Out of Place

An excerpt from Half Lies by Ruhi Cheema

You know the feeling of coming out of a disco bar, slightly tipsy. The music dies down as the heavy doors shut behind you, but the rhythm remains. Entering my thirties felt like that. I remember countless walks towards parking lots after weddings, dinners, birthday parties. The cool night air always felt more welcoming. As you walk away, the din dies down, slowly but steadily. Suddenly, the outlines are much clearer. The memories real. The words spoken remain distinct in the mind. It is, as if, now one can speak the truth, in retrospect. And truth was spoken, often by someone in the backseat of the waiting car. All of a sudden. And no one said a word. But we all knew. That this felt real. That it could not possibly be otherwise.

But I am lying. This tendency already began to develop in my late twenties. Age is definitely a number, but up to a point. These changes are so gradual, one never knows. The first leaf is already falling as you complain about the summer heat. Before the hand turns the key to open the door, the mind has already opened countless doors and walked a million steps.

Writing is always an act of being in the middle. Of that which has already happened and of that which will be—I am both. There are things I can tell you and there are things you can tell me.

And then there are those that we can’t.

Someone once asked me, “Would you like to be seen?” What I replied reveals a lot about me so I won’t tell. And neither ask it of you. But privately, what would you say? To be seen—does it make you feel relieved or wary? Divine or demonic? The need of the soul to be witnessed—is it a miracle or a violence? Or even better, a violent miracle.

Fractals are everywhere in nature. On animals, snowflakes, tree trunks, electric currents, clouds. I tend to think that if our lives were plotted on a graph, we would find fractals there too. There have been many deaths and renaissances within my own lifetime, or whatever part of it I have lived. Like the rings on tree trunks, I feel like I have been ‘growing’ in circles, one layer at a time. I pass by similar milestones. The challenges change, but they evoke resounding echoes. That I have been here before. Slightly smaller, more unsure. But I was here.

When I was 5, I was agitated. The grownups knew next to nothing. For all their power. For all their resources. They still knew so very little, I thought. My concerns were tiny but I felt strongly about them. And lord, was I willing to fight. I could not differentiate between passive aggressions and active ones. I failed to understand how someone’s passive provocation could go unpunished while my active reaction to it was. I didn’t understand why telling the truth was embarrassing. Or why grownups laughed off my genuine fears and explained away my irritation to lack of sleep. In all seriousness, I conjured a child court and passed judgement on myself and the people around me there and then.

And though I spoke, inherently I was aloof. For a long time. Still am, at times.

But sometimes, when all is quiet, someone—once in a while—says something, that makes me come out. It thrills me. That resonance. But it is rare. And maybe that is why it is so beautiful.

If you find yourself nodding to this, or if I find you nodding to this—I do not presume any more than what that entails. I do not presume, for instance, that if I were to butcher your solitude and we were to talk over a cup of coffee, we would find an alignment. That is the ultimate irony. Solitude brings us together, separately. We all have felt it. This feeling out of place. And in a weird dysfunctional way, this is how we are cursed to belong. As Beauvoir said, “To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it’s hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.”

My thirties have made me understand that. I am still out of place. No more, no less than before. But I am okay with being out of place now. And that has made all the difference in the world. It is a slight shift, but the more you follow through this shift, the more drastic it seems to become. Elementally, it changes the way you feel about everything around you.

Twenties are a test of your convictions. Either you stick with them. Or, in violently rejecting them, you end up embracing them even more strongly later. Some convictions break for good, never to see daylight again. Some continue to haunt the shadows beyond all rationale. This is why this time is often so turbulent. You are learning more about yourself. Darker things too. In one form or another, you are learning about loneliness too that tends to seep through, no matter what dams you build to bury it, through all drinks, laughs, tears, noise—one quiet moment is all it takes to know that this lived experience with all its sorrows and joys is often yours alone and “that when the drinking was done,/ the drinking wouldn’t make the stories/ we brought home any easier to tell” (Reginald Dwayne Betts, “Essay on Reentry”).

This happens especially when you are in pain. The mind can lie. But the body doesn’t know how to.

Remember those men and women in films that often play the role of a mentor, that know all there is to know about storms and demons and always have shelter and guns available? People in their thirties can be like that. They know the markings of the wolf when they see one. They have been through heaven and hell and back, almost. They have been alone too and it doesn’t bother them anymore even though they are still in the game and the hunt is on. Their skies get dark too. But they know now what to do. They look up and say, “No big deal.”

Often these men and women die in films. But we won’t talk about that here.

