To set the mood, please listen to this before reading: https://open.spotify.com/track/4wbDALtjwuwBxtMgjuumoi?si=5e3fa87c36e44389
Sometimes I wonder if she’d like me. I know she’d love me, but I don’t know if she’d like me. I like her though. I didn’t like her when I knew her, but I like her now. Her hair, blonde on her head, brown on her arms, black on her… that part. I like how she opened that part up for people, she wanted to share it, to share herself. She wanted to bloom and I like that about her, her desire, her longing. I wonder if she’d like me now. If she’d look at me and see a cereus in bloom, or if she’d see a cereus still yet to bloom, or––and this is my worst fear––if she’d see that I bloomed a long time ago.
I like how she had visions, I have visions too. Visions of her, visions of us finally reuniting. Mala and Pohpoh were “one and the same” (Shani Mootoo, 173) for many years before they became different. Before Pohpoh actualized her conception of Mala, before she broke free from herself and became that conception, that imagined person who always used to comfort her. What if everything is better imagined? Pohpoh felt release––relief––when she woke up from her dream of being Mala to find herself in Mala’s body. But Mala, too, now spends her days dreaming, not wishing she could be Pohpoh, but wishing she could see her again. Wishing she could talk to her. Wishing she could smell her.
Mala wishes that “she and that Pohpoh could have been two separate people” (Shani Mootoo, 173) and that she could, somehow, help Pohpoh become someone else, not Mala as she is now. She wishes that “they could have been best friends, or even that she could have been the mother of Pohpoh or at least her older sister” (Shani Mootoo, 173). That way Mala could still be with Pohpoh, could watch after her, and make sure that she was “protected” from both her father and from herself. Pohpoh became Mala because she didn’t have Mala, or a Mala-like figure. Pohpoh conceived of Mala and put her on, like a cloak, like a sheet. But now that cloak has swallowed her, that sheet has suffocated her, and she isn’t Pohpoh anymore at all. Mala lives in queer time, but Pohpoh is a time traveler.
Pohpoh bloomed at night, like a cereus. She knew she was going to bloom and she was going to bloom brilliantly, quickly, briefly. She knew her blossoming would be pungent, she knew it would repulse some people, those people who don’t understand the beauty of death. The love of death. The life of it.
Sometimes I wonder if she killed herself a different way. Sometimes I wonder if she’d like me, if she’d understand that I did what she wanted me to do, I just had to go and make a stink of it. I wonder if she’d think I’m beautiful regardless. If her conception, actualized, was what she imagined it to be. I’m afraid it isn’t, and I’m afraid I’ve let her down. All the pills and the smoking and the stealing and the hurting––I’m chasing with hedonism. I can’t swallow the thought of the Unknown. But she could, and she knew the Unknown was a friend––like Pohpoh knew. The Unknown was herself, a cereus, not yet in bloom, but already emanating its odor. Already past Goodbye, and past its past lives.