september sleeps

I've always been working, my first full-time job when everyone around me was still in school. I never looked back, and work became a big part of my personality. But the month of my twenty-seventh was my first birthday being unemployed, and it was mixed feelings of lost and free. The last time I felt a combination of the two was that last break-up almost five years ago.

September this year would have started with my legs wide open. A health checkup to be exact, because my body hadn't been the same since giving birth. But the nurse advised me against it, something about results not being accurate until after my first postpartum period. Something that I hadn't gotten since July last year.

The first Saturday of the month was a simple trip to a secondhand book barracks, but I made it complicated with the tomes I left the place with. An adult fiction, The School For Good Mothers, you can already tell by the title, and a young adult superhero novel. My two main persons at loggerheads. I was my old person, books and public transport, before leaving to be my new, husband driving us home to our baby.

Less than a day later I would get the news that my other grandfather had passed away. I cried a few tears after hanging up the phone, my son wiggling in my arms. The newest addition to my father's side of the family, oblivious to the death of the oldest.

He had also fought long and hard for his life the way my maternal one had, but this time I couldn't recall much. Everything I remembered or knew about him was through my father's stories. I didn't have one on one memory with him that stood out, apart from a random moment when I'd gone up to him and he rejected my attempt to salam because he had wudhu. Only many years later as an adult, I realised as his granddaughter, I had the right to have contact with him, wudhu or not. 

I had to attend the funeral with my clearest memory of him being rejection, but seeing one's many aunts in tears is enough to do anyone in. Sniffs and snot everywhere, and then surprise and some admiration seeing my younger brother one of the men carrying my grandfather down. Alot of love for my grandmother, who had just lost her husband but still managed to ask me about my son.

That was the very first death on my paternal side that I know of, in all my years of life. My very first time in this country's Muslim cemeteries, as my mother's father was buried in Johor where he was born and raised. But this time was short-lived because it started raining heavily, my black jubah rustling in the wind romantically for a while before we all started getting completely drenched and had to disperse. 

Then I stayed at my parents' house for two nights and sewed parts of my past and present together. Woke up before everyone else to pray, something I hadn't done before in that house. Gallivanted the way I used to do while my mother took care of my kid for me. Taking the bus downtown with music in my ears. Drinking sweet coffee that condenses all over the table while writing. Trying on jeans that could barely go over my new curves, when I used to complain about finding a decent pair just because my legs were too long.

I walked all the way home from there, like the way I used to from my secondary school. Taking the route by the roads without a care for anyone or anything. Walking alongside my ghost, sometimes she was alone and sometimes with a friend she wished was more than. I used to walk in the sun as much as I could without breaking a sweat, but now I struggle because pregnancy has truly changed my body.

The day after I returned home from my parents' house, my first period since last year finally came. I couldn't be happier to see so much blood between my legs, when it was the very same sight in December that led to a dramatic chain of events. It came and went uneventfully, putting alot of my worries to rest, up until one week later where I contracted Covid.

My husband tested positive first, maybe a bug from work. I still showed up negative, but I'd immediately given our child to my parents-in-law to minimise his chances. The sore throat and aching joints came the next day, until along came the dreaded thin red line the eve of my 27th. Sleepless night, movements I don't recall asking my body to make, fever dreams. Constant vomiting, just like all the fevers I've had since childhood.

Woke up many painful hours later with so much regret, having waited ages for my first birthday with a living child. I couldn't put it into the spoken word to the one person who could be in the same room as me. I heard sins are erased when one is sick, but how true is that and to what extent? 

The many hours spent sleeping, struggling to leave bed, were reminiscent of my days before marriage. All too familiar. So many more emotions and secrets I could not write out anymore. Embarrassment, like I have not moved on, despite being years older since they last spoke to me. I'd always thought my Junes were the roughest, the most maddening, like lonely school holidays and Ramadan fights. Sometimes my Octobers too, like first kisses and national exams and estimated due dates. 

A higher being looked down on me this month and thought it best to stir my sleeping waters. And yet here I write, here I think of it all, and that was all of the twenty-seventh September of my life. There are more warped versions to come.