Temporality

Time on the page, time at the tip of my pen, does not flow as days and hours do. Time pools, time crystallizes, time stands still. And so that night when two strangers became strangers no longer, sitting without facing one another in the powdered-graphite night, a night so smudged with retracing, reshaping, remembering, that all its edges are now blurred—now that spectral night returns to me, and I hold time still. In these words, glances dart and dance once more, trying to decipher, trying to hide, in that game of endless stakes that we call “attraction.” I hear velvet voices murmuring words that by themselves mean nothing, but coupled with the night, with the stirrings of youth, and with fingers edging closer, retreating back, edging closer once more, mean “Tu me plais. Et moi, est-ce que je te plais aussi ?“

The answer then was, “Oui.”

And even now, tu me plais encore, si seulement tu le savais…

But time also slips away. In writing I spare broken hearts the pain of breaking again. In words, lovers can become strangers once more. Writing is not a forgetting spell, but it does condense, it does abbreviate, and sometimes it erases too. So a first kiss in writing can take three hours to read, while forever can take no more than three seconds.

One. They met. They loved.

Two. Or at least, they tried.

Three. Then they never saw each other again.

Sunlit Thoughts

Clouds shift like designs on sand washed away by lapping waves. Shifting, stretching, returning to mist. They had lingered there for so long that I had begun to forget the colour of the cerulean sky, begun to forget that behind those grey veils—at times soft and warm, at times so terribly, terribly cold—remained something eternal, something bright. Sunlight scatters across the pages of the yellowed book open before me, timid pools of light at first, like blushing fireflies that have emerged at the wrong time of day, but now the light falls with the surety of rain, a cascade of glimmering gold, dreamers’ gold, more precious than any metal or jewel. And so I let those grains of gold slip between my fingers; never shall I catch them and never shall I try. I watch the sunlight glow and dim, glow and dim, between the clouds ever shifting.

Possible Happiness II

The weather in my mind is a fickle thing. Some days rain gives way to sun, some days peace gives way to chaos, but a day in the mind is only a moment in reality. So the waves lap the shores of my quiet thoughts, only to crash with sudden violence. The little boat that I have taken out to sea totters precariously on each black crest. But the tempest calms, appeased by my prayers, perhaps, and once more I glimpse that realm in the corner of my mind’s sky, that realm called “Possible Happiness.” In the rare moments when I have caught a glimpse of that secret world, I have seen New York, where human hands add stars to the constellations of sleepless nights; I have seen Normandy, whose wild grasses sway to a silent song sung by the sea; I have seen Paris, where cats’ eyes watch from attic windows the little lives of mortals, just as gods do; I have seen London, where quiet thoughts of inner lives brush against the frocks of children on boardwalks by the Thames. I have seen… I have seen… All these worlds of possible happiness, all of them I have seen through flashes of sun and lightning through the windows of the soul. These worlds call to me, ask me to endow them with reality. “I will,” I whisper, “I promise, I will.”

Possible Happiness I

In the museum of my mind, dioramas depict endless scenes of possible happiness, each serenely illuminated from above, each a self-contained world indifferent to the rest. Here is one: hands tap, tap, tapping on wide-leg jeans to the rhythm of a song on a late summer’s day. The air has begun to grow cool, and people too, here strolling in Carroll Gardens, in Greenpoint, in Battery Park have begun to sport light sweaters—unzipped, unbuttoned, fluttering like wings in the wind. Here a traveler once young, now not quite as young, has come to rest, leaning against the railings facing New Jersey, with the endless skyscrapers of the financial district towering behind her, and she is content with her journey’s end, contemplating whether home has not turned out, in the end, to be where she had once longed to never live again.

Moonless Dreaming

Sometimes nightmares still terrify me. Sometimes I cannot but wonder whether the impenetrable forces of the universe, having come to know me over the years, having gleaned my deepest fears, know just which ghosts to conjure to bring forth tears, just which memories to reanimate to make me weep. I start awake gripping my sheets as I would grip the hands of someone I love, someone whom I have just lost in that moonless realm of sleep. In dreams I die many deaths, endure many heartbreaks. On moonless nights I peer into that lightless underworld, convinced that no soul can escape those infinite shades unscathed. Surely, upon my waking in the quiet night, some part of me must too have died? For if not, then for whom do these drying tears mourn? Surely the heartbreak of my nightmares really do break my heart, ever so slowly, in fractures like those in ancient porcelain, surely, surely, for if not then why does my heart hurt so? The moonless night is quiet; it does not answer me.