Nupur Shah
University of Mumbai
Wafting down the brook of life, dying, she wants to see him more, last, once again.
Time.
Ripples through her in, oh, so many eddies.
Is he somewhere here among these folds of living water that are trapping her in, limb by Iimb?
This is what Ophelia, daughter, sister, virgin, woman, wants: to find, discover, invent bits of him inside of her. She wants to be startled by his omnipresence, swept away by his omnipotence, soak in his omniscience. But what she wants more than anything is to banish the gossamer ghost of his image that seems to have become stitched at the back of her eyelids that she has pasted onto the blue blanket of the sky even though the black earth will soon close them cold.
What is Hamlet she wants that even his own life will refuse to keep him? Who is Hamlet she wants that he called his own mother fallen?
O, for the said Hamlet to fall into her and begin peeling her wild, wild skin with lick after lick of that language that is ….only his….if only she had been given an equal gift of speech….
I think nothing, my Lord. Between my maidenly legs, nothing is a good thought to think about.
Meanwhile, dear death is steadily wrapping her away in its silver foil; the branches of her body are bending until they will embrace the roots and the entirety of her tree will be rooted out of existence. O, the bliss of nothing!
But until that triumph of time, she is clasping the leaves of his words; pulling at them stalk by stalk.
She remembers speaking to him of rosemary for remembrances and pansies for thoughts.
And he had said something mad, mad, mad, about getting herself into a nunnery.
But why a nunnery, she thinks into the air now, why that strange place that seemed strangely unplaceable in her exploding head. What was a nunnery and where could she find one?
Had she really been able to find one, would she have allowed herself to virginate at Elsinore, mothering thoughts of making nurseries for his children?
She would not have been here if other Hamlets could exist in other places for other Ophelia like herself.
But he was alone; like art, like love; like her, a strange place enough for her strangely unplaceable head, heart, limbs, legs, all mad self to disappear into.
Moreover, there are no nunneries (she is thinking as all ends); neither nunneries nor nurseries out there; every suffering belongs in here (like life itself) in between the nothing of a woman’s legs, legs that cripple the woman wherever she goes.
Where is Ophelia going? Sprawled in the sorrow of this undying water that seems to go on for far more than her breath can, she is going into the cavernous deep of a depthless desire. There a new language for a new body seeks for her. Unlike him, it will love thee well, as if until now she were an image outside of her own mirror, but will soon be transformed into a whole reflection etched in the water and reflected back as the clouds that are weeping mad, mad, mad.