Sickness

Winter breaks last two hundred years. During those two hundred years, I am not allowed to go into the room at the corner of our apartment. I call it The Other Room. In The Other Room, there is a sickness. The Other Room is where He resides. His memory has faded. His eyes are glued to the stock market all day. The stock market is active from 9 am to 3:30 pm, but for Him it lasts twenty four hours, two hundred years.

Sometimes She enters The Other Room. I hear shouts, I hear Him refusing to break contact with the computer screen, where the stock market lies covered in sap. I sunbathe in the balcony. The Other Room contains a sickness that I want to forget about. The Other Room contains a sickness that I want to run away from, but the sickness has stretched a month to two hundred years. Time stretches and so does the sap that lies on the computer screen. Slowly, it fills the entire room.

A Rebellious Rock

That Round One From Uphill’s day has been eventful so far. Someone just skipped him across a stream from one bank to another.

That Round One From Uphill is a rebellious rock. Most rocks do not like being skipped.

They like staying fixed in their little homes amidst the mud, and try their best not to morph into the near-flat shape ideal for being skipped. That Round One From Uphill grew up with different ambitions. Leaving his fate to human hands, according to him, was a way to see more of the world outside of where the stream takes you.

On that eventful day, a human considered That Round One From Uphill’s flat shape to be ideal for skipping. And luck was on That Round One From Uphill’s side—after eight skips he reached right across the stream.

So his name wasn’t a curse after all—his parents thought naming him That Round One From Uphill would be an antidote to his flatness. Contrary to the rock civilization’s beliefs, names do not determine destiny, thought That Round One From Uphill.

Rocks like to name their offspring names formed of sentences, so that they could be translated into any language. For humans, these names seem very long, but for rocks whose average lifespan is half a million years, they just take a millisecond to pronounce.

Goodbyes and Flights to America

The actual flight to America starts two days before the time on the boarding pass. It starts with the nostalgic silence between me and home that both of us are overly sensitive to. It starts with the scent of various snacks being prepared in the kitchen, to ensure my proper nutrition in the week after I reach. It starts with the cooking of all of my favourite meals. It starts with increased pressure on me to pack and to buy the remaining things that need to be bought before I leave. At various points throughout those two days I fight back tears multiple times. I feel guilty about leaving for a place so far away and causing everyone sadness. If they see me cry, they will be sadder and more worried. 

I count this with the flight because it is harder than the multiple component and extraordinarily tiring flight itself. The more flights I take, the more used I get to hard goodbyes and accepting harsh truths. 

The actual flight is an incubator for paranoia. It involves sixteen hours half asleep in darkness, spotted by meals and a sleepy layover where I try my best not to fall asleep on a bench, riddled with caffeine-induced hallucinations. It is the perfect environment for all of life’s stresses to pop into your mind with a louder volume. Over the years I have started fearing flights. Over the years I have also learnt not to participate in any anxiety-inducing events in the days preceding a flight. 

My life has consisted of a total of seven flights to America. One through London, one through Reykjavik, one through Frankfurt, one through Moscow, one through Tokyo, two of them direct flights. Each of them has made me more used to saying goodbye, something I have a lot of trouble with and so put a lot of effort into. Sometimes I wonder if I say goodbye too much. It is nice to let the people I know that I really appreciate their existence, and saying goodbye is one way of doing that. It is also the most painful way of doing that.