story time: government building. compliments on a red velvet case. “are you sure you want both? it drags on the tongue.” i am sure, i say. you would not remove a star from a soldier. think of a lone forbearing soldier under a black sky, opaque and unyielding; that is not a fair trade. the star and the soldier cannot be without one another.

story time: a window on a wall that leads to a hole. there is nothing in the hole, and the window has no pane. you cannot watch the sun rise from this room, but you can watch the sun shine on your fingers. a song pulses and sneaks through the curtains, “here we are tongue-tied, before we collide—” and you narrowly miss it.

story time: around a table. all of your personalities compounded in your mother tongues, and all of your mother tongues wagging in various judgements of character. i make no effort to mingle with you as the need has passed. i am not new to this space. we are all in exodus. no one wants to go back, but i do, i know my part.

story time: i let the silence be, clear and abating; i let it cover me with a warmth that could never compare. when you press your finger on my lips, i swallow all your might and confine it my chest in lieu of a nightingale or two. every day i strive to pluck birds from my ribcage. when i think too much, they do not sing; but i always hope that underneath the skin and behind the bones, their melody pulls through and i find my tongue.

it was an indistinguishable year, a few years ago, when i moved into my new home which would in time become my old home. i was crouching on the bedroom floor, surrounded by worn sheets and paint cans, covering my childhood dresser and bed frame with long red strokes. it was a calming, comforting gesture in a typical sight of boxes half-full and emptied; disjointed furniture waiting to be rearranged; new lives. my smaller cat stepped on the freshly-painted dresser and left a paw mark on the upper right corner, a sign i chose to keep as a reminder of love and levity. it did not take long to paint the furniture, and once all the pieces were dry i set to put them back together.

i could never explain what you were doing there with me in my room that day. you were once good and generous with your hands, but your priorities had shifted. it hadn’t always been this way, of course; there was a time when you could not not have been there. eventually, gradually, as with all things slow and dangerous, you opted for long days and even longer nights with your  favoured puzzle. your presence came to feel foreign to me.

i put the drawers back in the dresser. somehow they stuck together so that every time i opened or closed them, large pieces of paint peeled off and revealed previous layers. i had no desire for the forest greens of my youth. after another piece peeled off, i threw the drawer to the ground and cried out in anger. you stood at the foot of the bed and looked at me. your patience rarely ever faltered, but at that moment you questioned my sanity. how strange your voice sounded. i had almost forgotten you were there.

i suppose it would’ve been easy to lose it then, and i could’ve blamed anything, but it had to be you: you and your foolishly standing there, you and your not understanding of what it really meant for me to scream. i sat defeated across the drawer. as i finally exhaled, our last breath lingered in the room, and i quietly misplaced us—the turbulence of your old you and my new me—in the far corners of a red drawer.

you stretch out your long fingers, tips stained by beets and pomegranates. you paint your insides with the colours it knows best—all deep reds and purple blues. no one questions the morphing of you. a start never anticipates its end; it is too busy beginning, caught in the frenzy of unfolding.

it’s been like this a lot today—nowhere to turn but everywhere, with strange peripheral visions cataloging indescribable scenes.

(i do not run among the trees. there is no bridge to swim under. those high walls are not going to climb themselves.)

how easy it is to mourn the passage of time, regardless of the quality of time lost. i say save your tears, merak etme: we all have a taste for blood.

marguerite est malade car elle a mangé de la—

marguerite was sick because she ate a bit of herself, which turned out to be something else. that’s what i learned about her through her song, a song my mother used to sing to me as a child. the song of sick marguerite was a product of my mother’s youth; it was meant to be refractory but i wasn’t sure how it was possible to substitute a g for a d—the phonetic discrepancy never quite agreed with me. regardless, i played along because i understood the humour and i enjoyed puns, even bad ones; and mostly it warmed my heart to imagine my mother as a mischievous child, singing this song which, by all accounts, was quite vulgar in its time. when i tried to sing and teach it to my friends, they didn’t quite get it. i had to pause and explain the wordplay and its implication. while this need for an explanation validated my original hesitation, it also saddened me that my friends could not move past it and accept the song for what it was, as i had.

le curé labelle, assis sur une poubelle, priait le p’tit jésus en se grattant le—

these infinite loop songs may have been popular in my mother’s youth, or perhaps only with my mother, i wouldn’t know. i assumed there were more than just the one song about sick marguerite, but i only knew of another, the story of curé labelle. there wasn’t much to it. curé labelle (the local priest) was sitting on a trash can and prayed to little jesus while scratching his—and that is where the song cut and started over. i closed my eyes and saw the priest perched on the trash can. in my child mind, the priest donned a dirty grey suit to match the tin of the can, and wore a train cap. he was just a boy with disheveled hair, and his face was dirtied up by coal. he reminded me of martine’s little brother, jean, as dreamed up by marcel marlier and gilbert delahaye in their timeless classic. it made no sense for the priest to be dressed this way and to be of that age, but i couldn’t imagine him differently as i had never stepped into a church and i hadn’t been taught about priest accoutrement. it was also impossible for me to think of a grown man scratching himself on top of a trash can. a naughty little boy made more sense.

in my ultimate vision, marguerite and curé labelle were the very best of friends—they hid and they sought; they caught butterflies; they looked at the stars. on that particular day, marguerite was piqued by freudian curiosity and ate a bit of herself. she fell ill and was quickly bedridden, unable to come out to play. poor little curé labelle sat outside on a trash can, bored and lonely, waiting for her to get better. in a strange scene mingling fiction and reality, i saw my mother and her brothers running in circles around him, taunting him, granting him a physical reality he hadn’t asked for. it was a blasphemous song and i felt bad for little curé labelle, but not for the catholic church.

