Afterwards

  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.