Viewpoint

Everywhere I look there is a great wave of shadows. I believe there is a light that casts them, invisible as it seems. And I believe the shadows know they stem from brighter things, even if they run from the light that is their source.

I used to be an idealist, my face always turned towards the brighter side of things. Now I am a realist. I look to the shadows, and remember the light, and enjoy watching them dance together.

You and I

Our bond is almost umbilical. You are the first one I touch when I reach the place I call home. You are the soul in my words, the heart with which I feel my way in foreign spaces. My rose-tinted glasses through which privilege is lovelier, and the mirror that reflects my most helpless self. Anchor and wings, the lodestone to which I return every time I seek my roots.

You, whom I cannot judge with objective vision. When someone lifts a finger to you I must need explain how you became this way. Excuse her, she is old and troubled. If you had been through a past like hers you wouldn't know what to do either. I watch children cast words like stones at you. They are only just learning the depths of words like culture and history. They are idealistic enough to believe there are simple solutions. Each time they choose a label I hasten, in my mind, to explain.

Their word for the day is 'Slavery'. I have walked past enough such 'slaves' on my way to school every day, to know what they're talking about. I agree, conditions are inhuman and children should be in school. It isn't fair. But I cringe at the word 'slave', the way they might if you termed them 'cheat'. The rules are simple, and the same for both. Pay your debts. Play fair. Be kind to your fellow human being. Families stick together. Work hard.

Does the fact that they don't abide by some rules make it more acceptable that you disregard others? No. But who are they to cast words at you, rise up in arms against the crimes they commit themselves? Whether it is a credit card or a loan for 'do bigha zameen', a debt is a debt. Being irresponsible is a choice. How does a country where debt collectors are 'just doing their job' decide that other, possibly more 'useful' forms of debt collection are unacceptable?

Armchair activism is bad enough without the complication of hypocrisy. Sitting at a laptop in a climate-controlled room, flinging labels around is just the click of a few keys. How do they take a heterogenous population of millions and click-clack fit them into the five slots of a homogenous monotheist race? Prejudice and the caste system are bad, they say. Even as they approve racial profiling and draw lines of security and acceptability in their own states. Where are the solutions?

I sit here and watch signs of you in them, and them in you. You who profiled and slotted people centuries ago. You who grew massive enough to evolve culture without thinking about religion and science, creationism and the conflicts of modernity with tradition. They're not even trying to fit the pieces together. The evolution of culture is simple enough- it has little to do with art and 'higher thought', and much more to do with our primitive instincts to keep groups of people insular. How much easier to accept the instinct and learn to live with it, than fight and question cellular urges.

And after my confused attempts to explain the evolution of a society and a country, I still turn to you for answers. I know there are no simple solutions, so I look for the isolated instances. Success stories and positivity, the empowerment of one woman in one village. One laborer's child who owns a mansion like the one across the street from where I live now. One man who sets up a trust fund for his workers after his million-dollar hotel is ripped apart by terrorists. The students that stood by their classmate through medical school after she was raped on the streets of Delhi.

I search your depths for this growing quorum of hope and change to justify my love for you. With a child's faith, I look to your heart and ignore the cracks that mar the surface.

You who work miracles in my life. You whom I love without completely understanding. You are in my every cell, every thought. Infatuation is satiated by a poem, obsession can be burnt out in a book or two. But you, you are the one I turn to when I am filled with words, and they are still never enough. If I could only write about one subject all my life, it would be you. And you I never have the right words to describe. Eternal muse, brimming with words of every imagination, every emotion. I think that is why they use the word 'Motherland'.

The hunger games

To skim the surface, a stone must be very flat, and very light. The angle at which its cast is critical, of course. Nearly the same as the water, but just a little higher. When you cast a stone correctly, it skitters and skips and lands in the shallows at the other end of the pond. And when the sun comes out and dries up the edges, the stone ceases to be a part of the water. Much of the young-adult fiction I read is like this. It skips and skims, resonates in part and casts a few ripples, and then is cast on the other end of my awareness, to slip away forgotten.

