Polaris

by Denisha Naidoo

It is not my father’s funeral and yet my legs wobble and threaten to succumb to gravity. Memories infiltrate the fog in my head and blur the divide between the past and the now. I am lost in thoughts that leave me unmoored, directionless.

I lean on the brick wall for support. My eyes half-focus on something on the sidewalk—an old wallet, scuffed and worn. A passerby kicks it.

“Dissociative trauma response,” my therapist calls it.

The bruise on my forearm is real. A purple badge where I pinch myself. I am awake.

In my dreams I am four maybe five. My father is still alive—strong, robust. I inhale his scent—the smoky hint of sandalwood, I run a finger along the ropey muscles of his forearm—the childhood scar he never explains and sink my hands into the thick silky waves of his ebony hair. I dream of the desert, red sand, sunset glow and the brilliance of stars in a vast inky blue night sky. In this place, I can feel forever. I hear nothing and sense the fullness of space above us juxtaposed against the firmness of sand beneath our feet.

He draws patterns in the sand—the stars, the constellations.

“Polaris,” he says and points to the heavens. “To navigate by.”

I look to the stars and find joy.

The rough brick beneath my fingertips calls me back to the present. I am as unnoticed as the discarded wallet—a relic of someone else’s loss.

Feet nudge the wallet one way and then another. It travels at the mercy of fate. A pair of brogues kick it in my direction. Black boots complete the final pass until the wallet stops at my feet.

I slide down the wall to take a closer look. The leather, soft and scratched is curved to the shape of someone’s body. No one notices when I pick it up. Bereft of money and credit cards, it weighs nothing at all. I gently turn it over in my hands. Grains of red sand fall onto the bone white sidewalk.

Longing slides down my spine. I run my fingers through the wallet and find nothing. I hold it to my nose and inhale the scent of warm leather.

When darkness descends, I look to the sky. Polaris winks back.

BIO

Denisha Naidoo is a South African Canadian physician psychotherapist, poet and writer, who lives in Ontario, Canada with her dog Maverick. Her work has appeared in Killer Nashville Magazine, Amazing Stories, Gramarye, PRISM International, Passager Books, Prairie Fire, The Temz Review, The New Quarterly, Open Minds Quarterly, The New Quarterly, and Ladies Briefs: A Short Anthology, and others.

Website: https://denishanaidooauthor.com