Cherry brandy yellow warmth under a dark blue sky. Fire, ardour, the fusion of skin; they are the three ends of a trapeze. The fourth end is uncertain and intangible. You can stretch and tease and make it yours. It is a trapeze act; unpredictable, bizarre and oddly entertaining.

I write these letters to you from a swinging trapeze. We are but one here; you have to hook your leg into mine to save your life. Bruises are a habit and letting go is a routine. We gain momentum by swaying uncertainty around like a pendulum in a child's hand. Time is a monarch and we are but peasant puppets. Art in mid-air becomes an installation, a living.

So we go on everyday; a trapeze act over a field of discovery. You swing and I catch you; you impregnate the field as you pass by; pollens of thought involuntarily dropped onto fertile flowers to ensure that life everywhere continues undisrupted. You plant life into my wooden arms and coax me to see a net where there is none. Your illusions have a solidity to them that is simply transitional. And in this state of transition, we pass decades.

Jump and fall, the flying trapeze is safer than you think. The danger rests in a slip of mind and you already possess mine. You complete the fourth end and the trapeze is nothing more than a mere instrument. Play it at your will and break the ends, the fire will not stop till it has consumed everything in its way.

Fire, ardour, the fusion of skin and you.

I must be mother and child in your light.

Nearly a thousand years ago, one man painted the holy picture differently. He escaped the glass pieces and painted mother and child in one light. He painted them as they would look, just like you and me. It must take a certain amount of pain to seep back into the mould, I presume, just like it would take to break away. I wonder if he tossed and turned in his bed, wondering how he could have such impure thoughts of painting a normal picture of Virgin Mary and the Christ child.

I wonder if he stood in front of the canvas for days, staring at the white, wondering how best to pollute it. You asked me to let go the other day. I imagined a naked Giotto flinging his arms at his canvas, pure dyes shooting from his veins as he painted something from life after two hundred years. It hurts to let go. It must be just like childbirth. Union and severance together.

Of course I must let go. I am but the mother who understands that beyond being a family, everyone dear is but an individual. You wanted some space to breathe, still wet and warm from tearing away. So I gave you space. And somewhere inside that space, I became a hurting infant. My hands hurt from not talking to you, my ears rang of silence. I picked the phone and called you irrespective. I became an infant. And you kissed me into this world.

You make me mother and child in your light. Giotto’s pain of being normal lasted for several hundred years before they discovered geometry again. You must be him. You reformed me with the single stroke of a brush. And here I sit, perspiring the excess of you to keep you in.

Throw your colours onto me now, I long to be buried under your adolescence.

Once upon a time, I started telling you stories. Brief ones with a predictable ending, elaborate grand ones with meek endings, love stories masked beneath animals and fairies, stories of you and me. I narrated the epics; remember the grasshopper and the bumble bee that finally made it through? Remember their happily-ever-after?

These happily-ever-afters' worry me. It is a three word cluster. All three word clusters worry me. They contain just enough space to shake and uproot permanence. They contain just enough syllables to alter our biological compositions. They bury themselves in spaces between blankets and throw the wind out to disturb the layers of dust we wait under. These three word clusters; they make me shudder.

This June was a fugue of stories. The little ones still sigh in my palm, the grand ones flutter around in their conceit. I keep trying to tether them down, wondering if they will gasp in your voice when I squeeze them between my fingers. Inside these thoughts, inside this June of stories, I burn.

On the eve of July, I wonder if June will come back; if she will run back to us like a child with open arms. I wonder if she will sit on each of our arms and tell us our stories again. What if she offers the grand ones to you, all held together by a single string? Would you keep them? Or would you smile and slip them into my hands? The stories are but children themselves, and they want three word clusters for dessert. I grow old by the hour, and my layer of dust seems to be withering. I cannot hide anymore.

You keep asking me where I often wander away. I never find the courage to tell you that I wander into you, straight deep down into your nerve endings, following your lost impulses into your blood stream, hoping to revive them. I can never wander away; I simply wander further into you. This June of stories holds our three word cluster and she is dying of hunger and silence.

Where are you wandering now?

In abandon, we face our biggest fears. The moment your voice ceases to ring in my ears, I feel abandon. I feel the ordinary creep upon me. Have I ever told you that is my biggest fear?

The other day I took a walk when the winds were blowing in the opposite direction, with a certain amount of stubborness too, I must add. I live in a neighbourhood where either the walls cry out or stand solitary without windows. There are no inbetweens here. There is no moderate, no intermediate, no lines, no ballets and pirouettes on a non-judgemental axis. But within these walls, they commit the most atrocious crimes. I can see them.

