I Don’t Know What This Feeling Is
Rohan Dahiya
Monday is the longest possible day. It takes me across more kilometres than I can count, than I thought I’d signed up for. I should be grateful though, I must always be grateful. I rub my knee instinctively. Years of practice and discipline and gratitude, gratitude, gratitude ring-ringing through my head.
The letters and numbers do a dance to my left as I walk, unforgivably self-assured, across the terminal. I’m still embarrassingly heartbroken. One flight then another, long layover in between where, bored of my carefully curated playlist, I take to browsing books and reclining with my memory. Why is it that breakups fuel such a desire for change, such movement like a propulsion, an explosion out of the familiar?
I was seventeen when I had my heart broken by a nobody and I asked the man in the salon to buzz my hair down to peach fuzz. I cried not for the ending, but from my own vanity. I rub my knee instinctively between Malcolm Gladwell and some new age mahatma-type peddling spirituality for the modern man, I think—
I don’t know if I can hold my attention long enough for a book, but I like being around them because they remind me of being happy in a library, when I was seventeen and somewhat in love. Time has been unkind to me.
Final landing brings me to Rome, where I don’t know what adventures are waiting for me but I’m here now and I have plans and fuck it if they fall apart because I haven’t learned how to be spontaneous. Was it seventeen when I thought I might be gay? I can’t remember, I just know it wasn’t easy and I hated everyone from behind my smiling face and yet my face and my daily gratitude stayed on and on. The table tennis table where we first met somehow also served as the playground for our discussions. School was ending and the world felt like it was about to end too, about to swallow me whole.
I don’t call upon God uselessly, but what I do instead is press my face up to the glass window of the taxi that’s hurtling across town. Italian sun warming my face in a way that’s completely new but feels right, after the sun back home that’s always trying to drain the life force out of me. Mondays should only be good for traveling so far away from home that you can finally see yourself in complete fullness. For the first time; in the abandonment of all that is familiar I can start to assemble myself with some degree of truthfulness. I’m an idiot.
My two options are lugging this bag everywhere or leaving it behind the reception desk. I don’t care. I’m off on my feet; my feet that are shaking, that are nervous, that are on the verge of taking flight, that have carried me far. I’m allowing the faces I’ve crossed and sat next to and kissed under neon lights to fade. This warm syrupy sun can bleach me clean.
I see a church to my right and think of words like gratitude and grace, neither of which I was born with but, like other things, I have learned to love. To love, that’s the main thing I’m thinking and trying not to think about. I can’t stand to watch couples at airports settle into an easy silence, hand on hand like it’s always going to be there. I go blind when I see a romantic comedy. I’m dissolving in my own acids when I have to hear the kind of laugh that comes after a private joke. For your ears only, you know? I let Rome swallow me up.
Tuesday begins with a headache ringing through my skull because I’m developing a taste for Aperol and deviousness. What is it about being openly flirted with that’s changing my alchemy? I look in the mirror and my hair, which only yesterday was fine and cropped, now curls around my skull. Already romantic. I’m not another person here because I won’t allow myself to fade into the stone walkways. The path leading down museums, and I’ll try and do them all in one day, till Madonna and her child blur into nothing. I’m still me, somewhat embarrassingly heartbroken.
Colossal statue at the feet of which I wipe my brow and see a stolen kiss under the shadow of another monolith, similarly oversized. I close my eyes and allow flowers to bloom from beneath my shirt because if I don’t, I don’t think I’d be able to breathe. There are two of us here. The one on the outside looking in, projecting a confidence I have found fits my body perfectly, and a smile that I can sometimes deploy to charm the man too willing to buy me a drink. Then there’s the person inside, whose flesh is made of the same material as a rose petal, wondering if things will ever be alright.
We go home hand in hand, his meandering up my back, pulling me closer, making me feel wanted. Breath of wine and passion without the undertone of degrading each other into slabs of meat. I'm alright. We make love and then fuck in textures of midnight and mottled streetlight and I allow him to hold me. In the heavy hour of daybreak I wonder if there has been a manual on queer intimacy that just never made it to my town because import duties were too much. How does a man lie with another man? When he turns to my side I feel his lips soft on my bare back. Outside the city feels filtered by blue glass and I feel like I have glass in my mouth, in my throat; I cannot speak. I am not all right.
Wednesday begins on a platform; I’m still reeling from the sweetness of his kiss on my cheek, offering to drive me to Termini and beyond. Like he has all day, like he is master of his own destiny just because he has eyes for me and hair that falls in soft waves around his face. A muse of some kind. I'm angry. My eyes are still groggy, but in my mind things are falling into place. I reach into my bag and hold the stone as if it can bring me back to the ground. My journey can begin and so can my healing.
