THIRD EYE | On Thursday I Bloomed in the Dark by Lisabelle Tay

[Music] My husband told me who he was, but I did not listen. Blessings tend to fall into my lap. He said on one occasion, "She is but proud. I'm like water." He said on another, "I go with the flow." By this, he meant he was exempt from human striving. I realised this too late. By then, the change had already come over me. It began with sap, leaking from my nose like mucus. Then from my ear, thicker now, and alive with plowing scent. Then from my eye, forming a film that crusted over my face like lava. Thick enough to contain the liquid, but thin enough to pierce. Each morning, I peeled it off like an overnight face mask and spunged the sap away. "Your skin is glowing," my friend said. "What's your secret?" "Sale-sale-sale-essed and existential dread," I told them, then changed the subject. How could I begin to tell them about the change? Over the course of three weeks, I became convinced I was releasing spores into the air. When I looked into the mirror, I was burdened with terrible knowledge. I was rooting. Roots were shooting and seen in inexorable through plasma, burying past my eye socket, deep into my brain. The sap slowly changed color. What began as an innocuous smoky green was now tinged with red as I've all my fluids were mingling. I collected some in an old contact lens case and showed it to my husband. "Look," I said. "Look, this came from my ear. His eyes flickered over it with distaste. "I told you," he said. The antibiotics weren't enough, you should get a referral from the polyclining. I left at my shirt and my husband averted his eyes and barrisped and a little angry. "What about this?" I asked, pointing at the bark creeping across my ribs. "Flaky, mud green." "I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I'm not a doctor. Do you need me to call the clinic for your work?" "No," I said, pulling my shirt back down. "Of course not." "There's nothing medical about this," said the GP, "Please stop coming here." I couldn't blame him. He was exhausted, I'm sure. At medical school, they trained him to fix the fixable. What could he do about transmigration? The beauty of being a physician is focus. You see what you can do and close your eyes to the rest. The horror of being a wife is quite the opposite. All you see is what you cannot do and when you close your eyes, the image remains. My hair became stringy and took on a sort of elbow texture. It smelled like iodine, failing to wrangle it into submission, I decided to embrace it. My days now had a propulsive quality to them. What boiled down too, in the end, was the smallness of our small little world and the animals instinct for escape. Pastules developed down the length of my spine on Monday, translucent and pulsing like freshly sprouted berries. I twisted my back to take a selfie like some kind of deranged influencer, contemplated posting the result on a medical forum, then deleted it. I pushed my index finger into the biggest growth, located right above my tailbone. It hurt, but it not burst. I took a hastily sterilized needle to it. Blood and water gushed out and I felt, for a moment, Christlike and transfigured. Then I was overcome by the thought of bursting them all, of detonating a line of pain down my spine and gave up. I scolded myself in the shower and emerged naked to show my husband, pausing back first outside his home office, but he did not see. My pelvis opened up the next day as if birth split. If diastases recti extended beyond the skin surface, in the whole mate bear, yawning, I could see something threatening to fruit, webbed and viscous. I resisted shoving my fingers inside and pulling it out. Don't disturb the embryo, I tried it myself, prematurely maternal. My husband and I had tried for a child once. But the thing about immaculate conception was that it was a singular event inaccessible to most women. The biggest obstacle for the two of us, practically speaking, was a cardinal absence of desire. My body was blighted, or so it seemed, his touch glanced off me like a sword of a shield, as did his vision. I think that was the root of it all. You cannot want what you cannot see. Realising I could not compete with virtual women who embodied for quantity not failure, I adopted a posture of benign nosticism with all the enthusiasm of a freshly made nun. I had once been capable of hunger, but I conveniently cast this aside. My biggest personal failing was that I could create narratives from nothing. Now, I convinced myself that our situation had all the dimensions of a marriage. Around the edge of my pelvic wound grew a filigree of tendrils, wets and aromatic. I could smell myself in the air. On Wednesday, I emailed a divorce lawyer and my fingers germinated. I had to dislodge the tangles of root and stem from my keyboard and I felt faint by the time it was done. Tiny flowers bloomed off the bloody tips. I could smell them, a livid peppery scent that reminded me of childhood, of my mother rubbing ointment on my chest as a shivered under the ceiling fan. My mother had been right in the end, which only made it sting more. I was sick in the beginning. He found me crumpled in a heap of medically verified illness. A mutual friend introduced us in fact, but that was what it felt like. I was sick and he found me. He collected me from rounds of clinic and deposited me at home. A prospector had been found treasure under crowded sand. I clung to him like a barnacle. He cared for me and flourished under the spotlight. Such a good man, people said, and I nodded. The change however, he could not abide. Although there was pain, this time it could be neither soothed nor managed, at least not by him. My body had grown unruly, strong and repulsive as a mutant vine. For the first time, I wanted. For the last time, he saw what I might become and turned away. On Thursday I bloomed in the dark. I woked six as usual, jolting into consciousness at the coals' call. Over the past few years, I had grown accustomed to sleeping and waking alone in our marital bed. But that morning I felt acutely his absence and with it a delicious, delirious freedom. I knew then, in the dark I knew. I felt it before it happened, a flush of heat thrilling through my body, up my thighs and into my core, down my arms and through my fingertips. My body had known before I had. It was going where he could not follow, this man I once called, husband. I listened to it, submitted to its wisdom, to its strange and violent grace. How small I had made my life, I thought, as my skin opened up to the air. I had resented him for it, but now in the mirror of his apathy I saw the truth of my own self-abandonment. My stomata drew all the oxygen from the room, drinking, lapping, consuming with the ardency of a lover, one I had imagined since my sensitive youth. Perhaps this is how trees felt all the time, at once sinking deep into the earth and reigning up to what the sun, taking, giving, lavish and narcotic. The man I once called, husband, was not given to interpreting that with which he did not already understand. I should not have blamed him for failing to decipher me. He did not want to, yes, but he was also not capable of it. It was simply his nature. And ultimately was not a failure of character, but of choice. I made the wrong choice. This revelation had the finality of a stone dropping into water. I felt myself unspooling and suddenly the morning wasn't long enough. With what was left of my eyes, I saw the day coming up behind the curtains. I wondered if my body had simply had enough. I refused happiness for so long that the decision was now being taken out of my hands. It was being claimed for me, or something like it. If not happiness, perhaps freedom. There was an opulence to the whole matter. I had not thought to myself capable of such surrender. Each of my patials thrilled, each laminar, each node. My little hairs rose up and heightened wonder. The pistol filigree in my abdomen rived and something surged forth from the mass, seat bearing and pungent, bright with life. I possessed awareness, but of a vegetal sort. What a once called knowledge unfold, slowly, then all at once bursting into continents. I, multitudeless, scarlet and stigma and stammer. So o'olene with a memory of what it meant to be human, I could no longer retreat. I was being filled to the brim, about to spill over, a flourishing I could not resist. Now I bloomed, now I shuddered under the first flush of joy. On Thursday I bloomed in a dark, is written by Lisbilté in response to Hernando Ocampos painting, Dancing Mutants, done in 1965. Third eye is produced by the National Gallery Singapore and co-edited by Nazari Barawi. The podcasting is Erica Lai, Jolene Lo and Kaleisha Chakrasim. This episode is voiced by the author herself, Lisbilté. Sound designed and mixing by Mervyn Blanc. Thank you for listening.