Six Credible Moments of Comfort

1.

Jules says he is amused by everything man and pulls me into a fun house which spins like a dryer machine. I fall down and it’s pink and gets pinker when I twist my ankle. So I can’t see, and Jules hugs his hand around my ankle and squeezes until the twisting subsides. We make it through and compare hand sizes in funhouse mirrors, without touching. We also squat in a green room with pineapples on the wall and I become taller than him for once and he says he doesn’t mind. Everyone deserves a chance. He wonders why there are pineapples and we decide they want to make this room seem exotic, because as a human being changes into something distorted, they don’t want it to be their own fault. I don’t fully understand that, but I get the gist, and that the pineapples really aren’t necessary. When Jules’ name was Vikram, people always told him, “namaste.” Or in first year, I told some guy I was from Guyana and he wrote a poem that told me my skin was like burnt sand and my face was shaped like a mango. I get how that kind of informs our opinion. 

2.

Jules says he is gonna always have a way to make money. In the middle of the night, I wake up sweating and I remember a dream about a warehouse. I am on my period and I am in a warehouse and I can’t find pads anywhere. I start to question if there are any pads left in the world. I start to question why my body needs this world. When I call Jules he picks up on the third ring and tells me there will be definitely enough pads in the world for me, and if there aren’t he will make them himself. First, you’ll have to learn, I say. Of course, he says, I’ll make lots of money since there are no other manufacturers around. We agree to be partners and share the profits 50/50. There are days, months later, that I wake up with the same dream and there is no Jules because Jules never makes a lot of money. He plays some shows but the band can’t find a stable drummer, so they break up. He gets rejected from arts college again. We go down to the water that day, and Jules tells me he needs to move back to Brooklyn, to be with family. Our reflections ripple the same shade of brown. That’s a different country, is all I say, to make it sound worse than it is. 

3.

Jules says he is immune to everything and tumbles down the inclined driveway, slamming his body against the garage door and laughing into the paint. There are bruises down his left side. The door is metal. There’s gravel in his teeth and I pick it out with my thumbs and then I lick my thumbs because we’re not the kissing type of friends. Damn, says Jules, it hurts more than it should. He rolls over onto his back, wincing, stuck between the crevice of cement and metal. I pick him up. We ride the subway. The x-ray says fractured patella. I note the shape of his patella in my phone, likening it to an oyster, or a closed clamshell. I make fun of him and he cries so much he starts laughing. He’s not crying about the pain, he’s crying about the fracture, and so I remind him that in every oyster, there is a pearl. I talk him into calling his mother and telling her that for once in his life he needs help. She calls him Vicky. She is angry but glad that his hospital care in Toronto is free, which makes me laugh because we waited five hours in the emergency room and makes me wonder if what she’s really glad about is having son who can be broken. My body fits just right in his hospital bed. It reminds me that I will never see his bedroom. It reminds me that every wordless smell is attached to a body. It reminds me it’s been a while since I washed my hair.

4.

I get sick at the airport and Jules holds the brown paper bag. His patella is almost healed. His mother asks if I need medicine and gets me an Evian water before they leave. When Jules leaves, he leaves as Vicky. I leave as somebody who is going to wash her hair in a really lazy way. There’s still dandruff, but it’s not noticeable. I wax my moustache a little too repetitively and get a mild reaction. With ice on my lip, I enroll in the classes I have to enroll in to get my degree with one hand. I look at how they write my name with big block letters. It doesn’t look like me. I look outside and trees aren’t moving because there’s no wind. When I go down to the lake the water starts to ripple. The face inside the water is mine, but choppy. I can’t blame the water because I chose to look. A couple of kids burst by me on roller-skates. One of them falls down and other one laughs their ass off and sits down on the ground next to the injured one, and they are equals. I see the pearls in both of them, rolling up and down as they giggle. The day before classes start, I go to Canada’s Wonderland with two old friends. There’s a ride called the Great Canadian Minebuster and it shakes our bones, but my bones were more sensitive, and I rattled in the uber, on the subway, and in my bed. My bones might shake for years and I accept it. 

5.

I write all of this down. I do it in the summer, standing up with my windows tightly shut, wearing my warmest sweater. It’s more painful that way.

6.

Before my first day of third year, I go the lake again and there is a five or six-year-old boy fake-crying to his mother because he scraped his elbow on a rock. He looks a little bit like an old photo of my father, if my father had thinner eyebrows. My father was a plantation worker, and then he was a fisherman, and then he was an electrician, and now he’s at home putting extra sugar in his tea. This boy is just a boy for now. His needs are simple. He wants sympathy, candy, something like that. I know he’s fake crying because there are no tears and each time his mother looks at her phone, he drops the act just a little. His face is frozen in a grimace when I meet his eyes. He swallows a smile. I stretch my face super wide and bare my teeth until he starts laughing, he can’t help it but laugh, and I feel so good. I’ve broken him. I’ve reminded him that it’s okay not to be in pain.

Hadiyyah Kuma is an Indo-Guyanese writer from Toronto, Ontario. Her name is pronounced Ha-dee-yah. Her work has been featured in places like The Rumpus, the Hart House Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Yes Poetry. Her debut chapbook tired, but not spectacularly was recently published by The Soapbox Press. Hadiyyah's poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net 2019 and she is currently working on her second chapbook.