I keep my eyes to the window, to the changing landscape as we cross urban architecture into wide open spaces. My eyes drink up the scene and now they bring me clarity; between the left and the right I have all that I need. One shows me the happiness I’m destined for, and one the misfortunes assigned to me. I offer gratitude and find my hand reaching for my knees. I am grateful for this. I am in recuperance.
It gets hot in the train and Venice seems farther than I’d expected, but I have the freedom to move across compartments, no ticket master in sight now that we’re deep in the chianti of things. What happens if I get off at the wrong station, I wonder? I can’t remember the last time someone told me they loved me. Not since that one night back in June of last year when everything changed. Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still see the flashing lights glittering on the asphalt road.
Other times I think of how when I was twenty-two I made friends with this older guy who used my fondness to fill his loneliness. We sometimes held hands under the table and almost always made love on a hangover. Other times he kept me at one arm’s distance because he was scared, I think we all were, because that was the year the cops beat a guy to death for wearing glitter and angel wings. The world moves on, the train rolls on, I don’t remember the last words I’d exchanged with him because twenty-two was too long ago, back when thoughts of romance in dark clubs actually excited me. I close my eyes and come to life in a lone parking lot on my knees, making love to a guy to a friend to a nobody. Face full of cum and I’m alone before I can pull myself upright. The train slows down somewhere at Pisa and I find myself leaning against the window, hoping that I would someway be able to catch a glimpse of towers and kings. I think my friend treated me very badly.
It isn’t easy to make the call because I know I am expected to offer more information. I stand in the balcony or what appears as such from the world below; it isn’t the birthplace of tragedies and there was never a heroine here. Just as no one waits to catch me if I should break my head on the cobbled street below. A stone sits in my pocket and I reach for it somewhat ungracefully because I have not made up my mind yet not between gratitude, grief, and relief. Far above my head I see Jupiter in the sky, winking in unsteady encouragement as I make the call. I cannot come. Am I still expected to? When there is no one to sit beside me anymore, no matter that it probably would not have been very nice if he was here. But a wedding is a wedding, and even in the casual sense of a second-tier friend in attendance it asks a lot of me. I have nothing Como appropriate. I packed in a daze but either way, I reach for my knee, I’m thankful you thought to include me. I want nothing more than to let my phone drop and split open on the street below. I am worn out.
I don’t have a home by Thursday, train riding from the Balcony of Juliet to Riomaggiore. I find that, as with my heart, my suitcase seems to be getting lighter and lighter. The man whose bed I slept in last night didn’t want anything but to hold someone tight. I took my shirt and left it deep in his clothesbin, I don’t know how long it’ll be before he finds it. I hope it brings him a smile or warmth, at least, should it find another man. I’m thinking of signing up for painting classes when I eventually make it to Florence, but for now I feel the water blue and beckoning me. I'm happy? Or some close approximation of it.
I hike in the sun unbothered by the heat, eating soft ice cream that occasionally falls in sticky sweet drops on my chest. I think of how my last boyfriend hated my chest hair and I made a habit of trying to impress him. I stop. There is something heavy in my air, a stone somewhere between my heart and my pocket. The sun is warm above, but the sound of the ocean is beautiful and I probably imagine the sound of gulls chiming in but somehow this place feels like my destination. I’m on the coastline of my healing, thriving in the cognitive dissonance brought on by the hundred tongues overlapping around me. One, the clearest, of course, the language of the locals and the other coming from beneath the water. Is this where I release the stone I carry around like a totem like a talisman like a conduit of something unimaginably ugly, that I have had eating me up from the inside of my insides? No churches in sight so I settle for the waves and people laughing as they talk. I don’t know what this feeling is but I wish everyone could experience it.
The rock is hot on my skin but I dip my feet anyway, the water pulls me into a quiet nap for an hour. I wake up and find that my book has gone missing from the bag to my right but it was only poems and I’d learned to let go of them by this February anyway. I don’t go to thrift shops anymore because I know luck is a finite thing. The stone is still there; miracle of miracles.
I look up at the sunset and think of how grateful I am to be homeless and poor and free. My left sandal has broken from the heel and I walk back into the tiny town on bare feet. An American smiles at me from across the thrift shop. He’s reading a comic I think, I can’t quite tell. I’m taken in by the smell of coffee on his breath when he leans in and asks if I’d join him. Coffee turns to Campari soon and I tell him of my journey. When does it stop? asks he. I don’t have an answer because I don’t know when it stops hurting. My hands reach for my knees. I thank him for dinner and under a bridge we eat at each other’s mouths. None of it feels good, but it feels like the right thing to do.
