THE SIKH PATIENT---Chapter 3

“I don’t love you.”  I don’t know, I just said it to him.  Like that.  Like I wasn’t a person.  Like love was a soft drink. 

            “Yasmine, did you have to tell me that?” Nick asked.  I could see the hurt in his eyes, but I wanted him to see the truth instead.  I wanted him to admit to me that he didn’t love me either.  I wanted us to be O.K. with being together, without love.  A lot of like.  Isn’t that enough?

            “Would you prefer I told someone else?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Why do you want to play pretend, Nick?  We have something special, maybe it’s better than love.”  I stared as men rushed back and forth with trays of pizza, we were at California Pizza Kitchen in Somerset Mall.

            “Nothing’s better than love.”  He looked away from me and looked over at a wood-burning oven where they made the pizza dough.  The man throwing in the dough looked as though he was frustrated, too much heat.  And here we were; no heat. 

            “Passion, maybe we have passion.”  I was lying, but I thought I was good at it.

            “Maybe?  You don’t use passion and maybe in the same sentence and expect to have it.”  He took a sip of lemonaid. Why can’t I even spell lemonaid?  I don’t deserve the use of words.

            “I want to love you…” if that’s any consolation.  I realized, everything after I said that first statement was digging me further and further in a hole.  But what about honesty?  Isn’t there a reward, somewhere, for honesty?

            “Do you think you could ever love me?”  He looked into my eyes and I quickly looked away.

“Yes.”  I lied, but apparently better this time.

“O.K., then maybe I can accept that you aren’t there yet.”  I watched a very good-looking man with a tan and dark hair hand over a dish of pasta to a woman at the table next to us.  For a moment I wanted to love him instead.  All of a sudden, I looked closer at Nick and thought, you sound like god.  You’ll love me even though I am an idiot who won’t love you back. 

“You say you love me, but I don’t believe you,” I said and stared at a piece of bread on a tiny plate with olive oil smothered all over it.  I don’t even believe god when he says he loves me, how can I believe you.

“That’s 'cause you’re used to lying about love.  I don’t lie about it.”

“I think you think you love me.”

“What’s the difference between thinking you love someone and loving someone?”  He took a bite of bread.

“There’s a difference.  Maybe I’m not articulate enough to describe it, or intelligent enough to understand it, but I know it exists.”  I wanted to kiss someone then, maybe Nick, maybe the waiter.  I wanted someone to hold me.

I knew then, that I thought I loved god, too.  But here I am, sitting with the ugly truth that I don’t know how to love.  I keep thinking, I’m better than Nick, I’m better than even god.  And that’s how sick I am.

“The difference between you and me is I don’t think about love.  I don’t talk about it.  It’s just there or it’s not there.  You talk about everything, think about everything, but sometimes you’re not there.” 

“Where am I?”

“I don’t know Yasmine, where are you?”

I’m in space.  I am water.  I am the ketchup you leave behind after you finish your fries.  I’m a small piece of bread that falls on the ground and never gets stepped on, and even the vacuum misses me.  I’m the gap between your teeth. 

I want to be air because it’s so empty, and it’s allowed to be empty.  Air doesn’t have a crisis because it feels empty, its very nature is almost non-existence, yet it exists, and without it, we wouldn’t exist.  I want to be that powerful, yet that subtle.  That’s where I want to be.  I want to be between your sentences, the pause. I want to be even less obvious than a comma.  Never give this away, your place between the lines.  That’s where you’ll find Her.

Maybe love is a mirror image of another emotion.  Maybe it’s a metaphor.  My English professor who’s going bald on half of his head said you use metaphors when don’t understand things.  I don’t understand things.  I don’t understand the bald man and the man with a full head of hair sitting in front of me.  Nick is a potato, in my mash potatoes. If I told him this garbage, he would have hated me.  Talk about food, only when you’re talking about food, don’t mix things and explain yourself clearly, with sophistication.  Nick is logical.  I think he thinks that relationships come in a package, with instructions.  Kind of like Pot, you believe the myths, but it’s addictive, even if it doesn’t say so on the box. 

Love is addictive, if you ever get it.  I know I don’t love him, because I don’t need to be with him.  I’m not yearning.  Love is not subtle, it’s not slow.  That’s an excuse people make for feelings they call love. 

Love is simple.  It just tastes good.

Our food came.  I’ve haven’t come yet, in this relationship.

                                                *

Poetry is all one poem.  We just make up the lines of separation.  Sometimes you read it again and it’s not as good as you thought it was, either is life, that’s why we die in line.  We’re waiting in line to die.  Some of us cut in front, but that’s rude. 

