Eclipsed

The other kids always call me names like “stone face” or “heartless” or simply “freak”. I always thought if they really believed that I had no feelings, why would they think I would ever be affected by their taunts? I read somewhere that if bullies feel like their victims don’t react, they’ll get bored and stop bullying. I guess what they say in the books aren’t always true.

It was half right, what they said. I never show any emotion, any expression. My face is as featureless as the bare hills in winter, when even the sparse grass turns white with frost and everything blurs into rolling grey. The mothers gossip that when I was born I didn’t even cry like a normal newborn, just heaved a deep heavy sigh, as if I already tired of the world the moment I came into it. I asked Mother once if it was true. She started crying and hugged me tight, saying it was not my fault, it was hers. She said it was all because of the eclipse, and she thumped her chest again and again, blaming herself for not wearing red. I didn’t understand it all, but I didn’t ask again. Seeing Mother crying always made me get a lump in my throat, like I swallowed a frog.

I asked the books instead. They said that people long ago believed that during a solar eclipse, a pregnant woman must wear something red or metallic to protect their unborn child. An eclipse is bite out of the face of the sun, and without protection the child will also have something taken, and become deformed, incomplete somehow. The day I was born, there was a solar eclipse. I looked inside myself, and saw the gaping hole there, round like the eclipsed sun. I understood then, that a bite must have been taken from me, the part of me that feels. I looked again at the hole inside me, and thought it might have grown a little bigger.

Remember I said that the kids were half right? It’s true that I show no emotion, and I do not feel the emotions other people feel. I don’t understand what “happy” or “sad” or “angry” is. It’s like asking a person born blind to understand the concept of colours. They are meaningless words to me. I do feel something though. It’s like a wave that gurgles up from my belly and up my throat. When the kids jeer and call me names, it comes. When I find a really pretty butterfly, it comes. When there’s lightning crashing outside, it comes. Sometimes it threatens to burst out of my mouth. It makes me feel a bit ill, like that time we got on the boat and the sea was choppy, when the boat kept rocking and swaying and everyone looked green. I asked the books what this is called, and the closest word I could find was nausea.

Nausea (noun):

1. A feeling of sickness with an inclination to vomit.
2. Loathing; revulsion.

I thought it was funny how it had the word “sea” in it. The seas around here are always rough, so everyone would get nausea easily, even the fishermen. I also thought it was funny how it had two meanings, and the second meaning was an emotion. It made me think that maybe this means I am not a completely incomplete. Maybe the eclipse didn’t manage to take all of it away.

When I grew older, I learned that vomiting was the body’s way of getting rid of bad things in the body, like when you ate something rotten. Vomiting is a full forced ejection of the stomach’s contents, rejection of whatever the body deemed harmful. For someone who only feels nausea, vomiting seemed like the climax of all emotion, an extreme reaction. I’ve never felt so much that I actually vomited. Not even when my cat died, although there was a bitter sour taste at the back of my throat for days.

But then I met her. She was from the city, and she was the prettiest girl in our little town. All the boys clamored for her attention, and when she smiled the world got brighter, like a sun lived inside her. I would get nauseous every time I saw her, and it took every effort to hold back the waves, so I couldn’t even open my mouth to speak. Of course I never smiled back when she smiled at me. All I could do was dress nicely, keep my nails clean and my hair tidy, and watch her like a shadow. I ate little, slept little, constantly battling the nausea inside of me, which roiled like a stormy sea constantly.

They say it was a tragic accident. The seas around here are unpredictable, and she was unlucky. Her body washed up ashore the next morning, the waves kept lapping over her like they were trying to comfort her. Some of the people who saw the bloated corpse threw up, but for once I felt absolutely nothing while looking at her. The nausea that has been battering at me all this time stilled, and there was a deathly calm. 

That night I vomited. The dams I put up disintegrated as the waves rose with a fury from inside and crashed out mercilessly. I vomited again and again, rejecting this feeling from my body, rejecting it with every fibre of my being. When nothing was left to throw up, I kept retching and gasping, so I could turn my stomach inside out and vomit all my insides out until there was nothing left inside. As I thought that, I looked inside myself. The gaping hole was growing bigger as I heaved, expanding in a widening circle. It reminded me of a black hole I read about in the books, which can suck up everything and anything into it with immense force, destroying it all into nothingness. The hole kept growing, sucking me into its darkness as I stared into it.

At the very last moment before I disappeared, I wondered whether this is what they called “heartbreak”.