I walked past windows the other day when the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. Those windows were like strips of skin peeled away; the insides were simply left to rot. I could see a wife watching a soap and a husband falling asleep on his chair. I could see a child watching them and learning that life might end up being like that. I could see her abandon creeping upon her.

Another wall, the lights focused on its texture. Was that deliberate, I wondered. If you cannot see what's on the inside, you might as well feel what my skin is like. You might as well understand its texture. Lights and a white wall. He thought he was hiding. I could see abandon loom large over that house.

Another window, what did the flesh hold now? Did ordinariness eat away into their lives too? How do you make love without shivering at the sensation of an alien skin upon yours? How do you let new life grapple into you without understanding the course of familiarity that follows? I
shudder to think that is exactly where we are all headed. A world of abandon. Let it all go. What's your loss? What's your gain?

Peace might disappear in a few years now. The term could be extinct; we might spend generations trying to find the fossils. This world could be warred and bruised, the circumference of this planet could bleed and drip into space. Starvation could become a way of life, money could be a museum artefact. We could have two suns in our horizon and heat waves could drastically reduce booming population in days. And what could be the biggest regret we might have in the middle of all this?

Ordinariness.

I see through those windows and I see ordinariness. I see love buried deep under blankets and filth of an ordinary life. I see people force themselves into abandon. I feel wasted when an hour passes without feeling you in arms; the aftertaste cannot even get close to how you transform everything I recognize and acknowledge. I wish I could teach you to the world.

The extraordinary is nothing more than an undiscovered organism. It creeps beneath these walls, it hides just before you decide not to buy those flowers, it lives within knowing that you want to and not knowing how to. Ordinariness is my biggest fear.

There will be no abandon in this house. The wood sweats salt during the day and you ooze from my thoughts in the night. You bind me tight into this knot of the extraordinary.

You are my extraordinary.

These senses fail me. I don’t understand how. How can your senses fail you? Am I supposed to be dead then? Dead and buried, numb and breathless six feet under.

Am I buried under your weight of love?

But love is just a fist now. A fist closed and angry. A fist in denial and pain. A fist full of love wanting to run into a wall. A fist that wants to break the wall and watch its identity crumble into pieces. A fist that wants to embalm you in the love that makes it so heavy.

My senses fail me. Yet, isn’t it strange that I rely on my senses to ground me when I float to you? Did I just drink tea? How would I know? The aftertaste. It’s not you. It’s the tea, syrupy and bland.

Touch; tingles across my spine take morning walks. Tingles run along in pairs as the ground perspires and heaves at the warmth of your breath. Touch; your breath makes my skin fertile. The sun burns upon it to create life. Solar flares erupt in the distance and you let them pass through you, magnificent and untamed. You are the Northern Lights that rip through a dull gloomy sky. My senses fail me. You bring me back.

The smell of musk, the smell of a new you every waking hour. Your voice trembling and quivering, stretching across blankets and slithering by straight lines. Vapours of you and me coliding and dancing in the air, slipping through our noses and bursting out of our mouths in bouts of sighs. I can smell inevitability.

Sight; how many eyes do I have now? You glanced through and a thousand more uncurled over me. A thousand more and I could see the tragic ugliness of this world. A thousand more and I began to love it, all the tragedy, and the beauty that makes it inhabitable. How many more will you uncurl? How much more?

I can't hear anymore. My world is nothing more than a rhythm. I swim and surf through this rhythm, I know every curve, every wound, every single place where potholes are healing. I know when to jump over them. I know when to trip into them. I know you want me deaf. Truth is mute and I am deaf.

One day, one very fine day, all this won't matter. This invasion of my senses would be complete. This transition will be insignificant, and you will become the southern sun in its blinding glory. These senses would have failed me completely. And you, you will be all that remains.

Some kind of violence holds this world underneath us. It swells and swerves as your body arches on the branch, your solidity rushing through liquid naked blankets. We live on trees, amidst eternal sundry sating mornings. Yet you long. You long to live in those bubbles beneath us. They’re too expensive to afford.

“We could just go down there and live, you know?”

You love those bubbles; you love the violence they swim in. I love these trees; I love this roughness against my back. I love that we are high up in a place where homes are built out of mud and earth that nurture and feel warm in the cold of a cloudy morning. Those bubbles are fragile, pompous spaces that think they hide while all they do is reveal. But you never listen. You just long.