I find my seat on the train at 11 AM, lower lip still reeling raw from the night before. I didn’t think to pack my sandals but I took his comic book. Too late I realise it holds an inscription that probably means a lot to him. The stone sits in my left pocket. The train’s already leaving the station and a few Prossima Fermatas later I’m at Santa Maria Novella standing next to the man who sat across from me and touched my knee with his. I’m breathing easier.
That night once we’re done sweating he asks me what I’m doing here. In the darkness of the apartment he can’t see me take a few euros from his wallet. I don’t know what sense of retribution this might bring but I hope I can some day atone for this small deviance. Another echo of the man I left behind, a deviance for every fault in me he’d find. From the hair on my chest to the posture when I stood in a bar and then, well, he took his eyes off the road long enough to end up wrapped around a pole. I don’t know why I’m speaking this into a Florentine Friday night but I just have to. I tell him all my life I’ve only known how to give love – too much of it and too fast. I’m trying to learn to receive.
We walk through Florence at night under the moonlight with the occasional sound of music and laughter tinkling out from a bar. The air feels thick, like there’s too many people breathing here. He takes my hand before I have to ask for it. I’ve always known to find safety in the kindness of strangers. He tells me a story that’s drooping under his accent, but it’s pleasant all the same. It’s something about a bear and I think about how it’s Friday already. The weekend has come and I feel like I’ve only just begun. The only thing I have left in my backpack is my passport and fifteen more train tickets. Ticket stubs from trains, museums and basement parties where anything goes. I’m thinking of how to keep them safe in the weeks to come. All my clothes smell of roses and mourning, when he offers me a drink I say yes and bite into my sleeve to keep from crying.
Midnight into Saturday, I realise I should have gone to the funeral but the thing is I woke up and couldn’t think of what to wear. His family would’ve looked at me with the vacant sorrow that people reserve for strangers. They didn’t know anything about anything. What little I had left to say didn’t mean anything, the story had long lost its sweetness so I guess it didn’t matter that eventually it will be forgotten. On the outside I was just an other. On the inside my heart was calcifying.
He hears the sizzle of my cigarette and wakes up, mein freund from the train. We’re in a Florentine sunrise and he reaches for my knee. First with his hand then the side of his face. I can’t bring myself to push him away. I want to say goodbye but I’ve never been good at putting an end to things. He’d been cheating on me for months, while I used to make eyes at the neighbour who watered his garden in short shorts. Doomed from the start, I guess.
I leave him with a kiss on his forehead as the bells of the church sound off in the distance. We walked down the gilded corridors of the Uffizi earlier today but by
dawn I’ll be on another train. I don’t know if he’ll notice that I bought him a ticket. 34 to my 33. I’m so old now, yet I feel like my life is only just beginning.
I’m thinking about my first girlfriend, who called me a name I’d never forget, something I don’t really feel like sharing right now but in that moment it seemed appropriate. I used to pray on my knees at night because I couldn’t understand why girls grossed me out. I wasted my young years ripping myself apart in search of some other truth. I’m pathetic. I am all water.
The stone I picked up from outside his parents’ house because I had nothing left to do with my grief, nowhere to take my imperfect remembrance of someone who wasn’t good to me. It seems only appropriate that I whisper his name one last time before using it to destroy something else. Heaven-sent abandoned car in the middle of an overgrown corner where anyone could stab me for no other reason than looking the way I do. It goes sailing through the silent dawn air, to bear witness to my grieving. Glass turns to glitter in a matter of moments and I leave my glass heart behind for my still sleeping friend.
I measure my history in different scales, most of which are filtered by my own critical tendencies. Left eye speaking of the hard times that stretch before and behind me; right offering temporary roses of joy and frivolity. I’m mapping my adventures on the lines of my palm, lost somewhere in the grooves, when I find a hand reaching for it. Trembling fingers touch my hand, tracing a laugh from the day before. We had sat on church steps with two sandwiches laughing at his folklore. Two easy guys with twin easy laughs, never meant to be more. I’d made myself look back, knowing full well it wasn’t good for me, as I slipped out past the door. His smile is still uncertain now just as I am, best laid plans no longer sure. Sunday never held this much promise before.
***
About the Author
Rohan Dahiya is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in India. His creative work spans fiction, poetry, visual storytelling, and scent-based rituals through his practice at Ro’s Apothecary. He is the author of two novels (Grey Skies, The Bitter Pill Social Club) and three poetry collections, and has independently published zines, a tarot deck, and other visual projects exploring queerness, interiority, and myth. With a focus on sensory memory, desire, and the small rituals that structure daily life, his work often bridges the textual and the tactile. He has exhibited, conducted workshops, and collaborated across various platforms, and is currently working on new fiction that weaves scent, solitude, and melancholia into narrative form.