Caregiver
Rizla paper and little white pecks of powder.
“Keep folding them over till they’re pill sized, and then swallow!”
“What? Really?” come the muffled, quizzical voices.
All it requires is a spark. Folded paper that’s smaller than your Panadol Extra tablet, a sip of water and you’re off. Hours and hours and hours.
He has so much to say. His sentences are jumbled up, his mind whizzing from vignette to vignette, his ears hearing sounds and crowds, music that’s soundtracked his life and music that’s yet to be conceived. He’s sweating and he’s struggling for coherence, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not like she can hear either.
He has so much to say. He wants to paint the world and write on walls and on streets and paper and blackboards and whiteboards and on the insides of cigarette packs and chewing gum wrappers and on mirrors and clothes and the world itself. He’s not happy with his limited vocabulary right now – he’s not happy at his inability to articulate. He’s not happy that despite what he feels, it’s perhaps not the best time even for what he has to say. He’s happy and in a world of acceptance and bliss, but he’s not happy at his incoherence. The world might be a little speck of dust but a few hundred kilometres are too much. Tomorrow’s a different day and a different mode of transport and a different city and a different room, but he can’t think about it too much.
-
It’s a different day and he’s on a different bus. His palms feel fine and then they feel sweaty. He feels a visceral urge to chew on gum and then he doesn’t. Lollipops are what he needs, but the bus doesn’t stop for an hour, at least.
But that’s not important. He feels coherent now, for a few minutes at a stretch anyway. Mood swings – that’s a word he was unaccustomed too. But yes, coherence. He’s writing out all he wanted to say in his head. He’s writing chapters, verses, everything under the sun. Hell, he’s crafting a limerick as well!
His mind’s no longer incapable of forming a thought, a logical process, a continuation of what he wants to say and why he wants to say it.
-
He barges into his own room, grabbing his laptop from where it lies atop the cane rack and plugs the charger in. Cross legged, in front of the heater, he starts typing, oblivious to the fact that he won’t be able to stand up after fifteen minutes in that position – but that’s irrelevant. Everything, at this point in time for him, is irrelevant, except his laptop and what his fingers are curating on it.
Sentences. Lots of sentences.
It’s all silent except the soft hum of the heater and his laptop keys, chiming away to the metronome in his head.
-
She knows it’s useless, but he doesn’t. He never will.
