“Every time you go somewhere you leave somewhere behind” –Mal Blum
One day I will leave this place and it’ll come back to me, from somewhere I can’t see: the ocean I glimpsed sometimes, the mountains so far away as to be blue the coldness I imagined in the words, the buildings, the harbors, the relentless green, the cherry blossoms which bloom pleadingly the ones I love so tightly and on borrowed time
I could not imagine myself here but here I am, and there I will be, collecting things by losing them
For now, I am getting my ducks in a row. Trying to decide what this year will mean. Already many terrible things have happened but if I set my intentions by the end of January, I will still have made it in time.
I felt good about this year at the turn of it, with unusual certainty. The last few hours of last year, an old family friend told my friend and I about life and painting and commitment and I felt like things were possible.
18 days in someone told me that we’re all cursed, shared the nightmarish month they’ve had, everyone nodding. Someone else says it’s the year of the snake – we’re shedding skin, it’s messy.
I tell them what my friend said about it being a Year One—new beginnings. They say yes, how painful. I am stressed that we understand this differently and worry about what’s coming. The snake had better hurry up and shed, someone said.
I remembered today that snake is not the year we are beginning but the year we are ending—horse is coming, on February 17th. That means we’re shedding the last of it. It also means I have until February 17th to prepare for the new year.
I know it’s silly to feel like anything will change in a new year or to be surprised when bad things happen in its first moments. I never thought that they wouldn’t happen. Maybe I am surprised how quickly other people give up on a year, or call it cursed. Maybe I just felt too rushed in the first week to set resolutions and don’t like stumbling into a new year half-dressed.
For someone who’s been having a hard time with hope lately, it’s strange to feel it most hearing my parents’ friends sing Auld Lang Syne. Nothing changes and the year gets started without me. But one night a year we all believe the same thing: things can be different. By the end of the month—or when horse takes over from snake, at the latest—I will be ready to make things better.
I am so annoyed and angry and exhausted with you all. I love you. Happy new year. Just let me finish putting my armour on.
–KMN
Let me put my arm around you
Soon it will be a new year in the old country. Months after my neighbours bring down their Reindeers from the roof where my kite is still stuck between the chimney and a sandbag too heavy now from dew and frost.
In the old country, Cimita polishes pictures of Sauba and Kousin But only the pictures where they’re smiling as kids. The more I’ve tried to be like one The more like the other I’ve become instead.
Cimita only puts those pictures up when we know No one will make it back home for the holiday This spring. I’ve tried to explain To the neighbours that the kite means more
than a made thing bound by lokta and butcher’s twine. In our calls, Cimita never admits it’s getting late And there is work tomorrow I hear the things she doesn’t say. There is strength somewhere in withholding. She waits for Kousin or Sauba to speak. They don’t, but they still stay on the line.
I hear the horns over Bagmati blaring. I wait for them to leave. Cimita says this year she’ll have to waste All the sesame, jaggery, molasses and just Stay in bed and wait
until it’s a different day, a different day, when we fly old kites And I can feel the marks twine left behind on the arm you’ll bring around my waist.
Yesterday I did a bad thing due to a lapse of goodness. I am afraid I could be broken. Good people don’t hurt people. My fault lines could shift at any time and strike-slip the quiet.
I’m never quiet. I’m a bad dog. Time collapses on every fault. Silence hurts.
I have hurt so many people in quiet ways. My fault. Maybe I’m a bad boy. Running laps to kill time.
Thank you, but you cannot fault God, not this time, for ruling a child Bad. You do not understand how much I hurt everyone always, every moment. Even in the quiet.
Every night I kneel in the laps of angels and tell them my crimes. I relapse into that old vault of small sins. Disquiet the settled dust, the memories that have already been given their time. Every night I tell myself that if it hurts, I could not, I could not, I could not be bad.
In my quiet shower, I scrub myself clean. I lapse into good and bad, black and white, at fault and out of time, I have hurt.
In school they taught us about tectonics and even though I forgot most things I never forgot about tectonics. The way they push off each other, up, mountain-building, or bury each other into lava. In my eight-year- old imagination, this happens all at once, and still, I can’t imagine being in contact for that long. My mother says that hugs need to last twenty seconds to have their full effect. When you hugged me for a full twenty seconds, I felt like maybe I could understand what kept the tectonics together for long enough to change the topography of the earth.
It’s dark and I’m on a plane and it’s cold outside, it’s fall, the last beautiful trees, but right now I can just see the notes of light from the buildings, and the blue-gray strands of the clouds, and the dark. And the music is the old music which has come around, and the new friendship is the old love which has come around. I’m thinking about the woman earlier and her perfect poem and head, and how well it works in the night. My other friend and the stupid fights and the stubborn fondness. Everyone we’ve met who we love now and who remind me who I can be. My perfect complicated parents who love so much with me. I’m thinking about the cold air which brought on the snow, which i heard of and didn’t catch, but the near snow and the last yellow leaves and the little irritations and the being home brought on this warm wind deep dark mood where I feel good and sad and loved and okay, really okay, happy during grief which I’m realizing is going to keep coming around from all directions, somehow I’ve managed to let the weather move through me every day, things change all the time, last week I was scared of my feelings, I was on the bus and I was dying, and today i am flying through the air, I am not afraid of anything, I want to squeeze the hands of my past and future best friend and listen to the new old music, and walk home in the snow-forbearing air and the streetlights and the fallen brown leaves which make me remember being young and home, and love myself and cry and snuggle into bed with extra blankets and dream of good things and I am not scared even if I get nightmares because everything changes, even the air, even the night, even the most certain feelings, even the trees.
– KMN
They were perfect.
They really were and I’m starting to think that is why I never pursued a life with them. How do you tell someone that even after our hovel burned down, we kept a bit of the fire going to keep our fingers warm? The houses of your neighbours, the lit doorways and porches still laughing as ours crackled in the moonlight. Sanuma never asked for help. In the future there is a hospice bed with the hand rests removed, stowed under the covers like mango seeds in Terai’s prairie dunes. In the past there is a latchkey kid learning to cook alone, feet firmly planted on a teal milk crate Sanuma sorts medical bills in another room, amused. How do you tell someone that you once put everything you owned in a milk crate, and still left room for the last of the stones your hovel’s floor was built with, the surface dull and smooth with years of kitchen clogs and nursing shoes? When Sanuma lit the fire for our final meal, the hearth and the red clay shone like they always had before. But every meal is every meal only until there is no one left to share. Fiddleheads curling inwards like little kids before it’s time to go home Fiddleheads curling inwards like polymer papers turn to ash and the ash turns to snow. How do you tell someone what it means when a body lies unflinching, only when it rains at night How do you tell someone what it means to withhold And still be wanted what it means To hide and still be seen?
last night when we walked up the hill the ice smelled like rain
we wore our coats open windless streetlights glowing
you held my arm to keep from slipping I matched your steps
last night was missing something because my breath hit no resistance
it was confusing for the air not to bite to wade through the night with only
the weight of my head to worry about. I had no name for it.
I lost the quote about change. I need a new one.
– KMN
The heart says nothing for now.
Tired today, but tomorrow I think I’ll cook for myself and the day after that for my family and friends I often worry if there is anything else I can do relieved, the heart says nothing for now.
Mayalu Press 