It’s getting harder
to remember the feeling of sunlight on skin, motorcycle breezing up a dusty
hill, past a shuddering bus and a woman selling neera already gone with the
afternoon. Here, the sun is cold and
grey and the motorcycles are so polished, no kicking pieces trying to escape in
the wind. No seashell cemeteries where
wild peacocks shed their feathers one by one, no frothy sugarcane juice by the
side of the road. Just the
low-resolution memories humming around an empty mind, a foreign language
crippling what there is to be said, is there anything to be said after
dark? The sun’s setting later and later,
but what good does that do us if it’s cloudy all day? And in the arms of someone else, a
yet-unknown loneliness—in between love’s ribs, there’s empty space expanding,
devouring the rest. Where do we go from
here? Papers to grade, papers to write, and what good are they without the hands that write them? Nobody here has hands anymore. Machines
selling coffee, washing dishes, renting cars, making tables and chairs to
furnish the void. The threads attached
to my remaining ribs pull incessantly towards him. He once told me it was nine thousand
kilometers, but to me it’s nine hours in a closed airplane flying over
countries I’ve never visited next to people I’m not sure I want to meet. So until something snaps—either the threads
or my ribcage— I’ll try to imagine Sisyphus happy, carrying furniture up the
stairs until his wrists give way, eating breakfast in the morning like almost
everyone else.
