Back in time

Looking to the future, I have slipped back in time, become reckless in a way I have not lately been, driven drunk, been uncomfortable, surrendered myself to sweat and mosquitos, ripped open my throat singing in a voice not mine, in a language not mine, speeding through a city once mine but soon to be something else, willing it to keep me, to restrain me, to stop me, bury me, make me stay.

Too long

 I know that if I sit too long at my desk at night in silence, something will come loose and my chest will open to the weight. I have been successful at turning away, facing elsewhere, but tonight when there is no urgency that requires either action or rest I find myself here again, where I always come when my ribcage is parted.

Fat and booze

 Full of fat and booze I fall asleep to face the hunger and awareness of the next day

Fasting, feasting

I try to fall asleep with a full belly trying to imagine what it must be like to live across the street from a leafy tree-lined feast, just a slip of luck away from fasting.

DUST

Dust is a hundred-thousand microscopic moments from selves you've long shed that've found new homes in the disused shelves of your furniture.  A piece of me from when we first kissed collects behind your TV with a piece of you from the day your mom called and said Uncle Hector is in the hospital.  They sit in silent vigil until the day we move in together.

I don't understand

I.

On the flight I sit next to two young, attractive, very made-up girls who drink a lot of wine. Across the aisle are three dark young men who seem to be headed somewhere for a job — perhaps to join the young Malay and Filipino men and women manning the overpriced stores in the Muscat airport. They fidget until they are stunned into stillness by their whiskeys, becoming slack, helpless zombies in their seats. The light-skinned, fair-haired flight attendant is visibly irritated by them — I don’t speak Hindi, she spits, lips painted pink, smudged, exasperation palpable in her pale face.


II.

At immigration there is a sudden high pitch — the officer manning the line to my right yells at a woman standing at her booth. The officer’s eyes flash. She’s very pretty, in a delicate way that makes me think of an indie music festival in a meadow. She looks incensed. I can’t see the face of the woman she is yelling at, but she’s wearing a peach coloured headscarf, and there’s another woman next to her at the counter and I assume they are together.

I move up in my line. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch an sheet of paper being waved. A-4, like my own e-visa. The waver is the women in peach. The pretty officer once again reprimands her — now I think she must be interrupting someone else's procedure. We are in the foreign passport holders line, and only after this second scolding do I wonder if the woman even understands the language in which she's being scolded.

As I walk up to my counter, the air thickens further. The pretty officer yells again — the woman in peach seems to be trying to go through and is told, through fierce flailing gestures, to step back. The officer checking me, another young woman — also attractive, though more punkish and dishevelled — chimes in: she yells and slaps the counter in front of her, a shiny plastic surface.

The woman in peach moves over to my line, and my officer, after asking for my visa, looks not at it or my passport but fixes a stern gaze on the woman. At this point I look back and see that the woman is smiling, her skin peachy too. She is told to step aside and wait; I go through. I wait a minute to see what will happen to her, but I don’t understand anything.

URGENCY

I.

Urgency affects its immediate surroundings in much the same way a fire does. It catches and spreads, and your only best shot at safety is to remove yourself from the situation entirely—to watch your life burn before your eyes, and believe that your distance will spare you the same fate.

II.

She moved to San Francisco. Or was it Istanbul? Today, an hour's drive and a day's flight feel equally prohibitive. We don't talk so much. I wonder, from time to time, how life is over there.

III.

Two giant maples grow in the front yard of my mom's house. The old lady across the street, before she died, said she remembered them being planted when she was a young girl. The roots of the one closest to the house is stressing the old home's foundation, so they'll have to remove it. So many falls raking those leaves.

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.

Empty space

I think this thing that I'm feeling is a long-felt pressure beginning to disappear, a weight beginning to lift and the sudden slackness leftover, as if nausea had disappeared and I were now weak with hunger, or if I stopped holding my breath and my lungs crumpled, or if I stopped bracing for it, let down my hunched shoulders, and let myself be rushed by the cold.

SOME TEXTS

for Brianna Maria

I.

She's one of the lights—there, across the river—that make the city glow. About now she shutters her windows, darkens the rooms one by one, and reminds herself of things to remember come morning, and tells her cat she loves her.

II.

This is a good morning note. This is a "my life is better for having met you" note. This is a I'm-having-trouble-falling-asleep-because-I'm-imagining-doing-fun-things-with-you note. This a #2blessed2stressed note. This is a note recreating the way you slow down my cardiovascular system. This is a note written with one hand under my pillow, a note written in the cold, a note that pulls its meter from my chest. This is a note meant to be read in a waltz: bri-an-na, ma-ri-a. This is a note meant to be read in the first few strands of light lain over our forested city while an unyielding young feline vies for your affections. This is a note that declares (in a manner of sustained volume and steady tenor unavailable to my own human voice) that when I think of you, the whole world seems a bit more handleable.

III.

I'll take payment in the form of hugs and kisses, and maybe sweet treats 0:) But also some money, right? We'll figure that out later

Long journey

Outside the window the views get stranger, the sky darker, and inside I grow bleaker, heavy with a grief as dramatic and inexplicable as the landscape, sitting next to a very sweet cholita with a very sour smell. This journey is longer than I thought.

STREP THROAT, WINTER: 2017

The athletic aesthete was a theist and an avid adventurer with an undying adherence to address adulations above.

Still time

Three days with the covers pulled up to my chin, ears and eyes stuffed full of garbage, shutting out the possibility of naming my fear or leaving anything behind, generating limbo, creating quicksand, sinking sinking, floundering, then climbing out and finding a different kind of pause in the plump black shiny bodies of a pair of aubergines on the kitchen counters smiling as they wait for the the warmth of the oven, and before that the sharp pleasure of the knife slicing, and before that the cool stream of water sliding off their waxy skin, and before that the gentle awestruck caress of my hands.

MORNING AFTER

Heading outside and feeling the cool air mix with the warm sun against your cheek, you pause a moment to hear the door close behind you before carrying on. The streetscapes are silent this early on a Saturday—the morning's frosted dew still unstomped on the grass blades. You reach into your pocket and turn up the music in your ears before you walk away from the major arteries and into the residential area. Backroad by backroad, you carve a lightning-shaped path across town. People are just waking in their homes, but cats and dogs and birds mark the otherwise still scenery with sudden movements and with lazy movements. Some trees survive green and needly in this weather, but many are glorified twigs, reaching upward sans fioriture. And then you take a turn down an alley and walk naturally through a backyard whose owner you've never met. And there it is, as it has been every time before: in a small clearing at the border of four homes—homes shaped like they house kind families—there lives a small collection of rosebushes. It's unclear who watches over this patch, but the care is immaculately and invisibly performed. You bend to the flowers in an observant deference to the improbability that something so fragile and so red should survive in weather where your own breath is too foreign to go unchanged. Standing, you feel the second half of a vibration in your pocket and excitedly pluck out your phone, but it's only a message from a friend and you go back to imagining today as a healing experience.