khilna

a time capsule, opened and unraveled

my story at the base of a blossoming flower, where every petal meets right before the fall.

in my mind, when i smell my father’s perfume, i am taken back to a time where his clothes wear him like sunlight does to leaves, and his hands were still large enough to lose toffees between his fingers. I’ll catch him in dirty shop windows and puddles, and when he throws his head back laughing, the creases in his neck look exactly like my smile. I spend these monsoons jumping into these puddles till my reflection is exactly like his; all the roses in the world, and only the petals of my story will adorn a stage enveloped in a rapt, roaring applause. That day, he will say one of his same old speeches and it will refract against my poetry and all the light in the world that is dying, from weary city lights to smog stuffed stars, will turn golden again. i bet you’d be able to hear the twinkle in the distance, that day. i will be able to see it in your eyes, i bet.

my story will grow in your stomach if you eat one too many watermelon seeds.

i emptied out the pockets of my old school uniform and i found shards of sunrises i spent in cramped buses and (against the driver’s instructions) leaves from passing tree branches i reached out towards from the first row window seat. Back then, my hands fit perfectly with the twirling climbers, and i would spend hours upon hours rolling down manicured gardens and talking to bitter old trees. loneliness was the avla tree in my grandmother’s garden, and i was its best friend. loneliness was poster paints, and it dried until it was crusty in my fingernails. I’d fill up sketchbooks (and notebooks and the back of important documents and every blank space in textbooks) and the barks of trees (and weeds and the soil and bushes and inedible ornamental fruits and needly grass) with stories in which i saved the world. in the meantime the first of the five petals of a bougainvillea fell from my balcony down to the ground floor, tumbling down carelessly like i did from staircases and hills, into my hands. and what did i do? i crumpled it and threw it into a sky and watched it burst like pop rocks on my tongue, showering the sky in a kaleidoscope of a singular seismic saccharine florescence, a blush, boundless, breathing kind of new born hope.

my story and these flowers bisect at the anticenter of the world, and when you integrate the equation, the volume of the revolution is infinity.

my dad used to push me on lemon yellow swings on sunday mornings and once he pushed me so hard i managed to catch a morning star in my mouth. i fell on my face right after, getting the star stuck in my throat. years later i coughed up a supernova in the bathroom of my new school, and flushed it down the toilet. these stars, i tell you, are ubiquitous, they have no where else to go. long after, i would find particles of starlight on my income statements and text analyses, inside my cat’s ears and under my shoelaces. I would spend the less romanticized hours of the day, 9:13AM or 2:47PM or 8:23PM or 12:37AM, watching stray wisps of incandescence scurry around words i forget to highlight and spots i forget to color in. i have spent years cycling between rows of red-blue-yellow cars in graphite parking lots, crayon scribbled playgrounds and stippled temples, till the pedals of my cycle wore out and the chain snapped, i have spent summers making constellations from saffron light peaking through undrawn curtains during indigo midnight car rides around the city; what i mean to say is that maybe i got this story all wrong, there is no saving, only a savour. not until, but for. (for me) to be victorious, when there is nothing to win, is to throw your arm around loneliness, let the starlight rub off on their coat and whisper in their ear

“your turn”

and watch the world flip its pages backwards and watch time time itself this time.

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the first of the three parts to this is (obviously) about my dad, who i look up to like people do to prevent tears from falling. the second part is about my childhood, and i wrote about it solely because in english we analyzed a piece that i genuinely think i ghostwrote because its overarching themes are identical to those in my life. the third relates to “the rider” by Naomi Shihab Nye :

i don’t know whether to call my piece a counter or a response or just something with the same elements and themes but regardless, this poem is a piece i am fond of and i believe is worth framing in a museum.

i hope these monsoons (or summers) are kind to you, and i hope that the world is as gentle to you as the falling of raindrops and petals. thank you for reading my journal-esque almost-poetic nonsense

forever and always,

jia

(P.S all the numbers in the times i have mentioned add up to thirteen individually)