            Don’t rehearse death, there’s no way to have it twice. 

            Sometimes I sit in front of the T.V. while it’s on mute and watch them try to tell me things about merchandise and music videos.  It’s more interesting to wonder what they’re saying.  I don’t remember ever caring, but I do remember when T.V. had four channels and how I used to watch it more then.  Now I could watch anybody in the world, and that’s why I don’t.  It’s too easy to access the world, the world seems less important.  There are people in New Mexico and Mexico who meet on T.V., but I’m not watching, to make it official.  If nobody’s watching a channel, is it really playing?

            We never think about it when we’re watching, but people are really little on T.V.  How does our mind so easily dismiss how little their bodies become?  How come I accepted it from the first day I saw something on T.V.?  I don’t remember running scared, to my parents, asking them who these freakishly small people were. 

            Ravi and I was watching Cheers.  Oh my God I just said a sentence like the wife of Archie Bunker would have.  Edith, right? As I watched the re-run of Cheers I was wondering what it means to be normal.  I stared at Ravi and wondered if he really was normal.  I mean he was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, his hair was a little messy and looked like it might need a cut, and he hadn’t shaved in a few days.  That’s normal, for a guy, right?  Although we are both children of an alcoholic, watching a show about a bar.  I don’t know; I’m trying to find an ill factor here, somewhere.  I wonder though, if there is a guy or woman somewhere, who by some overall statistical average comes out as the ‘norm.’  Then it would be right to scream, “Norm!” when they walked into a room.  But in this ridiculous show, a very fat man who deserts his wife and drinks beer all day is revered.  This is normal.  This is America.

            “I bet if this show was still on the air, I could get a part,” I said to Ravi alluding to my dream of being an actress.

            “No, you’re too talented for this shit,” he said still staring at the T.V.  That was so nice.  He thinks I’m talented?  He’s never seen me act.

            “That’s really nice of you to say, but you’ve never seen me perform.”

            “You think I haven’t seen you perform?” He looked at me as if he was all-knowing and I was nothing-knowing.

            “What are you talking about?”  I asked, annoyed that I knew he was going to bring up my overly dramatic nature.  As one of my friends, Preetie, pointed out, “You’re so YASMINE, if you were a guy you’d be a drag queen.”

            “Yaz, you’ve been acting since we were kids.  You always acted like dad was a completely normal guy, even when he couldn’t get up from the couch for days at a time.  Acting kept you sane for a while, but eventually, maybe it made you…”

            “Insane?”

            “I didn’t say that.”

            “You were gonna say that, until you thought about how it would hurt my feelings.”

            “Yasmine if I cared about hurting your feelings, I wouldn’t be your brother, I’d be your friend.  I’m not your friend, I’m not your fan, I’m your relative, I’m supposed to insult you and make your life hell.”  He scratched his armpit.  He wouldn’t have done that if there was a woman in the room who he was trying to impress.  He would never do that if Nima were here.

            “Do you think of me differently now, because you know, I’m crazy or whatever.”  I sipped on some hot cocoa.

            “You’re not crazy, you’re just, I don’t know, weird.  It’s O.K., I’m weird too.”  He played with a small video game as he talked to me.

            “So you think I have talent as an actress?”  I said, wanting to go back to concentrating on my compliment. 

            “Yasmine, you have talent, but talent doesn’t pay the bills.”  He looked up from his video game and watched me dip a cookie into my hot chocolate.

            “Is that what you’ve been reduced to?  Is that what life is about, Ravi, bills?”  I took an emphatically hard bite of my sugar cookie.

            “If you can’t pay the bills, there is no life for there to be anything about.  You have the luxury to have meaning in your life.  Most people in this world don’t have time to create the ‘perfect life’ and those that do, realize perfection is a fantasy.”  Ravi looked very imperfect, a thirty-year old man playing video games and watching re-runs of a mildly funny sitcom.  Then again, there was something perfect about it.

            “You think I’m just another girl who wants to be a star?”  I looked sad, I know, because I felt pathetic.

            “No,” he looked very deeply at me, “I think you are an intelligent, talented, and honest woman, who needs to be honest with herself.  I believe in you.  I knew when you were a little girl and you used to dress up in mom’s clothes and dance around.  When you were born, you were like a light that came into our lives.  You made everyone so happy, ‘cause you have this spontaneous energy.  I think you’ll be a great actress, I just think you should have a back up career until you make it.  I know you’ll make it.  You still have that light inside you and I always knew you were gonna be something special.  The thing is I think you are something special already.”  He went back to playing his video game; I think he was a little embarrassed at showing so much affection.  I wanted to hug him, but it would have been too intense.  

