For the first time in over three months, I feel desire. An unfathomable longing to drown in an avalanche of polychromatic feelings and slink out on the other end of the storm as an arched rainbow. I run my hands through her skin again to cosy up to this new warmth. She can feel my fingers nervously teasing her body, with a glint of satisfaction cornering my lips, but she keeps mute. I cannot tell if she is feeling things too, like me. Apparently, she likes to keep her lady-loves wondering. I look into her eyes as I take in the sight of her lucid, black eyes and ask, “Where have you been all my life?” She says nothing as if to say, “you didn’t come looking.”
“I found you,” I want to say to her, “Too late?”
Not like she would respond even if she wanted to. Her name is Jessie and she is a bunny.
Hands on her pelt, I recollect the past three months in vignettes with the precision of dismantling a lego house. One day – COVID-19; another day – lockdown, and on all other days, time becomes something to suffer; a sluggish slobber of sentimentality symptomised by binge-watching, Zooming, writing, and stress-eating. I become the definition of Insanity dredged with self-inflicted sadness. Even the sickle cell crises that have been wrecking my brown body since I was born become tangible enough to hurt even more because, in my Inside-World, there is no hospital to saunter to, no doctor to feel for my veins, thrust in a cannula and numb the pain through a barrage of analgesics. In April, I remember lying deathly limp on the bed for days, welcoming pain, feeling it slither through my sinews; not crying, just singing along to Bilish Eilish’s cathartic songs:
After the crises subside, I sit in for art therapy. It is my first time doing any kind of therapy but it is nothing as I expected. The art lady does not pretend to have all the answers like shrinks in movies do; she listens as I construe my self-loathing into words. Be nicer to yourself, she suggests. You are enough in yourself. I tell her, “I feel enough, but not whole”… My body feels like thrash with junk food tucked between my midriff bulge yet my mind feels like it is on the tippity top of hippity hoppity. The paradoxicality of my melancholy finds expression on paper:
It is June 10, 2020. As I step out into Blaha Lujza tér for my first outdoorsy hangout in over three months, a line from Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, which I had read in the midnight with the relish of a shy, horny teenager, steps in line with me: “If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it… We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should… But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!”
My Blaha-friend and I have been talking for over an hour. About her bunnies, accents, Floyd, all the girls who have ‘no names’ like Arya Stark, Sicilian-Jewish redheads, and an Italian-Serbian grandmother who has seen enough wars to hate seeing food waste. I am listening to her with incredulity gurgling in my throat, thinking to myself about how badly I want to remember the past three months, today and every day from now. I am afraid that, someday, I will forget these feelings of desire, pain, loneliness, and horniness, because memories die so young. But, as I stroke the fur of Jessie who, by now, feels snug in my affection, I remind myself that the memories we struggle to keep live forever.