Sumitra Singam
Self Portrait in Three Diagnoses
Fibromyalgia
They are traitorous these ribs. These ribs dig and poke and demand notice, jamming into their joints like they are mainlining marrow. They demand to be marinated, smoked for hours, dipped in sauce. They appear to have a regular, anatomical structure, twelve giant fingers pointing at my sternum, but they are mere straws, hollow, pulling fatigue and exquisite ache into me. They resist holding the rest of me up, much like a rag-doll toddler, drunk on sugar. How they droop in their petulant, wilting heat as the day lengthens. These ribs are not fit for purpose, they wait to be hated. These fucking ribs. Must have come. From a man.
Dissociation
Sometimes I wear the sky like a skull. The space expands and expands, and I go roofless for a bit, but my memories, elastic and sizeable, they demand a ceiling. The clouds rake themselves across my scalp, pareidolia of hands, hands, hands, always grabbing, always pinching. But I can stratosphere through that too, where the air is thin and I hardly need to breathe and the view is only meaningless ants marching along in their self-importance. And I follow them for a while, smiling at their industry. But there’s an event horizon in my white matter, supernovae, bursting and dying. What else can a sky do but reflect, and show you things that have already happened.
Endometriosis
Menarche was a scarlet flood, clots like cherry preserves. Womenfolk keenly shared the secret of containing all of this spilled fruit, and it obediently crawled back up, seeding across my omentum, ovaries, bowel. Every month a twisting like an apple on a stem, like a premonition. A breathless gasp when time stops, the body screwing itself into a brilliant point of pain, as pure and concentrated as a sucked lime. Everything else becomes hazy, meaningless. And every month, the pickling fruit is stirred, any lurking embryo washed away. This all happens behind the great closed doors of shame. The woman in the mirror says, “Make real the unseen, mould me into a barren desert.” And I crack like a parched riverbed, fractals to the empty space between ovaries rotting on the vine.
END
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). She works in mental health. You can find her and her other publication credits on twitter: @pleomorphic2