And then there are books like The Hunger Games. Small and dense, they sink to the bottom of the water, rippling out unsettling questions as they settle into my world-view. On the surface, the story is a simple one- A girl with two boyfriends, a contest and heroic acts and victory. Sparking a rebellion that changes her country forever, battling danger and death and remembering to save the pet cat as she runs from her annihilated family home. And to add to the fun, there is fashion and drama, reality TV and romantic conflict.

Though I skimmed through the first book and was a little disappointed with the second, the finale of the trilogy is what made me want to write this. The girl who was on fire is burning out, and the book captures the hero's conflict more truly than the magical worlds of Harry Potter. What happens when you take teenagers and throw them into a battle-field? Are children really resilient enough to bounce back from killing and destruction to the innocent playgrounds of their childhood?

The protagonists of the book are no heroes, perhaps. Un-magical and ordinary people, who break down with torture and the constant killing that surrounds them. They wake up screaming every night. The sound of sirens sends them hiding behind warm pipes in laundry rooms, holding themselves together until it is gone. They are lost, and vengeful, and entirely human in their attempts to live. They hold up fragmented memories and question "Real, or not real"?

As teenagers, they question the nature of love. They question government policies and parental choices and popular opinion. And they cast both youthful glow and grim shadow, as they reflect on inane game shows, the price of war and the reality of heroism. It's not just the girl who is on fire. They all shine equally, even as they move towards the end of burning.

(The books: The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins)

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

One of the advantages of a nature-based religion is that miracles are everywhere. Religious symbols based on the universal geometry of fractals and Fibonacci patterns mean we can always find a sign from the universe. Attributing meaning to geological and climate phenomena such as the turning of the winds keeps us attuned to as yet poorly understood physiology and biochemistry. Perhaps such faith is a placebo. Perhaps it is the simple means of directing attention to the harder to perceive changes in ourselves that makes these faiths seem more powerful than they are.

But it is hard to be unimpressed by the minds that created religions where faith is omnipresent and the mundane is a constant reminder of the miraculous.

Easy way out

You hate being fat.
You don't like the fact that other people take decisions for you.
You dislike asking your husband for money.
You are bored, and would rather be at work.
You are terrified of change.
You don't want to be stuck in this country where you have to ask for employment.
You want to get off your medication.

Everyone wants- Shinier, brighter, better lives. Too many people I know complain about the way they are 'forced' to live. Responsibilities and obligations and lack of choice.

Here's the easy way out- Pick up all that baggage and take it with you. Go chase your fantasy career, your thinner, more fulfilled self. Following your dream is really far, far easier than being miserable about not having it already. It is discouraging, and terrifying, and requires big, untiring effort. You will slip and fall on your face, have bad moments and wonder whether it is worth it. But I promise you, truly, that you will be happier and stronger, shinier and brighter and better for it. If you're not, I promise to listen to you the next time you cry. But first, try taking the easy way out.

Only human

I don't want to be satisfied about this. It feels too much like leaning back on my laurels, self-assured and pompous, just asking to be taken down a peg or two by the young seeker who brings the naive daring that only the fearless can know, to solve these age-old equations.

I tell myself I am only human, when I reflect on this glow I feel within after our conversations. Only human, to feel glad at your fumblings, like a baby learning to walk. I smile at your cuteness as you stumble around trying to learn your balance. And what is wrong with being human, reminiscing on this glorious sameness that all relationships go through as I watch you with your new girlfriend/boyfriend?

I have heard your judgments about other people's immaturity. You have cast your vote on tradition and the correct way to behave in relationships. Declared your hatred for flowers and gifts and mushy endearments. And today you tell me of this beautiful, wonderful human being who is your significant other, so sensible and mature despite what happened today. And you say you will never use such callous words with them, the kind I just told you worked for someone else. Your lover is far better, more refined and urbane and genteel.

I tell you love is love, and bills and insurance and the trappings of life will always be what they are. I tell you that regardless of degrees and paychecks, a broken heart will always feel what all broken hearts have felt, independent of space and time and language. But of course, the two of you are different.

