Movements Borrowed From Memory
||. Fragments from the Otherwise. | • | October 30th .||
The conversation had long since stilled. We moved through the corridors, half-real, our movements borrowed from memory. Laughter cracked from the doorway ahead, where a woman lurched forward, her knee brace flashing a brief, surgical glint. Beyond her, the private garden yellowed in its own suffocation — steeped in the nicotine of the doctors’ suites, where fresh air felt unprescribed. A toddler wailed for a lolly from the café — that sad little altar of caffeine & sugar where nurses leaned on their own bones as the coffee machine hissed like a cornered cat, & visitors practised their smiles over paper cups before returning to whatever sentence the day had written for them.
The November light punished everything. It drilled through the crown of my head, down my neck. My hair, tied back too tight, throbbed like something held hostage. I’d left my sunglasses at home — a small failure that felt biblical. Eyes burning, I gripped your arm & let you draw me down into the carpark gloom. The ticket machine refused me — its slit an unblinking mouth. The paper bent, jammed, mocked. I kept trying, as if shock could be solved by precision. The attendant came, his hands fat with sympathy. I sent you ahead to sit with your silence, while a small crowd gathered to witness my apprenticeship in incompetence. The machine said, ticket goes here, money goes there — so simple, so final — & still nothing took. Numbness slid in first, found its slot.
The seat-belt buckle branded my fingers. You said something ordinary — hunger, perhaps — & I wondered whose appetite it was: yours or the cancer’s. You named the Indian place you loved, the one that seared the mouth clean of taste, & I thought how fitting that heat would be, that I could match your fever with one of my own. The parcel I had ordered upon instruction from the police was waiting at the post office; it happened to be near the restaurant. Convenience — the new religion. We drove seventeen minutes toward home, through streets so bright & bleached of mercy. Parked between an obedient Weimaraner-grey Volkswagen & a champagne Mercedes slicked with afternoon glare. The bitumen writhed in that burnt-oil haze. At the building’s walkway dividing our errands, you turned to your right & I to my left.
I held my parcel — my name misspelt across its face — against my hip, watching the doorway breathe you in. Pungent notes of cumin & fenugreek drifted out before you did, the sun’s heat stifling what thoughts still managed to move. Your shirt bled turmeric from the takeaway you carried like an offering & I watched it spread — a stain the colour of dying light. The bite of your vegetable samosa scalded my tongue, & you turned ahead of me toward the car. The distance was barely a few feet, yet it felt like the first widening — the one from which all others would follow.
As you know, I am left with so many questions, as your pieces often pique the curiosity (the police parcel no less), but it’s those moments before grief becomes grief, when you’re still inside logistics, errands, glare, and yet something inside you already knows everything has changed. That choreography of numbness, this really is masterful writing. What a gift you have, Kim.
A suffocating garden, a punishing November, hair held hostage, a parking ticket made of numbness, cancer with an appetite for fire. Kim. You are a master in animism. The world alive, cruel, and always in relation. I could study you for lifetimes.