#42: Character Study: The Sharp One

By Halima Abukar

"There are things," she said, "that when people describe them to me, I can immediately understand, and they register in my brain as a tapestry."

I looked on at her, as she continued, holding her hands over head, and interlocking them, "and when people say things to me that I don't entirely understand, or are without reason or rhyme, they unweave this tapestry that I have made in my head."

She put her hands down again, and let them rest at her sides.

Her tapestry is woven with three colors, and she unravels them at her own will at times, first to make sense of the world, only to submit to the endless entropy of it.

When she sent me a letter about teeth splitting grapes,  I imagined that her hands didn't move as fast as her brain did. We were one of those things where we were one and the same; synapses that were created and linked; neurons that fired off in the same direction. 

It is an epistolary friendship mostly, yes, and maybe my most important one. As children we were thoughts that biked into the night endlessly, that hopped and had vegan decadent desserts for indulgence at a home that we never were familiar. To be among her was also, indeed, a submission to the entropy of the world. She exhibited spontaneity, and that much was an honor. A stranger would approach and state the obvious to him, obscure to us (that he was invited to a pool party although he could not swim), following our once urgent trip from a Thai restaurant that ended in an orchestral symphony playing in a church (in this instance, she stuffed dumplings into her jacket pocket).

Albeit walking and talking with her would, to the onlooker, seem mundane, it is nothing short of obscure and otherworldly.

She unearths the nature of freedom, a singsong dance and walk, and endless respirations that encompass smiles. She grants me an apology after an endless, satiating rambling of the wonky way of the world. And then she apologizes again: for she has become a hermit for her way of working. To her dismay, she is a lively target in a scene of a crowd.