            “When am I gonna think that about myself?”  I swirled a spoon around in my milk that was getting cold.

            “When you fall in love.”  Whoa. That was unexpected.  He missed Nima, didn’t he?  He really did learn something from her.

            “How did you know I’ve never been in love?” I asked and watched Ted Danson pour someone a shot on T.V.  Ted Danson played a recovering alcoholic on T.V.; Nick was a real recovering alcoholic.

            “Because I’ve never seen you actually go crazy,” Ravi said so casually.  I’ve been a mental patient.

            “Really?  It gets worse?”

            “I don’t recommend love; it’s a mind fuck.  It is also a body fuck, but…”  I think he stopped because he realized he was talking to his sister.

            “How did you know I’m not in love with Nick?” I looked at the side of his face, he was very good-looking, I was proud that he was my brother.

            “I don’t know…does he make you nervous?” Ravi looked at me.

            “No.”

            “Yeah, see, it’s better this way.  You think you have anxiety problems now…” Ravi looked sad. 

            “What happened with Nima, I mean if you want to talk about it, I never really understood what happened.”

            “We, uh…we saw each other grow up, you know?  We didn’t have any secrets.  I mean we…needed to see what else there was out there.”  He said it like it wasn’t over, like it was on hold and that made me happy.  Because I loved Nima. 

            “I’m sorry I brought it up, I didn’t mean to you know…”

            “It’s O.K., I hope one day…ah whatever…why are we watching this crap?  Let’s see if there’s a movie on HBO.”  He changed the channel.  Misery was on with Kathy Bates strapping a writer to a bed. 

            Years later Kathy Bates would star in a film called Deloris Claiborne that my therapist would always tell me to watch.  Her favorite line was, “Sometimes all you got is being a bitch.”  I really did like Kathy Bates; I appreciated the fact that a woman who didn’t fit the physical ideal of Hollywood could make it. 

            But sometimes, I didn’t want to be in movies, or on T.V.  People were gonna turn my body into some kind of sculpture, they were gonna cut off pieces of my body with their words.  I wished I could make sculptures instead and people watched me do that, because I guess I still want to be watched. 

The thing is, maybe I want to be the sculpture myself.  Because they are so still.  Months later, I would experience psychosomatic paralysis of my entire body, and then I would know how twisted it is to actually be a sculpture. 

                                                                        *

            Reading my own poetry is making me insane.  It’s so fucking convoluted that it upsets me that I understand it; I understand it so well it haunts me.  So I stopped writing poetry.  It’s just too intense; I don’t think it’s good for my mental health. 

            Last semester my Jamaican poetry professor told us, “Don’t ever write in a diary, because everyone sounds crazy in their diary.  And when you die, just look at what they did to Sylvia Plath.”  And I listened to her.  I always knew that though, anyways, because I’m gonna die, and the dead have no rights.  It’s funny, all this privacy we yearn for when we are alive, and the moment we bite it, our secrets are spread out like cream cheese.  My dad didn’t have a diary and I want to even read the notes he made in his medical charts.   

            “I hate my life,” I said to Mona as I shut one of my old journals of poetry.

            “Yeah, that’s new.  Find something new to hate, everyone’s into this hating their life thing, it’s too trendy.”  I stared at her as she was pasting photographs of her and Khalid in a scrapbook.  She was also the one, who said to me freshman year, “Homosexuality is just a trend.”  Of course, three years later, she knows better.

            “Are you happy?” I asked her as she flipped through some photos.

            She looked up at me.  “Am I supposed to know?” 

            “What’s the point of being happy if you don’t know?” I threw the journal on our blue couch.

            “Kids are happy and they have no idea.  You want to go around telling them.  You think it’ll make a difference in their life?  You only know you’re happy when you’ve been unhappy.”  Mona was so definite about things.  I think it’s the math thing.  She’s really good at math.

            “Are you saying you’ve never been unhappy?”  I looked across at the kitchen, it was my turn to do the dishes; they were piling up.

            “Of course I’ve been unhappy.  Hello, you have been around me for most of those times, did you forget?  I just don’t worry about it too much.  It comes, it goes.  You know, good times, bad times.  It’s like that song by the Beatles, ‘For everything there is a season, a time to laugh, a time to cry…’”  Nowadays they may have updated that song to, ‘For everything there is a symptom, a syndrome.’

            “That’s a passage from the Bible.”

            “Well, it was a song too.”  She always defended herself with such ferocity, even things that didn’t need defense.  She wore armor. 

            “Sometimes though, it’s even hard to breathe.”

