On the warmth of sand

"...more than anything, we would have danced. A second, a minute, an hour; a quiet sway, standing on my feet as I moved, a weightless waltz on the warm sand."

In June and July, my migrant body is divided: my feet crave the warmth of beach sand, my face a cool breeze on a hot day. Where in the winter I feel forever awake, cracked and ready for heartbreak, in summer I’m always in a dream.

I’m reading Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, translated by Douglas J Weatherford, a novel that is chaos incarnate. Its style is fragmented, broken and coarse, and yet it’s clear in its form. The dead in the novel, in the town of Comala, speak with a voice that’s as clear as that of the living and maybe even clearer. I bought the novel at Argonaut Books on Leith Walk while attending an open mic night alongside friends and writing companions Titilayo Farukuoye and Alycia Pirmohamed, and I performed a poem about love and hope. The kind bookseller (whose name I can’t recall) there saw me looking around, and I told them that I want something that ‘isn’t grief-y’. They laughed, said ‘grief-y’ was their specialty — I almost replied saying, ‘Me too.’ Eventually I was convinced by Pedro Paramo: I’d oddly never encountered it before and it had glowing reviews from Susan Sontag (my sartorial muse) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (who described how he couldn’t read any other book for a whole year after encountering it).

In the book, between pages 57 and 59, the primary narrator Juan Preciado converses with a woman named Dorotea. Juan, who is very likely dead, tells Dorotea,

‘It was the murmuring that killed me. Even though I’d worked to control the fear… it kept building until I could bear it no more… It feels as if someone were walking on top of us.’

Dorotea says there’s two kinds of dreams she had — a “blessed” dream and a “cursed” dream. I think I too can find this Manichean split in my dreamed life, lately.

In June, all my attempts at fighting grief disappear. My distaste for the word and my anger towards this distaste fuse to form some revisionist history of all the holding-on-to-things that I’ve violently performed for 7 years, and I give in. I sleep incomplete, and wake incomplete. I try to avoid dramatizing ‘this shameful condition’, but to report it without the devastating gravitas it holds no matter how perpetual or regular, would be dishonest. It’s difficult, and it always has been — that’s my truth. Haunted or otherwise, I miss my little personal ghost, every day. I think of them less, lately, they’re not present at the tip of my tongue or the ends of my fingers as often; like sand and sediment they’re down an inch, beneath just one layer of soil, compressed and hidden but forever feeding these roots.

Held in the surplus of dreams, my “blessed” dreams are often of the beach. I breathe in, in Edinburgh, and I’m teleported to Goa. The air is thick and humid, it’s summer and we’re in an isolated town in the South during the off season, no other tourists around. I’m younger, experimenting — unbuttoned cotton tunic, dark shades (borrowed), and even shorts. The AirBnB I’d found us was subpar, with an odd Buddha statue in the corner of the room and a shower with water pressure lower than a dying man’s piss stream. My love was ill, for reasons more than just medical. There was a distance and anxiety between us even then that we tried to bridge; we always held hands cautiously, but in that town forgot to for a moment. Amidst the summer’s breathlessness, there was time to breathe. We left the next day, I got us a refund on the AirBnB and we went back home — happy in our knowledge that as much as we liked to travel, we also liked to stay home, where it’s just us and none else. But that one night in Goa is important to me. As my love rested and tried to find sleep, I went on a walk, found a beach shack with a table facing the sea, got Kingfisher beers, drank in silence.

I was so sad. There were a couple of women in a tent behind me and I fantasized approaching them, joining them, although I knew I neither could or would. I lacked the will, the self-esteem, and faith in my beauty necessary to be all that I think I am now. I had no money, my resources were limited, and I was alone. I had just ruined a holiday we’d wanted for a long time. I drank and watched the moon; at some point, as the hours passed and the night grew darker, when the women had gone to sleep and the empty green bottles accumulated on my desk and on the sand, I pretended to be on a phone call with my lover (fast asleep in the subpar AirBnB a few blocks away) telling them, with giggles and over the top gesticulation, of what I was up to. I invented these conversations, I invented each giggle, each moment my eyes teared up in fictional flair, even the time I whispered a smiling ‘I love you’ before putting the phone back down.

I then tried videotaping the sea, the night sky, and the beer. I didn’t catch much, except for my eerie hum, shuffling, and a faraway crash of waves (although it was nearby). I tried taking a picture, and it was blurry. I just wanted evidence. I wanted proof that that night happened, that I was alone, and that I was sad. I don’t know why — there’s not much reason in loneliness. But it was important to me to hold on to it, to become something beyond this quiet. Even back then I knew that this sadness and weight was precious.

