Over time I don’t want to forget,

what it is that is worth whatever that we do.

–

In another world, where life is truly a game, I hope it will not be pay to win. Unless it’s paying it forward with kindness.

–

On a slow morning in a slow month, listening to a piano I cannot play with the sunlight streaming through the window in front of me – I am a little breathless with the beginnings of a headache.

It stuns me, sometimes how bright the world is and how bright the sun is.

My grandma was reading the newspaper (is?) now before we go to the hospital, she too, is caught up in the idea of rankings.

But someday I would like there to be some absolute relatives.

That things are good and things are bad, kind and unkind.

After a while of thinking upon it, we are not people to take pleasure in knowing things are uncertain.

That we can live and live well knowing it, doesn’t mean we want it to be; that thought, again.

 

It leaves me restless at three in the morning when I wake up with eyes dry and without stars.

What is that shadow in my vision? The not-quite oval with another hole in the middle – something that we have been aware of for much longer but do not have an answer for.

A halo, but not of light but shadow. Since light chases it away.

Sometime between three and four fifteen, I fall asleep. I wake again and then cannot sleep anymore.

Why is it that we want to sleep the most when we must not have it?

The old clock chimes on the hour, at fifteen minutes past and at fifteen to the hour. Is there a difference in the length of the chiming?

I do not know. Sister is at work.

On most days I sleep through these hours. So that is one reason that I cannot sleep well in the night.

–

The back of my palms smell of disinfectant, diluted in a ratio of one is to twenty. Numbers hurt my eyes right now, possibly something to do with the two hundred I counted to in a bid to sleep.

I did not sleep.

–

This disjointed writing is for ourself, another day to read through and sleep after.

(I yawn)

Why not be it an extended poem?

–

What is it which is mattering to you now, in these days, I wonder?

The truth laid so clean in those numbers. They choke me and I am blooming.

Why do my pair of lungs not learn how to breathe under a mask better, rather than leave me short of breath for a month?

Why do our genes not know the temperatures here are high after fifty-five years?

S will say I’m being silly – she was only half-listening to my sleepy rambles in the evening.

Frangipanis and graveyards, being planted on the roadside, an omen for the inevitable future.

The small blooms of those frail trees, transplanted, almost convince me that it is not a frangipani tree mini.

Do bonsai flower smaller, deformed flowers?

–

Her linkin park CDs are on the shelf by my favourite peony-jade box I forgot existed.

Her bottle collect glints in the sun, the interplay of light.

–

Rubbing walnuts into small scratches in the wood. Can polishing cracks fix them?

Using the shift key to capitalise words and thinking back to a time that we used the caps lock for that – when did we shift and why and how?

–

A green river is our reminder of this month in the past, the tree that grows past the window and a palm tree taller than a building.

Online groceries and baby spinach being out of stock all the time.

–

The cool breeze dries out my eyes.

How I wish the rose plant could come back to life. If it is too late for them, is it too late for us too?

–

The clouds are grey but the sky is pale blue: an Einaudi mood. Not that I truly know the composer, but that the music fit.

–

I do not know – one question to three of these.

A foolish tribute but still a part of us that we cannot let go of, and will not sacrifice at the altar of the future.

–

A mosquito kissed us on the cheek and for a moment we panicked thinking we would be sure to get dengue from it.

It flew before we got to check the markings (for white stripes on the legs, the aedes).

But speaking in statistics we think it will not be us. Is that foolish, too?

–

The fourth raja who murdered a boy-saviour; a hill running red with blood, the iron-rich soil of today.

And on that hill, the home I almost cannot bear to return to.

Advertisement