Wound
- Oct 31, 2025
- 4 min read
by Abhinav
The skin of time is made of light. And I saw it the day my mother cut my lip in a fit of rage. Pieces of her bangle splitting light like a dream. It caught my attention; the spiral of light travelling in a parabola — a sliver of time right before the second blow. She kept swinging because it was her instinct. I blocked it out of nowhere, which was a first. It shocked her, as if I had deprived her of something. She believed she had that right over me. They both did. I was a wound they’d nudge time and again just to see how much it could hurt. When I stood up, I was as tall as her and we both knew there was no going back. The moment afloat, our hands stuck in the air like a lambda. In my mouth a trail of tasteless blood and I was all the corners of all the rooms where I sat sobbing and scared, promising myself I’d kill them one day. Both of them. That was the day childhood ended. Time no longer a yard but a funnel tilted downhill and revenge suddenly a possibility, not just desire. I knew I could do it. She saw it in my eyes. She knew I could do it. Which gets us nowhere. We don’t get to choose the childhood we get. This is all to say I think I understand what you’re saying. I like talking to you but I don’t know how to comfort you except recall a wound for a wound and see if anything shifts. I never thought you’d be this important to me. The night is a translucent sheet of water and on the phone, I keep inching towards the sound of your breath. I don’t want it to stop. This call, this night, this thing we conjured out of nowhere. There is a dream I have where we’re on a train, and the lights are on. It’s dark outside and we can see each other laughing in the window. I think the meaning of the dream is that I love you. The meaning of everything is that I love you. There is a hole in time the shape of your laughter, I want to live there. It’s a habit of mine, I keep looking for pitfalls in time. For sharp curves that make the peripherals redundant. The last time I saw my psychiatrist, she said time blindness could be a symptom of many things, but one can only will their way out of it. There are ways — touch the surfaces, pay attention, live the texture of things unfamiliar to you. Time is rarely solved chemically. Which brings memory under scrutiny. My mother says it wasn’t all that bad, and she doesn’t remember any of it, and there are worse things that can happen to people. All of this is true. Which still gets us nowhere. We ricochet off the surfaces like beams of light. My mother with her worn out religion. Her God that terrified her, who was also the God of her mother. He was the worst man I ever met and he was nothing but kind to me. Nothing adds up once childhood is over and I try not to discuss these things. I try not to remember anything — live as if childhood never happened, as if the reasons of my life were errors in judgement, and none of them count. For me, life is a montage of images veering past the peripherals. I dream them against my will and recite them out of order. Which makes me think Simone Weil is right about attention being a prayer. When I can see the world right, just right, I find myself willing to believe in it. There are things that sway in the wind blameless. I wish I were blameless, and forgiveness came to me as easy as it comes to my mother, but somewhere in the kernel of it, you are always a child and the world is a wound, and beyond the grudges, there is a helplessness that bends at nothing. I wish you were here. In this city slouching over itself and its night like a river leaking in the margins. There is a spot from which you can see both horizons and how the metro vanishes into the earth. The wounds of light on the freeway merging into each other, and the asphalt a sprawl of liquid light. Remember that story in school? Where a drunken man on the highway couldn’t differentiate between the nothingness and somethingness of two blobs of light so he plunged into the night with nothing held back. What do you think he saw while grazing against the skin of time? Is there a door in dying young? Or just the hunch that you have betrayed your mother? I feel there is no language where these questions have an answer, but tonight, when I run with the wind, there is a point past which the effort dissolves, and the margins collapse into each other. And there is a crack in the side view mirror of a car stuck in the median. It splits light just like the day I realised I was strong enough to wound my mother.
(for M)
Abhinav is from Kanpur, India. His work has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Chestnut Review, Fahmidan Journal and more.