My “blessed” dreams now are of similar texture. Warm beach, cold beer, on a cloudy yet starry night, waves crashing and drawing closer and closer to my feet. The knowledge that there’d be a tomorrow where, before catching our flight, my love and I would sit watching the sea entangling our toes with each other. They’d go for a walk on the beach alone, sit at a distance and type things into their phone and I’d see a trail of footsteps leading to them from the distance where I sat. Their loneliness sat with me too, then, and I’ve thought of it hundreds of times in the years since — the hesitation, the anxiety, the guilt, and most of all the melancholy of my/our trespasses. The knowledge of an end to come.

I wish I could hold that moment with a strength that returns me there; I’d have the words, I’d have the will to act, to hold tight with such grace and abandon that all departure would have been delayed. I’d have booked us a new hotel with all the money I have now, found us a room that was cool and restful, healing and with ample sunlight but also thick curtains. I’d have given my dearest time, distance, room to know a town beyond the limits of my body. I would have laughed joy into their tired eyes, brought the full force of the bottomless, childlike wonder I’ve trained myself into preserving. But more than anything, I’d have played the right songs, and we would have danced more. A second, a minute, an hour; a quiet sway, standing on my feet as I moved, a weightless waltz on the warm sand.

In June now, dreams of the water and the warm sand quickly give way — oftentimes in the same nap — to the “cursed” dreams, of monsoon rain, silent cities, and green mountains. In the the thickness of unnamed forests, I’m always following my lost love, a silhouette leading me somewhere. At times, it’s in Scotland, on a bridge to a walk in St Andrews, Aberfeldy, or Inverness. I would never try rushing to catch up or grab ahold of them, only follow diligently.

Even in the dreams I could feel the fatigue holding me back. They’re sometimes set in spaces like Rulfo’s town of shadows and whispers, Comala: empty towns where no one shows up, that feel empty, without yearning or desires. They’re dreams of broken bodies, my body broken; if no attempts can fix and build this body to a version of it I can truly believe is worthy of love, capable of seeking love, protecting love, then only in movement and wonder can I clothe it to strength. Sometimes, they fall down and I’m unable to get to them in time; the dream fades in a lasting afterimage of bruises, blood, and tears. Other times, it’s simply that I can’t reach them. We talk as friends who’ve met after all these years (as if it were possible to reach you now) and we part ways in the end. I’m reminded in my “cursed” dreams that there’s an effort, a tactic to wonder; it is deliberate as much as it is natural. There’s ways of impressing the world of a light you aren’t convinced you hold, and to do it well, do it strong.

I never really wake up from this. Every year I’m convinced I’ve spent every sorrow my little body could hold, my little body surprises me with its vastness. This year, I am told that my body’s capacity to hold is often an unfathomable immensity, one that matches my insatiable loneliness. As the grief — yes, the grief, the grief, g-r-i-e-f — and its vocabulary return to me I’m awash with the desire to cry.

Split between the “cursed” and the “blessed”, I think I want to be this. I want to be the one who holds and never lets go even if it means it textures all loves to come. Love feels like its nearby now, even if I’m unsure; maybe it’s in a home far away from Scotland, maybe it smiles in a cafe I’m yet to work in, maybe it finds me slowly, maybe never. That’s okay. The grief trains us to love what’s unreachable, what’s distant, and to love it well — without ownership or suspicion, and with faith. All that faith. In knowing the grief — g-r-i-e-f, greef — I can recognize the signs.

To end with, on page 117, the titular character Pedro Paramo is having a sleepless night. He remembers the day his love left, and says, out loud,

‘The light was the same then as it is now; not quite as red, but it was the same miserable, lifeless light draped in a white tissue of mist. It was the same time of day. And I was sitting right here, next to this doorway, seeing the sun rise, watching…’

I think I’m this too. Paramo was not a perfect man, or even a good man. But grief is tender with evil and good alike. And dark or light, in the Fall my love will return — of this I’m certain, the same certainty I hold each year, that I prepare for. In the Fall, I’ll know what to look for, “cursed” or “blessed”. I’ll know to look for a starry night, for mountains of green, for a sign in the air that love is near. I’ll know to be generous with it, to give without witness or reward. But mostly, I’ll know to cherish every lonely moment waiting. It’s difficult, and I am sad, but I’m okay, really.

My grief isn’t an impediment, it’s a soft sounding board. If I’m split into two, I always have the other half to talk to on the phone, with whispers no one else can know, to allow grief (guh-reef, goo-reef, greef-uh) its stay despite its cliches. It’s always here to dance with me on the warm sand, my beloved. It’s here to stay, to be planted into the soil and feed my roots.

It’s here. Right here.