So I lie back on my tales, smile and wait for you to catch up. A chronicler of stories, a gatherer of life-experience. And I try not to be too self-satisfied about it. But I am only human, just like you and your lover and everybody else.

Oof

A grey Friday morning, cold rain, and the promise of a night snow. Hot coffee, the house to myself. Half-remembered songs hunted up on YouTube bring back childhood crushes and family dinner time in nostalgic smiles. Such a contented space, quiet and welcoming- a time to give thanks for all the precious moments and the promise of so many more.

Given the setting, wouldn't you think sending polite thank-you emails to virtual strangers would be a breeze ?!

Haunted by words

Fishing is a metaphor, and the words of the speaker resonate with my thoughts about writing. Just as he is haunted by waters, I am haunted by words. And some of the words reflect so deeply what writing means to me, I would put them down here to remind myself. Some of my favorite quotes from 'A river runs through it' -

"Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart - I don't know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect."

"All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible."

"I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river."

"As the heat mirages on the river in front of me danced with and through each other, I could feel patterns from my own life joining with them."

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."

The practical reader

A recent blog post reminded me of the many reasons 'practical' people dislike 'poetry'. The words are too confusing, the meanings too obscure, and the entire melange is nothing more than an attempt to obfuscate the simplest observations. While I accept that a lot of bad poetry exists, most of it seems like the result of people 'trying' to be artistic. Are words more lovely or more meaningful only because they rhyme?

I believe the principles of good writing- clarity, sharp editing, every word responsibly contributing to the meaning of the whole- apply to poetry as well. And the following poem makes part of this the point better than I could :)

A Practical Reader
- Carl Dennis

I'm willing to buy your book of poems
If you can promise that whenever you liken a day
To a coin that cant be hoarded,
You spell out exactly what I should buy with it
In the few hours left me before the sun
Sinks behind the garage outside my window,
What items more valuable than those in the shops
And mention where they're available locally.

I'm a plain person, I admit, with little patience
For vague suggestions, so if you believe
Poems need to be vague to be suggestive,
I'd better save my money for something else
(Money I dont have endless supplies of,
Not with my job as bookkeeper for a hospital),
A work of history, say, or biography
Or a book of encouragement from the self-help section.

I could use a poem showing that those who seem
To be having a better time at work than I do,
Or a better time at the beach or hiking a trail,
Have simply learned to do more with moods
No better than my good moods,
While making less of the lesser ones.

I wont complain if your book has many poems
Praising the joys of giving so long as it has a few
On the joys of taking. How to choose friends,
For example, who wont forget me after I'm gone,
Who'll tell my story now and then to themselves
If not to others. Friends glad to remember,
Who believe their gladness would be complete
If I were sitting beside them sharing it.

As for friends I've lost, do you have some advice
For the times I'm asked to speak at a funeral
When my feelings, ardent before,
Suddenly seem too cool and measured?
Dont tell me to level my words down
To the flats of fact in the name of integrity
When the task before me is rising to the occasion.
If my feelings cant make the climb, inspire me
To send up some phrases that would be honest
If I were the person I'd like to be.

Please stay undercover

I don't object to stalkers, or people that keep track of my status messages or blog posts. (By putting this information out there, I am taking that chance. And I know who the lurkers are). I don't even mind adding the friend of a friend of a friend as a friend of mine. But some actions move beyond the realm of curiosity or gossip. Why does the luxury of anonymous, instant connection bring out the dumbest in some of us?

1. "I met you on the subway in NYC last July, and you gave me medical advice for my mother. Can we connect?"
No, we cannot. I am not the random stranger that dispenses prescriptions (or medication) on the commuter rail. And if I were, you probably don't want to be linked in to me anyway.

2. "Can you send me the neutrophil killing protocol you used? And also, the PO numbers for the EMSA kit and antibodies and.."
I graduated. I wrote a dissertation and papers and left copious notes and CDs behind for a reason. Let's see if you can figure out what that was now. And if you can't, feel free to send me a polite, professional email at the contact information I left. Wait to see if I respond before bombarding me on Facebook.

