When Boishakhi’s feet hit the ground, the first thing she notices is how despite the overbearing July heat, her entire body feels cold. The feeling, however uncomfortable, isn’t uncommon to her ; especially not when she plays football. No matter how accustomed her body is to the wet grass of the Women’s Complex field, her mind doesn’t feel the same.
Briefly, she wonders how many times you have to visit a place for it to be considered home? Does it count if you’ve spent your entire childhood coming here everyday for 2 hours?
When the ball lands at her feet, she realises that today will not be that day. Because no matter how much she wanted to deny it, today is different. It’s evident in the way her feet, which are usually hot to the touch and covered with blisters, feel cold, and not in the normal way when she’s filled to the brim with anxiety.
It’s in the way she feels like she doesn’t belong in her own body, as if what’s happening has grabbed her from the inside out and twisted her guts out, squeezing them until every last bit of blood is taken from her body. It’s in the way that time doesn’t stop when she starts playing, even if it always does, even if it has since the day she was a child and realised that she could stop time.
The first time it happened, she was getting teased by a boy ; something about how girls can’t kick as hard as boys. The only thing she remembers after that was the weight of the ball under her feet and everything else slowing down. The last thing she remembers is the look on the boy’s face as the ball went straight into the net, making a sound harder than he’d ever heard before.
The sense of triumph that she’d felt then and every day since feels like a distant memory now. Ironically, the one thing bringing her back to life are the stares she receives from her teammates— usually expectant and overflowing with trust that no matter what move she makes, it’ll be the right one— now filled with confusion. Usually, every time she’s playing—when everything first starts to slow down—her body feels warmed up as if a spark has gone through it. She pumps up her fist and keeps repeating the motion over and over again in hopes that the warm feeling will come. But, it never does.
The only thing she’s left with is sweat pooling at her forehead and the faint sound of her teammate’s voice mouthing at her. Pass. Even though she can compute the instructions, her mind feels like jelly. Briefly, she wishes she could somehow get her phone and Google what to do, like someone telling her what to do at all times.
The thing about always having too much time on her hands, always having her every move calculated was that without it she really didn’t know what to do. Or, at least her brain didn’t. That’s what she tells herself as her body stands still, undoubtedly just as confused as the rest of her on what to do. But, as it turns out, even though her brain didn’t know what to do, her body did. Because, she eventually manages to muster up all the force that she has to just hit the damn ball. It won’t hurt you, it can’t hurt you.
What happens afterwards isn’t jaw dropping, especially not by her standards, the one she’s set over the years that has even her teammates scratching their heads in confusion now. But it’s something and it feels like it when she does it again. Then again and again and again. Once her body starts moving, it feels like her brain can finally catch up to it, like taking the jump in the first place was the only thing she really needed.
It feels a little unsteady and her body hasn’t fully adjusted to the whole thing yet but if she stops and thinks, amidst all the chaos, she realises that for the first time she’s not really worried whether this thing will stop working. When she was young, far too unaware of what to do with her body, there was always this nagging feeling accompanying her ; that one day her powers would stop working and she’d be rendered useless. She found that that feeling was no longer there. Because it had stopped and she’d still survived. Maybe not in the same way she did before but she was still here and the knot in her stomach felt just a bit lighter for it.
When she mouths to one of her teammates that she’s having an “odd day” it feels natural because that’s what it is. Or, maybe it’s finally a normal day without all the oddness that’s ever present. It doesn’t make anything better, because the thought of change and instability is nothing but terrifying but it feels lighter.
When Boishakhi was a child, the one thing she remembers being told almost every day was that she was too hot headed for a girl. And she’d probably proved her mother right by not biting back her words that maybe her father shouldn’t be acting in a way he wouldn’t want his child to. As she grew up, sometimes she briefly wondered if it would be so much better to be the opposite? The only way she could envision herself not being hot headed was if she changed her genetic makeup to be cold blooded. It’d be something but it wouldn’t be her.
In the case of fishes, their blood circulatory system is called the lateral line system, as it flows against the stream of the water, mimicking its waves and patterns. Maybe if she was born a fish instead of a woman her body could mimic the waves of the water. Yet, she doesn’t think it would make her any less herself nor would it make her any calmer.
Without her ability to make everything around her stop, time seems to drag on and yet she doesn’t mind it. It feels akin to the feeling she gets after running for a long time, exhausted yet almost accomplished in a way, like even her body knows it’s done something worthwhile with it. When the exhaustion of the game they’ve been playing finally hits her, it feels like a welcome hug. Like something she’d been waiting for her entire life and never got.
When you spend so much time running and running, from the world around you and everything that makes it what it is, always afraid of when you’d run out of time despite having so much of it, it feels almost therapeutic to feel a sense of accomplishment for something you’d done—no matter how small— instead of just being glad it was over.
This time, when she’s taking off her shoes, the only thing she can feel is the sweat that’s now reached her neck and her cheeks. She doesn’t need to check to know that her entire face must be flushed red. When she looks down at her hands , they are still beside her , with no intention of moving them. Not even if it meant getting her powers back.
Looking out in the sky, at the sun that’s now setting along with the rest of her teammates who are getting ready to leave, her chest feels more at peace than she ever remembers it being, as if she was back in her mothers womb as a child with no knowledge of the world and endless possibilities of who she could be. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t anything or anybody because she’d be herself no matter who she ended up being. And she thinks, maybe for the first time in a long time that it’s alright to not know her next move because she’d do whatever felt authentically like her, without anybody’s help.