             She looked up at me, and put the pictures down.  “Yaz…”  She got up from the other couch and sat next to me.  “I hear yoga helps, you know, with the breathing.”

            “Yeah.  That’s not a bad idea.”  She just sat next to me.  I think she was listening to my breathing, making sure it was still happening. 

            Khalid walked in.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about him having a key, but I didn’t know how to bring it up with Mona.  And whatever.  “You two ladies look perplexed,” he said and opened up the fridge. 

            “I made some pizza,” Mona said without getting up from the couch. 

            “Wow,” he took a bite.  “This is great.”  He took a long look at us.  “Are you guys having like a moment or something?”

            “Grow up,” Mona said and walked over to him and let him kiss her on the cheek.

            “You want a kiss?” he asked and looked over at me.  I was motionless until he said this.  

            “Yeah, just not from you.”  I picked up my journal, suddenly afraid that he might get a glimpse of it.  I mean it was bad enough that I had to read it, but to subject other people to it, that would be ludicrous.

            “I see we’re in our usual spritey mood,” Khalid said and sat on the couch next to mine.  “What’s the matter?  Did your –

            “Leave her alone,” Mona interrupted.  “If you want to annoy someone, try me.”

            “Oooh, I love it when you get feisty,” Khalid said and winked at Mona.

            “Oh my God, it’s true, I’m dating a child.  I think this relationship is illegal,” Mona said and sat down next to him on the couch. 

            “Well kids are happy,” I got up from the couch.

            “You might have been a happy kid.  I lived in five different countries before the age of twelve.  I was a refugee.  It’s pretty fun to watch your father sweep floors after being a professor at a university.”  Khalid looked down at the table where Mona had been making her scrap book when he spoke.  He was referring to fleeing Iran when the war began.

            “God, Khalid,” Mona sighed, “Do you have to constantly be so bitter?”  I was standing and I didn’t walk in the direction I was supposed to.  But I didn’t sit back down.  I just stood there.

            “Do you know what it’s like to watch your father not be able to spell his own name because he’s so intoxicated at ten in the morning, after being a Cardiologist for twenty years?”  I said as I stood there.  Well, I mean if we were gonna trade war stories.

            Khalid looked into my eyes and then I looked away.  “Don’t let him make you unhappy.  He doesn’t have the right,” Khalid said and kept looking at me as I stared at the dishes.  The dishes needed to be done.

            “How do I get it back, how do I get myself back?” I asked and walked towards the kitchen, staring at a bowl with tomato sauce dried in it.

              “Don’t ever let anyone decide how you feel.  You wake up in the morning and you decide, and if you decide to feel like shit, then at least it’s your own decision,” Khalid said and played with the sausage on his pizza.

            “Since when are feelings decisions?” Mona asked and wiped some tomato sauce from his chin.

            “You wanna leave it up to your heart?  That’s just stupid.”  Khalid spoke like a magician, it always seemed like there was a trick he was doing on you.

            “I think my dad decided to die,” I said picking up a wet sponge from the sink.

            “That’s a luxury, not too many people get to decide,” Khalid said, still eating pizza.

            “God this is so heavy, can we like, I don’t know.  We need to change the subject,” Mona said as I started hot water in the sink.  I liked how it felt on my hands.

             I liked breathing in the steam.

*

“Did you find the Fountain of Youth, Lara?”   I asked my therapist, who looked ten years younger than she was. 

            “It’s not a fountain.”

            “What is it?”

            She paused and looked down.  I looked at her hands. They looked older than the rest of her.  “I don’t know, but it’s not a fountain.”

            Is it a father. A fuck?  Is it a family, it can’t be family.  Families makes you old.  Is it fame, or maybe just a phone?  Maybe it’s a fall.  She’d been in two accidents, both caused by drunk drivers.  She was hurt very badly.  Something like that could make someone old.  But it made her younger. 

            “I want to be young, always,” I declared.

            “Join the club.  It’s a pretty big club.”  She took a sip of water from a bottle.  Her office was cozy, there was a dim warm light coming from behind her that lit up a painting of a scene of a pond with greenery all around.

            “Who said, ‘Youth is wasted on the young?’” I asked and put some chap stick on my lips.

            “Someone old.”

            “I don’t ever want to die.”  I looked up at her pretty eyes, they were a very clear blue they reminded me of water.

            “It’s not really your choice is it?  We never really die, Yasmine, we change.  Maybe we become another being, maybe we come back on Earth, and maybe we go to a beautiful place called Heaven.  But there is no end.”  She spoke with such confidence as if she had been to Heaven.

            “How do you know?”