3. "You used to write well. This is crap."
It's my blog. Find yourself something better to read if you don't like it. Constructive criticism is welcome, unhelpful, unpleasant opinions are not.

4. "Please tell me what _ was like when he was your boyfriend five years ago."
Yes, random stranger, I am itching to share the most intimate details of my past with you !! Let's find some pink pajamas and fuzzy pillows and have a girly party online, shall we?

5. "Will you marry me? I really think we could have something good together"
Sigh.. Hours of talking on chat and the phone, conversations heedless of time and time zones and cultural differences. The bonding when someone from another continent fixes your computer issues is a different level altogether, isn't it? But difficult as it is, I think I'll stay here and resist the urge to drop my life for the Dell customer care rep I think you are.

This is just a draft

First there is the crowning flush, after hours of painful inaction. A sign of life, there is SOMETHING here! It takes hours of agony, pained gasping breaths. Inch by painstaking inch she* emerges. Towards the end we are both confused and teary, just wanting it to end. And end it does, in a long endless sigh of relief. It is done.
Out in plain sight, confused and babbling, limbs askew and a shrieking head. Now, I rub my hands in glee. Now it begins.

Chop this end and place it there, the other one goes here and twist that around a bit. All that effort to come up with a mangled jigsaw puzzle. But wait, this piece goes here, doesn't it? And that, surely, is the corner piece that holds it all together!

When words are stuck and deadlines loom, this is my mantra- This is just a draft. Not a first-born miracle on the planet, nor a literary masterpiece. It frees me from the responsibility of the mother-instinct and the pressures that weigh down the masters of the craft. No need to guard these words, they aren't perfect. No need for these words to be perfect, this is just a draft.

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* My stories are 'she'. Simply because they are always as uncomfortably self-aware and confused as any adolescent girl I have ever known or been.

Out of books, to people orchards

Of course I have always loved to read. Words are as familiar and essential as breath, instinctive as inhaling air. In principle, I get incredibly annoyed with people who claim they don't "need" to read because they have instead lived life, as is the two were mutually exclusive. Their experiences are their own, they brag. They don't need books to teach them things.

Now I find myself echoing their speeches. "What are you reading these days?" asks a friend. "I have no time to read", I reply, shocking myself into silence. When I must write and write, words flow out like gasping breath, pause to catch up with thought and then run again. The run is exhilarating, even though I barely pause to inhale.

Words are like breath, cycles of inhalation and exhalation. And when I am spent, I will open my books again. But for now, when I close a book, I open life. I could teach no one anything with my words, except that I am living with something in common among men- When fighting with them, when saying all their say in my song.

Ode to the book
- Pablo Neruda

When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.

The ocean's surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio--
I got a telegram
from the "Mine" Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won't let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.

No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.

A moment

An old friend of mine is now a filmmaker. Nothing you would have seen- She makes small-scale, independent films and conducts workshops on finding visual inspiration (or something like it). I would know her anywhere, and when I watch her movies, it is always a little surprising to find that she isn't on the screen. You see, they are just so very her, so full of her personality that it's easy to think you're seeing S. even when she isn't physically there.

Another schoolmate stars in music videos and jewelry commercials. Though I've seen the ads and videos, I wouldn't recognize her unless you told me her name. Strangely, she looks exactly the same as she did in high school. Unlike the rest of us, who have changed in so many ways, she still looks fifteen.

As for myself, I still write. I'm still learning to dance. Only more wholly than before. The rest of the trappings of being grown-up- a home, credit cards, a car, 'responsibilities'- still seem so very ephemeral, like I am yet to grow into them.

And when the late afternoon light slants in, all things in life turn back into the ache of adolescence. Adulthood seems a strange interruption, these lives with professions and pretensions of responsibility. How unreal, to think of the girls we were turned into these people in the newspapers that we as children dreamed of becoming one day. A deep, searing nostalgia fills this moment- I am filled with a sense of loss even as all my senses chronicle our achievements.

