odds n' ends
どこでもいいよ
This is a list of windows I liked.
Through the first window, the initial phrase that came to mind was nostalgic sunlight. Not a personal nostalgia, but something much older than I. As it strikes the corners of the travel brochure someone left behind, the latter curls up a little, as if stretching after a late noon nap. It casts long shadows across my parents’ blue-tinted wedding photo. The image is newly dusted, though I don’t think my father has smiled so brightly on camera since. The date on the bottom reads 1989. It was always a gamble, whether that second window would close properly. Perhaps it was something more than RNG that rendered it open when I screamed fuck you at some poor passerby taking a stroll that night. Or sometimes it would be closed so that we can still sing songs, written by other people, for other people. Those hours were a little chaotic, but nice. Yakult drinks were nice. The squid snacks were nice. The third window was never really cleaned properly. When someone says New York City, it is always about the brilliant, bold things they meticulously polished, rehearsed a thousand times in front of a mirror only to drink away at some dimly-lit bar one September night. It is never the quiet, forgettable things, musings that ease up their scrunched eyebrows as they rest their heads for a short respite. But I tell myself that sometimes, this dirty window is kind. Sometimes, when the scenery outside is dark and I am the only person on this train, the lights across my city cast through this murky veil look like fireflies. i. The texture of rope in this tug-of-war dictates my idiosyncrasies. Half a year has gone by now, but I sometimes still let the hardened flax dig into my skin so they may form calluses already. A worthy distraction, but I was raised sheltered. Summers spent in a small corner of the bedroom where pixelations mimicked a delicate script. They took me to obligatory vows before I learned how to reason properly.
ii. I think about a hurricane somewhere. It drowns the fishermen to feed the fish. There is grace in the way their bodies were dragged from shore—a gentle maneuver on whose part? It is a shame I already knew how to swim. iii. A list of things that are not romanticized in memory: ambient music that does not complement the mood, a slow disregard for unsanitary windowsills, a stupid water boiler. iv. I’m probably crueler than you think. Even my mother tells me this. The same waves wash over me and I am no longer interested in your stories. Pillow talk is how you reveal your insecurities, but neither of us were kind listeners. Tonight, there must be some other incentive to dream: the promise of another mindless summer, a lack of jurisdiction for our depraved vagaries. There is an easier way to settle into this image, but the neighbors do not stop whispering sweet somethings. The night air must have brought something to me. The top of my right cheek burns saline and light. Hydration is recommended anywhere, but that’s a little unfair. Do you remember how the squirrels get fat before they die. That was a time when my eyes were still occupied.
I put up lights not because I miss home, but because I miss the notion of being home. This is a state of synthesized high. My guilty pleasures include replaying my own snap stories and sipping Horizon Organic milk at midnight. There is always a self-appropriated refrain between ordinary calm and moods like tonight. We talk shit sometimes. 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. 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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