Gill - Your Body is an Ocean: Love and Other Experiments

BY NIKITA GILLNikita Gill is a twenty four year old girl who lives in the extremes of laughter and sadness. She likes people who live somewhere on the brink as well and that is who she draws inspiration from. If you recognise yourself in here, you should try and remember the tall, lanky girl who was somewhere in your vicinity a while ago. If you recognise yourself in here, thank you for the inspiration.Copyright 2012c

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

Cover Design by Nikita Gill
Foreword by David Gauthier. 09
Lists by Fiverse

I Bet You Got This on Film. 72

At some point, no matter how obscure this little thing is, someone is going to ask me why I wrote it.

I wrote it to prove something to myself. That when you truly love something, at some point, you have to sit down and just do it. I wrote it for every single time I have thought, that would make a great story. I wrote it for the people who told me I could write. I wrote it for the people who told me I couldnt write. I wrote it because of Neil Gaiman, and Jane Austen, and William Wordsworth and Sylvia Plath. I wrote it for the seconds by metaphors I have let pass me by.

But most importantly, more important than any of what is listed above, I wrote this book for you. Lose track of sight. From your mind, take flight.

Travel out your forehead, about sweat from a day much too long, past smells travelling a trail forced crooked when you once fell; onward (right) beneath the twitching lid that knows the knife; moving down over quivering left by the first lips not your own; further, toward a jaw no longer even; fall to dents imprinted by thumbs of those you were meant to love; sink in through the flesh and skin; glide along the raspy remnants of the first inhale; and stop a while deep, where there is no light to offer comfort amidst screaming from the palpitating coffin ofyour inner child.

You didnt forget, did you when the future became this?

We (all of us) face our trials and tests. We justify our plight by revising past to sway and flow with the skill of meaning. As one navigates to their first beginning, order seems counter to ones being.

Memory is associative. Musings are tangential. Maxim is mangled.

We focus on the misplaced bread crumbs of history hoping never again to stray from the prize at the center. Arrival yields deceit. The ginger-bread house is occupied by the elderly cannibals and wolves dressed as sheep. Some settle for what they find while others sigh toward the exit on the other side.

How can we find ourselves if we do not know our purpose?

Walking tear-stained floor-boards of lifes labyrinth is surely a test designed for those with stone hearts and madness. Lament: all are invited and none shall pass. Run the wheel, press the second button for a meal, and there is electroshock beyond the seventh seal. Remember it all and hope it repeats; proceed toward an end you perceive. Be warned of twists and turns you will not believe while trying not to weep or fall to your knees. Wasnt there somewhere this was supposed to lead?

Submitted for approval, an alternate notion. Its not a maze, but an ocean.1

Nikita Gill offers a collection of fragments and shards from her daily bread numbering roughly 33 (sar*zan as some might read). Be they fact, fiction, or tricks of memory; be advised that what you see will be the truth in life as it is only found somewhere between.

1 You must ascend before you can breathe11

We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.
-- Mother Teresa

Some, be it by choice or by need, specialize in humanity. BY NIKITA GILL

Her name was Alyssa, and when she was nine her mother built her wonderland. After being raised on a healthy diet of Charles Dickens, Enid Blyton and J.M. Barrie, it seemed like the only course of action. She created it out of paper, each scene indispensably, indisputably perfect in its imperfection.

And she did it because Alyssa was terrified of the idea of falling through a rabbit hole, into a place that allows magic only when you are confused. Mothers do the most impractical, exhausting things to show how much they love their children. It seemed a pity that it was this very effort that kept Alyssa up all night, staring at the paper people like they were coming to get her.

(If Alyssas mother knew, she would have spent all her time trying to explain to the little girl that it wasnt just paper people she should be afraid of.)

-

God appeared to have a sense of humour when little Alice became Alyssas best friend. She lives across the street, her hair always wild when she would run over in the same little blue dress and tell Alyssa the strangest stories. Having understood that paper people were no longer meant to be feared, Alyssa listened with wide eyes to her paper story loving friend, becoming a part of a landscape that housed fairies and pixies and odd little men with funny hats and talking animals.

It accepted her into its folds gradually and in a tree house made by Alices father, they tried to understand why ravens actually hated writing desks and how hares would actually hate tea, but perhaps love coffee.

(This was before Alices mother left and her eyes broke, and they grew to understand that people grew apart better with pain than distance.)-

James liked to drink coffee and wear funny hats and gave people rabbits as gifts. And he had never read anything about wonderland. So ofcourse, Alyssa had to fall in love with him. She counted the droplets of water on his eyelashes and wondered about how someone who has promised himself to her so effortlessly could possibly be seventy two point eight percent water; all this because water was so easy to drain away.

She called him the Mad Hatter. He never quite understood the reason behind the name.(Thats the thing with being in wonderland. It never really likes to acknowledge its own existence.)

Rose is a girl a lot like Dorothy with big dreams in a little place, and a house that often falls apart. She is named for her mothers most favourite flower and often kisses a wishing star before it turns into a shooting star. She has never been chased by tornados, but she does like chasing them. One day, if she is very careful, she will get swept away in one. She doesnt understand girls like Cinderella who dont actually like hard work and would never give up her voice for a man like the Little Mermaid.

It was no wonder then, that the mirror hates Rose more than it would ever hate Dorothy. Because she argues with her mother, fights with her father, and most importantly, does not have a little dog like Toto.

[What she has is a nasty black cat who doesnt seem to like her much either, but thats neither here nor there.]