memory is mad_nomad

1

eleven thirty seven on pc clock

This early monsoon night is hot and sweaty. Little insects crash-land on the monitor. A blue Pacific noon spreads its bright body under wild passive clouds.

In the pixelled crystal sea, three palm trees rise in solitary glory on a darkish island.

Why do I hesitate between the worlds?

*

2

It was a spring midnight.

He lies there. I have never seen him like that. Lying on the ground. White and yellowing under an unforeseen dream.

Around him, women cry quietly. Mother looks at me as I enter. Says nothing. Just looks away. Her mother, my grandma, suppresses a wail. Her face crumples like a damp newspaper ball.

The morning is far away. I am sent away to grandma’s house. Time slows down when someone dies in the family.

The reality of father’s death does not sink in. A quick short glimpse of the face, and then I go.

But the image sticks. Even today. Like an eternity of death.

*

The night turns me over and over. Lying on a carpet in the dark room, I see a worried old man pass the night measuring his room with silent footsteps. As if to measure the vastness of time’s ways.

*

3

I have been speaking to you.

To a window through which I can fling pebbles of my silence and not hear the sound of their crash. You can keep secrets. You can wait. I know you will not judge.

Paper always flaunts. Like a billboard. It does not hide secrets in a grey darkness.

It is like people.

*

4

I always thought I was fragments. Must be mad.

When I tried telling a story, a whole story, I felt so dumb. How can you live on fiction, on a whole fiction? Live wholly on it? On fictions of wholeness? Tremendous resources, I must acknowledge.

But I don’t have these. I can’t even link fragments.

*