Home

"In her solitude, she discovered something odd. She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about history-makers and the home-makers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it, she had simply hoped to take on the freedoms that belonged to the other side. What if she traveled the world and the seven seas like a hero? Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?

She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this."

"When no one was left she would have to confront herself. Leaving home left nothing behind. It came too, all of it, and waited in the dark. She realized that the only war worth fighting was the one that raged within; the rest were all diversions. In this small space, her hunting miles, she was going to bring herself home. Home was not a place for the faint-hearted; only the very brave could live with themselves."

"Orion slowly grew cold. It takes some time for the body to stop playing house."

"...and she was lonely, not for a friend but for a time that had not been violated."

~ Orion - from The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson

Things I Miss

Stumbled upon an unposted manuscript from Jan 7^th 2011 in an old hard drive:

Things I Miss

I miss June mangoes –

Yellow, luscious, inebriatingly aromatic.

I miss dripping green rains –

Punctuating march with rainbows of flowers.

I miss a pair of blue eyes –

Sinkable, poignant, blue-gray eyes.

I miss a hoarse mid-pubertal voice –

On a beautiful, red-lipped, truthful teenager.

(Remember how we laughed –

While our joke was still new…

“I ask you, 

why are my glasses askew?”)

Jan 7^th 2011.

Where Worse Things Keep Happening

To have to revisit one's own past with such distinct clarity - one would hope it were something beautiful. Shame! Shame to see that the pains that were numbed by the kindness of time, have been pried open by bullets and bomb shards.


Where Worse Things Happen

[Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. - Arundhati Roy]


[The blood-curdling echo of wails
Shall keep reverberating yet]

In the white silence of night,
In the vengeful stinging of frost -
The narrow breadth of my gauche hands
Has expanded monumentally,
Till it now encompasses
The galactic girth
Of my utter helplessness.

Each bleached morning,
I carry that leaden weight
Strung to my eyelashes.
Kohl, charred and inured
Spreads chaotically
From all the chafing.

Whereto should we look for succor…
The fallow faded promise of heaven?
The bitter belated justice of hell?

Or the paradoxical tying of our hands
(O yes, paradoxical!
I tried hard,
But fingers aren’t hair.
They’re unknottable)

And so we have become
Buyers and sellers
Of puppet masks –
We have one for every occasion
We have to have…
For underneath those facades
Our glazed over eyes
Do not [cannot] alter
Ever.

Dec 5th, 2009