiffen.
I don’t like
the sound of that.
I don’t want
it to be true.
But it does.
Why is my voice
cracking?
With technology,
with a man-made environment,
with advanced engineering…
I sound
so desperate.
Asher finally
turns
to me.
His eyes are fuller
than I remember.
There’s sympathy there,
remorse, hope, sadness.
It’s okay
that
it can’t.
I don’t understand what he’s saying.
The emotions
in his eyes.
The sentence
I understand fully.
It is because of the sentence
that I start to talk—
so fast I don’t know what I’m saying—
but Asher knows
because the emotions in his eyes
become more intense
and he cries
on my behalf.
I tell him how Tammie and I met
while I was recovering
in secondary school.
She was the only one
who made an effort
to befriend me
who couldn’t communicate normally.
She accepted my illness,
lived with it,
loved me for it.
I tell him
that my favourite thing in the world
was holding her hand.
Because of her,
I got to have
a normal life.
Shopping for clothes with a friend,
eating BBQ at the beach,
I can’t remember
everything
but it comes back to me
in flashes.
I tell him
that she was honest with me
and it didn’t hurt,
it was a good thing
because I was so dense
and confused about
what’s real.
When we were together,
I always knew
what’s real.
I was lonely,
isolated,
labelled a lunatic
before I could even understand my own thoughts.
I was accustomed
to being surrounded
by strangers who were also
a danger to everyone else—
and we would be
lonely
isolated
lunatics
together.
Like the two of us are
right now.
We can’t understand each other
—how can we?
We’re both selfish
devils who can’t care about
anyone else.
Tammie
was a different kind of person.
She sat close to me.
She told me how she felt.
We hugged.
We kissed.
We cuddled.
I learnt
about
friends.
She appears in
all my sane memories.
So all my memories of her
are precious.
Seeing her here,
hurt.
You think I don’t hope
she’s really a hallucination?
My voice sounds
calm to my own ears
but Asher
is crying.
I want. I’d rather be delusional,
I tell him,
than believe I destroyed
her life this much.
I close my eyes
and try to think back
to what I did.
What happened then.
But I only see her
with bright grey eyes
smiling,
giggling,
still too skinny,
still dancing around the pole.
Her laugh,
her smell
fills me up
and I don’t want
to open my eyes
anymore.
But Asher’s voice
drowns out Tammie’s.
I’ll be your friend.
I can’t take her place.
Because you and I…
are the same.
His eyes are pleading
when I open mine.
❦
