Read Online Ode to Lata by Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla - Free Book Online

Not ever again.
    I felt afraid. Terrified of imagining life without Richard. Without this madness to contend with for everyday of my life what would I do? Who would I be? Ali had become the obsessor of Richard. My every conversation. My every thought. My only ambition.  When awake, I spoke of him. About him. As only I could see him. What promises he had made to me. And where he had failed in them.
    And in my sleep, he came again. And most of the time we were both silent. He held me close, and nestled within him, I felt safe and assured again. Sometimes he made love to me. And in rousing myself from bed and discovering my semen marked on the sheets, I would enter into the day consumed by a tumult of arousal and shame.
    Take all that away and what would be left of me? It was a death in itself to walk away from the Ali I had so distastefully helped create. And loathe him as I might, it was the only Ali I knew now. How would happiness embrace me after all this time of adulating misery?  I didn’t know how the door would open up. But I knew I had to get out. Nobody could love their jailor forever.
    I looked at my reflection in the mirror above the basin. I didn’t see someone in his twenties. I saw a man much, much older. More ravaged than he should be. The skin around my face was still tight. There was only the hint of dark circles around my eyes. My lips were firm and full. My hair dark and thick. But it all felt like shellac filming a decaying core.
    Is this why Mummy struggled to raise me? So I could learn such pain?  Is this why I was doted upon, bundled from the cold in blankets and kept from grazing my knees on the ground?  Force-fed and fussed over?  So that I could grow up and in losing my heart, trip and break it into a million fragments?
    I felt cracked. Broken. Bits of jagged edges stuck outwards from within me and poked me until I winced. It must have been apparent from my eyes, this bungling collapse of my spirit. The self-loathing. My disappointment in myself.  That must be why I meet no one else. Embarrassed by my insufficiency, I averted my eyes from others in fear that they would catch glimpses of my worthlessness. I looked away before they did. Sometimes I may have stumbled upon the hope that maybe someone would be persistent enough to scale the walls that I had cloistered myself in. But in Los Angeles that doesn’t quite happen. Apparently, we were all waiting for our saviors.
    Instead I stood there and looked into the mirror, freshly doused but unable to eliminate the glassiness in my eyes or the swelling around them. A soul in dire need of absolution from its demons, waiting for an absentee messiah. Nobody was coming anytime soon. I might as well face up to it. I was going to have to wake up and realize the task had to be accomplished on my own.
    I splashed cold water on my feverish face, unable even to drink it as it gushed forth from the faucet – not like Kenya, no. The sweet waters that I could cup in the palm of my hands and drink. Straight from the tap. 
Oh, God, help me find a way.…Lift me out of all this.
    Like so many times before, I took a deep breath, hoping that when I got back out there something would be different, Richard might have called.  On my desk, I did find an urgent note waiting for me. But it was a message from Richard’s mother, asking me to call her right away.
    Something had happened. 
    I found him at the I.C.U. in a cold, sterile room, the steel efficiently humming away around his sleeping body.  Slowly I took the chair next to him, not removing my eyes from him for even a second. Looking down at his face, I felt as if I was looking into my own. That’s how much I’d lost myself in him. Nights of forging his features out of the darkness and frantically stitching them together in the absurd hope that he would materialize had left me with no recognition of any other face. 
I don’t know where you end and I begin.
    There was something else in that face. A subtle