all things die, i suppose

EN DOBLE

I saw you with both my eyes open, and saw doble. I closed one eye the rest of our conversation, but only grasped half the story. The rest of my mind draped itself around the crests and crashes of your words, the syllables pulsing from your mouth like eruptions from a burning world. You chuckled into your hand and your shoulders fell like flowing lava. Let me burn reaching around the curve of your collar bone. Our eyes caught in a pause and our mouths grew limp, betraying neither pleasure nor anxiety. I opened my eye and there were two mouths quickly licking your lips with just the tip of the tongue. Blinking, focusing, I thought out my next sentences just as the server asked if we needed another round.

Viva la vida, como dijo Frida

Observo a mis labios en el rearview de mi coche por la noche, mirando la corrida de las luces de la carretera sobre ellos, y pienso en qué guapo son, qué guapo se ven gritando cosas en la privacidad de mi caja metal, gritando cosas en mi idioma adoptado, gritando Órale! gritando Pendejo! Te parece gracioso, pero no es nada grave, me estoy hibridizando nada más. Sí que hablo español y sí que vivo en Nueva Delhi, y sí que escribo, y presto atención a lo que me da la gana, y estoy contenta, coño! En las pausas ahora, incluso cuando hable inglés, digo ehhhh y no uhhhh, y eso me dice que ya me penetró algo del otro mundo, ya se me injertó algo distante, ya estoy viviendo una doble triple multiple vida, y que guapos mis labios riéndose de alegría.

One day in April

One day in April, I went for a hike. Twenty kilometres in under six hours in freezing drizzle and stiff sub-zero wind. I think I was trying to break my body in punishment for carrying around so useless a person, unable to do one damn thing to stop the bodies of other girls being broken. I think I was trying to dissolve it on the other end of the planet because it carried a small piece of a girl born in Ferozepur in 1931 whose body had just turned to ash.

REFRACTION

You know the phenomenon of refraction, where the light hits the water and takes a sharp turn downward, and you can't tell if you've finished half your pint or three-quarters of your pint or if the pint in front of you is one your friend ordered you and took a sip of whilst delivering—

We met in a bar called High Dive, a pun proved in its low-lit/high-priced interior, and we had a pleasant evening before parting ways with a polite hug.

Sharing a wide grin, we refilled our glasses saying this or that about optimists and pessimists, but ended up agreeing that a near-empty glass is a sign that the wine is in our bellies, and that thought made us laugh.

Dust

Dry summer storms, semi-desert bluster, this city, now, is high dust. Further south, the monsoon has arrived, but humidity precedes it here and we wait, days dawning hot, setting still. Sitting in a dusty terrace full of dusty plants in a dusty green shirt eating with my fingers off a steel plate, making prints on the kitchen floor with water splashing out of a tiny sink after a big meal, luxuriating to the rumour of a breeze, I am flush with the place. This is geography between my toes, congregating in the creases of my body, this is the answer to the word 'where'. 

SOME DEATH

The night was long and stillness transitory, coming between instances of the amorphous reaching and slow pulse of the moonlit tide. Splinter cells crept in the dead of night, working toward flanks. We listened even as we slept, felt with our flesh for invasion. And then it happened: a true interruption. Noise. Motion. The landscape shifted as they moved across the lands, hugging the contours of the hills and the valleys. Moments of panicked cacophony, moments of individual agony, moments of labored breath; and then a heavy calm as the entire engagement was finished. I remember it all well, but it's the smell that haunts me. And now I spend my morning breathing fallout as you head to work.