“Being Normal”
- ritumukherjee10
- Jun 23
- 4 min read
Her phone pings on a restless Sunday evening. She glances at it, snatching it from the bed, her eyes moving through the screen of the phone, her breath unsure. Steadying herself, she reads and sends a careful, fragile ‘hey’. She has been rather cautious these days, letting each of the words she conjures, roll around in her mind. She knows now that words can be strange enemies, familiar in their swiftness, unnecessarily sharp in the wounds they inflict. She has just managed to swim to the other side of a breaking relationship, and feels tethered to it in various parts, like one who is hurt by treacherous eddies of an undertow, but ploughs ahead nonetheless.
She puts the phone away. She will get back to it in some time. She paces the roof of her apartment on the top floor of a four-floor walk-up. The roof still has traces of an exceedingly warm afternoon but there’s some respite yet. A cool, calming breeze blows from the south, it must be raining somewhere. This sixty-day relationship sits heavy on her head. Time is a rogue magician, corrupting her head with unusual bulk. Her all-consuming passion has to fizzle out in friendship. She likes a clean amputation usually. The wounds don’t fester like gangrene and throb madly in that case. This rather fraught friendship is unfamiliar territory. It is both tender and tentative, unlike the frankness there used to be. He has suggested that friendship would allow her to be truer to her spirit. She doesn’t remember what her true spirit represents. Memory is funny that way. Her brain cannot really recall how she used to be before, how she looked, sounded, behaved or was with her friends and family. She has deleted all her texts to him, so she cannot recollect how she used to be with him before this shift.
She keeps thinking of faulty electric switches and leaky taps that do not shut properly and keep oozing water. The phone blinks again. She is happy and she is not. She puts on a smile as if it were a thing she bought at an online store. Tries it on for size. He has replied. She finds it draining to carefully contrive a conversation that won’t take a direction where she gets burnt. She knows if she asks him about his day, he will say it is a lame thing to do. Clueless, she chooses a safe topic.
“What book are you reading now?”
This is safe. The two of them love books. They discuss it for some time and she sends him a poem she has read and loved. His reply unmakes her attempt at caution.
“I thought you were fine being friends. You have feelings still.”
An accusation? She laughs it off.
“Well, it’s not just a love poem, have you read it at all?”
“I don’t read love poems. Thought you knew that about me. I can’t talk to you until you’re normal.”
“Normal?”
“Yes.”
She stares at the screen, shaking his words as though they have pockets and will surely release something secret if she keeps at it long enough. She puts on the smile again and taking a deep breath, asks,
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing wrong. Just not comfortable. Let’s not meet till you’re normal.”
Again, that word, it seems to ring out louder than the rest of them. She bids him a hasty goodnight and walks back to her room. She feels a peculiar kind of numb. Normal. What does normal mean? She googles the word for its meaning. It says ‘conforming to a standard, usual, typical, expected’. She looks into the mirror. Her brown face has a tinge. She has deep dark circles on a plain face that sometimes beams into prettiness. Her round eyes are hollow from restless nights but her brown irises aren’t dull yet. She smiles. Normal. She remembers a book she read during her Masters—what did it say about women and hysteria? His wariness makes her sad, amuses her somewhat perversely. She still doesn’t remember how she normally is. She makes her way to bed, surrounds herself with pillows on all sides, cocooning herself. She falls asleep trying to recall her adolescence, throwing one pillow from the bed after another.
The night wasn’t fitful. When she steps outside the next morning, the sun bracing down at 8 am in the morning, she burns with life. She walks briskly to the main street to catch a bus. Spotting an air-conditioned Volvo speeding past her, she starts running after it, thinking if she runs fast enough and waves at it, she can perhaps catch up with it, the thought of the cool interior spreading through her like warmth. She runs. The passers-by look on in amusement. A few in surprise. A middle-aged woman in disgust. She runs faster. The Volvo has turned to a dot by now and her clothes drip wet with sweat. She runs harder, feeling a little light-headed, her heart-beat louder with each step. She starts giggling and comes to an abrupt stop. Huffing, she keeps giggling. Other buses speed by her, blurry-eyed she keeps giggling. Then, a part of her brain thaws in that summer heat and she remembers that smiles always came easy.
Mad Swirl, September 2024
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