odds n' ends
どこでもいいよ
Cautiously experimental. A tune you hum to yourself while tucking in your shoes. Today is an ordinary day filled with ordinary sounds: the faint rustling of leaves, the exchange of war cries between crickets and cicadas. Only if the melody from my speakers once belonged to a sparrow—maybe then can I understand.
Someone hand-washes her grandmother’s floral blouses, aged seven years and going. The new ones are neatly stashed in a suitcase somewhere. But she tells her granddaughter to not be afraid; she does not plan on leaving anytime soon. The child who grips her grandmother’s hands thinks of her calluses as natural. She stares into her cloudy eyes but only dreams of her own adventures in the rom she newly purchased for her Gameboy Advance. Her grandmother tells her to marry early but fall in love late but she grows up watching everyone around her. In middle school, a boy tells a girl that he likes her smile but the girl tells him that she does not really like to smile. Instead, her favorite expressions are smirk, derp and gasp because they were more fun to make. He promises her wonders but she prefers the monotony running through her blood: black hair and black eyes. The girl tells the boy in the next class that she likes his smile. He tells her that he prefers girls with eyes that light up with wonder. In high school, the girl dyes her hair. This is the apotheosis of retrospective narrative. She paints a blank wall in sedated differences. She makes a needlessly boring observation sometimes: eureka! In this picture, her grandmother walks a step ahead of her grandfather—that, too, is another interpretation. i. A flamboyant character in garish attire tells the story of a starving man, stranded at sea, who cried over the fish he was forced to kill. A beautiful Arowana, king of the waters. When the starving man caught the same fish again, he would not be able to differentiate between his own tears and mere stretches of brine.
ii. I store in a conch shell the elegy to my idealism. Key set in B minor. On windy days, it echoes some vague notion of someone who was once more merciful. iii. This is neither a story of hero complexes nor an allegory of conditioning. I thought forgoing this thing they call expectation would make me a kinder person. But I realize that even my nightmares are idyllic in nature. I visit them on sad nights, happy nights, drunken nights alike, before settling back into gradients of wakefulness. And this distinction is probably cruel. That is, the dreamverse governed by my ideals can only be populated by marionettes donning the faces of people I know. They do not speak about themselves. Or the things they like. The way they sip their afternoon tea. Someone wearing my face plays a supporting role in someone else's noir movie. There is no ticket guaranteeing passage from one theatre to the next. The parasitic cycle is karma. We all play fools, pretend this little box is soundproof—paper orchestra, paper symphonies. But my ears are as poor as my eyesight. I sometimes pick up the old conch shell and still hear a song of gratitude. year one said I was weaker than I thought. That the things I thought myself immune to kept me awake at night. That I favored the concept of reheating cold fish. It actually makes no difference, whether you reheat it or not—the aftertaste remains the same: fishy. Either way, I do not mind. I think about someone else's ocean.
Someone's promises were made here: a town of borrowed ghosts. When the number of vows outnumber the number of inhabitants, they are auctioned off the next day at noon: sometimes dirt cheap, other times worth a pretty penny. Adults claim this is only a fad, a passing breeze leading from one pier to the next. But piers echo themselves and I am an adult. My friends wait on piers of different shores. The figure of a young sailor blocks them from my view. He directs his gaze towards the waters and does not lower his head to inspect the quality of wood supporting his thin frame. To hell with your sea. Someone hums an old nursery rhyme. They are jovial but off-tune. We do not tell them the song's origins. As I raise my glass, toast to someone's birthday, I notice that my breath smells of coconut. A memory of days I was too happy to stop and record mingled with the hazy notion of growing things: moss on yellowed photographia. An infestation easily controlled by the bravery to light a single match. But the roots are invisible to the eye. They thrive. year two says I will be brave. year three sleeps. year four will remember softly. |
Authora little cynical & tired Archives
July 2019
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