Chronic Renditions by Bhoomika Tiwari
Image by Robin Erino for Pexels
It happens as always. A sudden transition, like entering into another realm. The backpack I am carrying becomes too heavy, the people around me too many, like bodies in a mosh pit closing in on me, churning and suffocating, their voices mingling into one heavy pounding sound like something blaring through an amplifier that thump thump thumps in my chest and ears. And if I look up, the skies are dotted with more than a couple of blurry white dots. If I look up the spasms grow stronger like unforgiving concrete hands pressing down on my shoulders and contorting my treacherous body in impossible ways.
I want to reach under and wrestle the agony out of my being or crawl out of my own wretched skin but sane people don’t dig and claw at their own flesh. I want to scream and howl and vocalize this intensifying pain but adult women don’t scream and howl the way I want to. A few tears escape past the blinking guards of my lashes and I hastily wipe them away, hoping no one sees.
Fleetingly I think of calling Ila, who had asked even till the last day if I was sure I didn’t want her to come. Taking out my phone, I can almost hear the course of her response. She will ask many questions, propose many options. Her far away anxiety would join hands with the others punishing my back and legs, grinding and winding me into tighter knots. And underlying it all would be the unspoken words; I shouldn’t have gone alone. My chest constricts further just at the thought of it, and I put away my phone.
An old museum building swings into my dizzying vision as I still try to shake off the feeling that I should ask someone for help. Inside could be cooler, less crowded, a place to get some weight off me. The idea of this respite forming shape, I enter and almost blindly buy a ticket. Making a beeline for the underground where the cloakroom is, I shove my backpack which now weighs like stones and everything else that I can get off my back, into a locker.
There is a momentary lightness that passes all too soon. Ila’s voice, cool and coaxing when she would talk to me as I would lie flat on the cold floor in such moments, wanting to help but afraid to move me, floats into my consciousness. Following her, I breathe in. Filling up my belly, pushing air into my diaphragm, feeling it move up to my neck, I will my breath to resist my seizing muscles. And then out. Parasympathetic breathing can help, she would say. I want to believe it does. I try to convince myself it does.
I keep breathing, bloating my tummy, lifting my chest and then releasing as I find my way into the galleries. My glazed gaze browses through the paintings, taking in only the colours, the lines indistinct and blurry. The colours are beautiful, of summer, beaches, sand, endless clear skies. I linger a few moments letting the feeling of it wash over me before carrying on.
At the end of the hall is a room devoid of paintings with only a complex installation at the centre, a contraption made up of strings, straining to connect levers, drumsticks, drumskins, tiny tambourines, and other odds and ends I do not know the names for, so taut they seem to vibrate with unpent energy, like they might snap at any moment. And behind it looms its own giant shadow, dominating the room with its larger than life form.
Unable to make sense of it, I squint as if squinting would help me understand what the contraption is when a man moves up next to me and gestures to the plaque in front of the installation that I had somehow missed. Chronic Renditions, it reads, followed by a paragraph of description but the only thing I retain is that the artist is someone living with chronic pain. The man presses some of the buttons on the plaque at random and the organ comes to life- clashing, banging, thumping, tinkling- at once a cacophony and symphony of the artist's pain.
Beautiful, isn't it? the man says. Stunned and staring at this production of sound, I feel a ballooning inside of me, the rising of a flood I can no longer contain, my insides swelling beyond capacity and suddenly releasing, and I burst into hot ugly tears, my heaving, grating sobs joining in the organ's song.
Bhoomika (she/her) lives and writes in Bonn, Germany. She likes trains, talking to strangers, and discovering secret places in new and old cities. Besides writing, she loves to paint and is hoping to exhibit her work in the near future.