Mid-squat above my dented desk chair, the one painted black, its wood from some long lost oak poking through, I realize I’ve left the kitchen light on. Its glow casts austere shadows down the hallway, disrupted only by a brief flicker—some fault in the fuse or simply the ghost of my better self, scolding me […]
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It’s true that braids are a love language. It’s true that fruit is a love language. It’s true that the shooting star emoji is, too.
I want to know what became of the girl but my aunts don’t know anything more about her, not even her name.
Tell me it will be enough. Tell me it will be enough to wipe away the spreading stain of blue.
The other night at a concert, my brother’s fiancé turned to me and said, Your brother is the only person I like all the time. The only one, she said. Everyone else I grow sick of or annoyed at. But not him. Her comment stayed with me because I feel the same way about you. Even when we are fighting. Even when you are cranky. Even when you eat the last of the quiche. Even when I don’t want to run to Ralph’s and Sprout’s and Trader Joe’s and Target all in the same day. I want to be domestic with you, you said during our affair, when the closest thing to domesticity we could achieve was wandering around Rite Aid together after the gym, pretending we were a married couple picking up shampoo. I think what you meant was—I want all of you, even the boring.
Palimpsest: the term came to me at that moment. I knew the Greeks had coined the term to denote the scraping or washing off old texts from a page—be it parchment, papyrus, or vellum—for reuse, as I knew the word could now be, and is, used figuratively for situations of overwriting or layered meanings. But it was only when I saw the buried texts that I realized my latest purchase was in fact one itself, the same time I understood the concept’s usefulness as a trope to characterize my whole trip.
My mother has what you might call a tradition. Each summer, when the Connecticut heat slides towards 90 and the humidity makes it feel like you're breathing through cotton balls, my mother goes outside to her car, rolls up all the windows, closes the door, and sits in it for as long as she can manage. She alerts no one. Seven to eight minutes later, she throws open the front door, gasping, eyes squinting from the sweat that could no longer be held back by her eyelashes. She smiles as sweat pools inside her shoes and eventually spills out of them, leaving two watery footprints on the floor when she walks to her bathroom for a shower. I wonder for a second what Yemaya would have to say about the oceans at her feet.