I have seen terrifyingly beautiful things. Terrifying yes. Beautiful, only if seen out of context. Poetry is like that too at times. Often, I like to slice poetry lines out of their context. I pause by the roadside, right before the turn to the next line and I wait for a glimmer of that Egyptian sun blessing a secluded corner which becomes God to me in that moment. I make my own destination there and then. I open my purse and put that line in it to keep close at night when the shivering gets worse. From time to time, we can be like that to one another. Lines without context. I remember being told I looked terrific on the day I wanted to die. I don’t doubt them. I must have looked terrific and cold. A line without a context.

These days, I welcome such a reading of my life. All that happens is welcome. Everything can fall and rest around me. When I was 28, I wrote in big bold letters on the wall of my room those words by Frederick Buechner: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” And I believe in it, even more firmly in my thirties. And these words are probably all that I would put in a glass bottle to throw as a message into the ocean.

Well, maybe not. What I will put in there is a secret.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I remember daydreaming, looking at the advertisement brochures that fascinated me a lot more than the gifts they fell out of, gifts that some of my relatives would bring for me from abroad. They had pictures and prices of toys that seemed too extravagant, too impossible for a child to possess. They were out of place, sitting there on the table of our living room surrounded by darkness due to another power outage. They were potentially useless. Have you wondered why in every household, there are multiple half-filled shampoo bottles, conditioners, creams, hair oils? Because nothing seems to work. Things. Delivered and returned. Thrown. They often arrive either too early or too late. And you can never find things when you need them the most.

So is with people too.

One day I sleepwalked myself to the washroom and wrote this on my phone, half asleep:

“Do something about the words you keep whispering to yourself under your breath.”

Now there’s a fine New Year’s resolution or what.

These things are easier said than done. There is too much noise around, too much movement for anything to shift elementally. That shift requires a moment of of stillness.

The other day in bus I saw this boy reading a book. He had only a few more pages to go. That last delicious bit. I could tell by the way he could not take his eyes off it. If you are a reader too, I am sure you know that feeling. Nothing can stop that marathon when you are nearing the end. You are propelled by all the forces that be. You must see it to the end. When he finished the book, he finally looked up. His eyes were still not seeing what was around him. He had woken up but into a different space, a different place. It would be a while before he would return. He got off the bus at his stop and I noticed his shoe laces had not been tied. Clearly, he was still under the spell. I often wonder about that invisible bubble that book readers, artists, people engrossed in any kind of labor of love often have around them and do not emerge from for really long, even when they ultimately talk to you. It is fascinating how that can often be a super power of sorts. To tone down the din that surrounds you. To finally listen to that still voice. To finally have enough clarity, strength, and simplicity to act.

With time, my beliefs have evolved. I feel there are no cues now. There is no script. God is electric. Take-outs definitely taste much better the day after and brunches are underrated. Less is more. Subtle is bold. Irony is the blood of my blood, the flesh of my flesh. It is hilarious really once you sit down to enjoy the show.

But you need to have the nerve.

We have often heard the saying that we hate what we don’t understand. But there is another one. We often desire that which we don’t understand, or at least hold a tender fascination for it. Like the fishermen enchanted by the beautiful alien woman who arrived in the utsuro-bune send her back to the sea, frightened by her strangeness yet unwilling to harm.

This morning on my walk I heard a poem sung in Ojibwe. It sounded so gentle and wistful, rounded and smooth like a pebble in a stream. I had no idea what it meant. And that is exactly why it meant so many things all to me at once because the signifieds had flown away like doves in a row and now I could not tell whether those were birds, clouds, or puffs of cotton.  All that remained rightfully to guide me was how the words felt, the music they held.

For instance, consider these lines by Ada Limón:

“At the funeral parlor with my mother, we are holding her father’s suit,
            and she says, He’ll swim in these.

For a moment, I’m not sure what she means,
until I realize she means the clothes are too big.”

Ada Limón, “The Hurting Kind”

You see, I clutch on to the image of her maternal grandfather swimming away, floating, freed, in a rapture. I refuse to think of him buried underneath, dormant, in clothes that don’t fit him. I would rather imagine those clothes to be supermanly, imbued with powers to dive deep into the ethereal. This is how I imagine my nani too, who is no more.

One day I had an epiphany that she was here, with me. She was free. Not bed ridden now, she was a girl again, one with the wind that made the trees beyond my backyard come alive.

And I can see why subconsciously, Limón’s mind first went to that place too.

I guess living your life in your thirties is quite like that. You choose your context. No matter how wild, or how bizarre. This evening, standing next to the waters, I feel potent. The trees, the rocks, and the mountains know. This is not my home. When it gets darker, I will leave. But till then, I will stand tall among them like a witch of the night.

And if I say I am, then maybe I am.

“She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.”

Ada Limón, “Wonder Woman”