So I did it. I took the plunge and jumped into a bubble one fine lazy summer song. I plunged, I threw myself away from you to understand and feel what you longed for so desperately. And I entered them. I entered a night for the first time. I saw fire for the first time. I saw time collide into sparks that the flames threw about carelessly. I saw time afraid. I saw people whisper; they were as timid as the night. I tasted midnight oil. Syrupy and bland. Blank and clueless. And I longed to burn. I longed for you to be my midnight oil and burn me through and through.

So we lived on anyway. You folded the sheets every morning and slept with me very morning. We knew night existed somewhere but we just couldn’t find it afterward. I could pass a thousand mornings knowing night existed somewhere. And I could pass another thousand knowing you would plunge with me into it.

We know those mornings instinctively. You and I. Nothing much said apart from your ten cups of water and my one cup of tea, your silence overlapping my sighs. We know the ingredients, the spices and the natural aphrodisiacs that make it special. Presumption is a hypnotic art, it makes you mute.

We never washed our hands. I touched you the night before and let my fingers marinate in your impatience. You told me somewhere in between that you could hear my blood soar through my veins. I smiled. I knew we would never wash our hands.

Fingers collided in a bowl of green. Bloomsdales mixed and scurried through the water as we eddied around. The leaves were the most essential of all; water needs to scuffle and run as it senses the green. They need to resist tear and unbind our doubts in the bowl.

“This one won’t work.”

You pick a leaf and hold it up. I shiver at the sight of light bouncing off your hand. Don’t you ever notice how beautiful you are, I wonder.

“We can use it for the base though.”

You shrug and place it aside, brushing your hair back with your wrist. Water can be so parasitical, I think to myself. She sticks onto your forehead and slowly trickles down your eyebrow, spreading through and seeping into your skin. This is not just another course of nature, another biological need. She must love you.

I must love you.

The mushrooms need colour, you murmur. I’ve always known your bias against all things colourless, like old shunned widows off a salty coast, forbidden and cluelessly unappealing, like they had given up. Mushrooms, white onions, radish, muskmelons. I’ve felt for them ever since.

“We’ll soak them in the paste now.”

Making the paste was a short outdoor activity, something you hated and something I loved. You hated how the grass stuck to your frock and I loved how you stuffed the mushroom caps with remnant spices from your hands. It was all fleeting, you pressing against my legs, unknowingly slipping spices off the stone. I picked and placed them back when you turned away. I couldn’t let you know they slipped and fell. It was almost treacherous.

Attraction is simply chemistry gone blind. It didn’t matter that we were making this for someone else. All that mattered passed through your frivolousness and settled on porcelain plates.

We went back inside and you were pink and flushed from the short exposure to the sun. I remembered our first night in your mother’s room. You looked sun-kissed then too.

“Is the shrimp up on the burner?”

I always forgot the shrimp. I was jealous. It was the only thing close to human after you. I didn’t like the idea of you lapping it up.

“They’re up now.”

I felt your glances across the kitchen. My skin propped up like a child for a story, sniffing and grabbing anything that the air brought by. Your glances tugged at my shirt as I tried to finish my portion of mushrooms.

“Olives, where are they?”

“Right next to me. I can chop them up alongside if you want to.”

“Sure. Whatever.”

I could see words floating around and between us. The ‘whatever’ was particularly unpleasant. Like a red blob amongst a sea of comforting unknowns. The ‘whatever’ stared me in my face and sniggered.

I knew you would notice sooner or later, there was just too much green. It was filled with too much possibility for you to bear. We had to add the tomatoes. And soon. Your intolerance surged through that sea of words. I felt sad.

You had once told me that chemistry is spice and love is what makes it sour. Affairs are neutralizers and that’s why people wander. I never understood your anecdotes. The shrimp and spinach were boiling while the mushrooms and tomatoes rested in the oven. The olives stood chopped and solitary. I knew you had already wandered. I was just hoping you would come back.

I watched you dress the shrimp. The mushrooms were ready to devour. Olives alongside boiled tomatoes, only you could do something like that and get away with it. Your arms glistened in the light and your lips parted as a small piece of meat slid in. I heard an unfamiliar moan.

We sat together, I kissed her on her cheek too. You both spoke and I reveled in the taste of you on the porcelain plate. You wanted to call it Lover’s Salad. But it wasn’t a salad and there was no lover in it. There was no love in it. There was only you and pieces of an instinctive morning in my mouth.

I swallowed. I felt the water rush down my throat. That was my meal. You were my meal. You were my morning and you were my meal and she was the love that made it sour. These mornings are a fugue and I never remember too much afterward.

“How is it?”

“Good. Really good.”

And I smiled. I smiled at the two of you.