            “I don’t, I believe.”

            “I guess I do too.” I looked in her eyes again.  I think maybe that’s where Heaven is, inside people’s eyes.  “Is it true, that thing they say, that we spend our entire lives in denial about our death?”

            “Maybe.  But maybe it’s not denial, maybe it’s our souls whispering the truth to us: that the soul never dies.  Maybe we aren’t in denial about death, we just know intuitively that just because one chapter closes, it doesn’t mean the book has ended.” 

            “But every book ends.”

            “In this world.”  She looked for a second like she came from another world.  Not like an alien, not like an angel, just a presence from somewhere far away.  A messenger.

            “I think I’ve met God, and he’s not that different than us.”

            “Are you disappointed?  What did you expect?”

            “No, I’m surprised.”  I wanted to comb her hair, I don’t know why, it was flowing blond and pretty.  “I’m happily surprised.  It’s refreshing to know that, maybe He’s as fucked up as us.”

            “Do you really think we’re fucked up?”

            “Sometimes.  Then sometimes I hear a song on the radio and everything seems beautiful, like one big beautiful mistake.”

            “God doesn’t make mistakes.”

            “How do you know?  I think He does.  I think when we meet him he’s gonna apologize to us, too.”  I wrapped myself in a deep green chenille blanket she had sitting on the floral couch.

            “That’s interesting. I’ve never really thought about it that way.”  I don’t know how to spell interesting, wait, I just did it.  I think that’s interesting. 

            What if I were not to capitalize god?  Some people get uncomfortable, I don’t think god gives a shit.  but then again we capitalize Coke, maybe god deserves a capital letter.  most of us are ordinary, but if i told you that i think god is ordinary, not extraordinary, would i go to hell?  Even though I’m pretty sure there’s no Hell.  a lot of people say he is exceptional then put a period at the end of sentence  some of us are so great that we know He is great  we are so sure of it that we would bet money, if we thought god accepted cash.

            I’m sorry but I’m getting an English degree at The University of Michigan, and I don’t know what exceptional means. I would rather not use those words to describe god until I mean them.  But I would rather think that god does something that feels ordinary, like brushing teeth.  Maybe god brushes his teeth every morning and sometimes his gums hurt and that’s how he knows how good it feels when they don’t hurt. Maybe sometimes he starts having paranoid visions of Gingivitis.  I could be way off, but I believe god took the time to invent Gingivitis.  He might be a little suspicious, just like the rest of us.  but I don’t know him that well so I don’t want to put words in his mouth, or diseases for that matter.

            We say god is perfect but we are not.  I don’t know about you, but things don’t look that perfect to me around here.  You might say, just because the world is not perfect, doesn’t mean God isn’t.  I would say we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, and we’re using words.  The word ‘weakness’ means something bad to us, but I bet our weaknesses are not really that bad in god’s eyes.  I bet he sees weakness as sometimes being good, I bet you kind of do too.  I bet without your moments of weakness, you would be nothing.  maybe god is kinda like us.  Somehow the word ‘weakness’ cannot be attributed with ‘perfect’ because weakness is not god, not the one we don’t know yet.  The one we pretend we like thoroughly and completely.  Oh we even use the word ‘love’ because we know what that means. 

            But really, I don’t what I’m talking about, or why I’m talking.  One thing I do know though, it’s not a sin to think.  I like to think god has a personality.  I like to think he gets scared sometimes.  That is the only way I can know Him.  I don’t want to go back to the way I used to think, when God was faraway from me like a grandfather I never knew, who disapproved of me. 

            I have no idea what God is.  But I don’t think he’s gonna hate me for playing pretend. I pretend He’s nice.  I pretend He’s cool.  I pretend he thinks I’m special.  And if any of this is sacrilegious mental activity, I take no responsibility for it, my mind has a mind of its own.  Please feel free to use this disclaimer when feeling blasphemous.      

            Since we’re on the topic of blasphemy, what about this:  This thing about God knowing everything annoys me.  Because that means I cannot come up with a completely original thought.  I know this is a mental game, because when I come up with an original thought, God is one with me, so She like participates and she already knew anyways.  How about this?  I like to think I came up with a thought all by myself and god is proud of me.  I invented something that She didn’t know until I knew. 

            I think I could say a totally unique sentence, like, “The peacock ate a hamburger.”  No one in the history of time has said this, possibly.  And if God watches us, the way we watch T.V., and he knew I would say this sentence before I said it, maybe he mutes this knowledge while he’s watching.  Otherwise what would be the point?  Yeah, I know there could be a greater meaning to life than entertainment. 

by

Nina Kaur