you hear distant conversations coming from another room; fragments of words that do not echo on walls but are absorbed deep into the recesses instead. you can’t tell what is being said. through notes and inflections you know these are not conversations with people you know, but between strangers who, for a moment, have taken refuge in your living room. every morning the voices rise and fall, but you pay no heed. your ear shifts in vague acknowledgment then seeks out another silence. you know you won’t have much time to finish writing this letter before the credits start rolling.

close your eyes. keep them still underneath your eyelids. part your lips. breathe as you normally wouldn’t. do not let your fingers wander. let the ink dry. do not pick up the pen. leave the page blank. close the door. shut the window. draw the blinds. turn off the lights. do not hide. do not follow the fragrance. let the mercury rise and fall. do not tip the pendulum. gather your notes. undress yourself. turn off the water. let the anchor down. do not ruffle any feathers. keep them close to your skin. beware of your heart. move slowly. avoid the third floorboard. tuck your hair behind your ears. let it fall back to your face. scatter the ashes. make some tea. (very black.) use the good china you do not own. do not let the spoon touch the cup. cross your legs. uncross your arms. place the cup under the window. warm your hands above the steam. let the tea cool down. open your eyes.

it rained. my heart sits heavily on my chest but i haven’t found a better place for it. from my bed i see small raindrops glowing under the balcony ramp. there used to be a tree in the yard, but it is gone now. i don’t know when it left or where it went; i wasn’t there for the farewell. in this space i see walls without windows and shadows of crows and seagulls gliding through the air, leaving elusive marks on the concrete. there is nothing there that shouldn’t be there—flesh and bones mingling, stories from another world.

we have been in this quietness together before. our fingers weren’t laced together; our hands weren’t touching. our minds were separated by my thoughts against yours. i kept a distance from you, and you kept your hand on my thigh. you told me countless things through your lips and from your eyes, but i absorbed only a fraction of them—the weight of our conversation too feathered for me to remember most of it. you wanted to be more of you with more of me, but within several hours you had already lost many of your defining features. (and how beautifully you faded.) the best part was forgetting, i suppose.

this:

this is what i said, and he had a valid reason to feel slighted. soon these moments won’t be easy to spare.

i took a nap in the middle of the day because i couldn’t shake a feeling. no matter how hard i tried to will myself into a different state, i couldn’t draw the energy; i didn’t know where to draw the energy from, i was just not convincing enough. i decided to sleep. i knew that in those hours of sleep i wouldn’t be feeling the feeling i was feeling—it would be at bay, relegated to the state of wakefulness that i had escaped from. i knew suspension would offer me something else; a substitution of feelings, a change in spirits. in sleep i could be safely relieved from that which overpowered me.

i slept.

(when dreams are nightmares, there is an opening for perspective. sometimes wonderful intensities live on and spill over to wakefulness. other times there are no dreams at all, but time spent pausing is a reward in itself.)

i woke up, the feeling somewhat tamed. the sun had already set, but i made myself coffee. i had a second breakfast. i fed the cat, and i stepped outside.

these:

the dissolution of boundaries.

the weight too heavy for a frail finger to hold.

the burning smell of a wooden door.

the vines climbing up the walls.

the children whispering underwater.

i am reading this book and i feel you reading this book with me. i am with you at a time that has already passed, yet there is no lag at all. you have read this book once, before me. your eyes have shuffled through the words; the fragments that are strangers to me are passing acquaintances to you. you have walked with them. you have a warm memory of them.

it is not the most important book to you, but it could be an important book to us. i picked it up and chose it; you lent it to me.

i can feel you and i can see you feeling the words on the pages, as i feel them through me, through you. some pages touched you more than others, some you skimmed over in moments of distraction. i can feel the contraction in your lower abdomen at the sight of certain sentences. i know it as though it is mine, but it is not. this wistful longing, the not knowing it would ever happen to you but the careful hoping—it is all yours.

i can feel you feeling the words and i cannot help but feel like a voyeur meddling in your sacred grounds.

you are a tender soul, generous and aggregated. i am often guilt-ridden at the thought of tearing a hole in your heart.

(chaque jour je reconnais l’idée d’un lendemain.)

the truth about novembers: they are not really there. they do not really exist. they have no flavour, and they do not care for sweet and spicy things.

novembers are an excuse for our memories to sway and to revel in deliberate amnesia. we go through lives scarcely remembering anything of the hours of those days. what has ever happened in cold november nights that was worth remembering? i had a hiccup once. i walked in the streets of vienna. i worked many long hours, most likely. i drank red, red wine in a bid to facilitate the arrival of so-called holiday spirits (though my favoured ones were ghostly, admittedly). many hearts were broken then—the hearts of faux captains who never learned to sail; the hearts of languid linguists prone to vertigo; the terminal hearts of animal lovers. recovered hearts were broken again. some hearts disappeared, and most hearts never returned. manifestly.

no, nothing ever quite happens in november. in november we put off for later, we postpone and we provide rain checks not out of caprice, but by reason of actual rain. we don’t gather ’round, though we probably should, as our warmth depletes in communal ways. instead we turn on many lights and forget the brightest one of all ever scorched our skin or dried the earth.

november is autumn’s last sigh when it has long decided it no longer wanted to live. it is the forgotten month between falling leaves and first snows, the scapegoat of our seasonal ailments. it is our listless abandon between heavy sheets and cushioned hips. it is a yawn with no relief. it passes through and leaves nothing behind. it is the unmistakable fog above water that wishes to freeze, and we never regret it.