When Dom was in Chennai with me, the words he said to me the most weren’t, “I love you.” They were, “This place smells like trash.” Well, he did have a point. Every day, we walked past this spot with mounds of trash. The buzzing of the flies almost drowned out the constant honks and sounds of the traffic. Men urinated on the wall like proud firemen putting a fire out with their hoses. Whenever you walked past that wall, you had to learn to exhale more than you inhaled. But even though he had a point, I wished he’d just accept the wall, the trash, like I accepted the migraine-inducing traffic in New York or the incessant rain in Seattle.
“I didn’t ask you to come to India,” I wanted to say. But the words that eventually came out of my mouth were, “I’m sorry.”
When we returned to the US, he didn’t hold my hand to make sure we didn’t get separated in the massive JFK airport. His tall, broad back moved farther and farther away from me, his stride confident and quick, not the same as when he was tiptoeing around the potholes in India.
In the next few days, he came and went like a flickering light. Like the orange circles that danced and changed behind your closed eyelids when the sunshine hit you squarely in the face. I thought I had him one moment, but he was a stranger the very next. Every time I spoke to him, it felt like I was at the funeral of whatever we used to have. When we made love, it was with a haunting intensity and a searing detachedness. I tried to put my heart and soul and every question in my kisses, but I didn’t get any answers in his.
When I finally asked him what was going on, he seemed relieved that I was the one to bring it up. It was like opening the car window to let a stray bug out.
He dumped me then, three weeks after our visit to India. I think he preferred me when I was in the zoo; he didn’t like seeing me in my natural habitat.
It’s been more than a month since that last time. The other day, I saw him at the library. When he saw me, he walked towards me in long strides. His JFK strides. He smiled and hugged me. I’m sure his very attractive companion thought that we didn’t hug very often. It was awkward, rife with friction, and when I succumbed and rested my head briefly on his shoulder and his head was in the curve of mine, I could feel a nerve twitch in his warm neck, as if his head was itching to go back home to his own body.
We stepped apart. “Are you doing well?” he asked.
“Very well, thanks,” I replied. “And you?”
His eyes darted away for just a quick moment, to make sure the woman was still waiting for him.
His mouth moved, forming words in response to my question, but I suddenly remembered to breathe. For a long time, I’d been exhaling more than I inhaled. “Thank you for going home with me,” I said with a sincere smile before walking away.
Neeru Nagarajan is a storyteller and poet from Chennai, India. Her work has appeared in Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, Kitaab, The Adirondack Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant fiction editor at Mid-American Review. She writes stories about men and women who do not align with societal conventions or are burdened with conflicting ideals.
Photo Courtesy Stocksnap
WANT to support HMS’s programming mission to empower divested Chicago-area adults using storytelling techniques to give them a voice and publishing to give their words a visible home? You can donate HERE or buy a journal HERE.