In the lengthening shadows and warm light, the dreams of old feel as unreal as the future that is now.

Metamorphosis is hard.

He remembers times past,remembers being sure footed and strong.
Nourished on green leaf, supported by many sure limbs.
He walked on bough and stem, holding them close to his heart,
Secure, cuddly, snuggled into sturdy branches.

Now he flits from bud to flower-
Sustained on little sips of sweetness
Struggling on a few spindly legs
Far from his bough, he is lost
Ambition weighs him down
Brilliant and strong and many-hued.

Years of evolution bear down on his back.
Ancestral dreams of flying high, voices that doubt he can make it
What destiny is this, this burden he carries?

From a distance, wings look like fun
But first, he must learn to fly.

Understanding

The worst kind of loneliness is when you speak your heart, and the words are lost in an un-hearing disagreement.

Awareness of a conflict. Realization of unhappiness. Words to clarify, words to help us grow into a greater understanding/ acceptance. A tentative move towards common growth. To me, this is the instinctive (and necessary) progression of relationships that matter. Most of the people closest to me seem to disagree though. More often than not, conversations end here. In an unquiet peace, an uneasy silence.

You tell me your thoughts, why you feel I was wrong/ they were wrong/ you were hurt/people hurt you. I listen. I feel your pain- trust me, I do. I know what it is like, to not be heard - To have your feelings drop away into nothingness because they didn't matter. You are angry and hurt, because your anger and hurt have never mattered to the other person. And you cry that you have never been understood, never been held. All you want is space to grow, someone to care unconditionally.

I listen to both sides. I remember the feel of cold winter tiles against my cheek, as I lay alone and cried over the two of you. If only you would hold each other and listen, none of us would cry alone.

A wish

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.


– Rainier Maria Rilke, A Walk.

A simple wish for the year that is to come- to feel the wind, and to remember inner light.

Signs of life

How do scientists look for life in other worlds? One of the most basic dilemmas is this- that we only know one way of defining carbon-based life. Beyond this, neither do we know what we are looking for, nor how we'd identify whatever interesting 'stuff' we picked up. And still there are enough of them, with telescopes aimed and microscopes at the ready, searching constantly, endlessly, through eons of space-time, for a sign. Just one sign.

On earth as in heaven, there are enough of us who do the same. We look to the stars and the great beyond for signs.

Under the guise of science and research, religion and tradition, the impulses that move us are the same- A basic human need for knowledge, and security in knowing. And so we sift through signs, from earth and star and instinct, asking as we examine each one- Is this it ? Is this a sign of life, a sign from God, a sign marking my place in the universe?

Circling back to the dilemma, we hold these things, not knowing if they are what we were looking for, nor knowing what the objects of our seeking look like. We pick our symbols, marking the end of our own personal quests, the end of our territories and desire to know. This much is enough, we say.

This little understanding, this greater world-view. This knowledge that stars are great spheres of fire, this faith that the fire in them shapes my destiny.

We pick our symbols, objects of power to us. A cross, a sacred thread, a pair of bangles marking a married woman. A totem pole, a ritual mask. Each of picks our objects, and we hold them and say- This much, and no more. This understanding is enough, this object powerful enough. Enough sustenance to live by, until the flame of life dies.

For myself, I hold them all. I hold lamps to be lit at night and sacred threads, meditations by the sea and insights from starlit forest nights. I cast them all back to the skies and ask still - Is this it? Is this all the understanding there is?

Things I wish I remembered

List # 2.

There are plenty of messages we throw out in time-capsule bottles, along the lines of "Things I wish I knew when I was younger". Now, I realize there are things I knew back then which made me a lot happier than some of the things I do now.

1. Sensitivity comes from moving out of oneself. Not by wallowing in self-pity or self-analysis.

2. It is okay to have and voice an opinion. There are only so many shades of grey. At the ends of the spectrum, call the colors black and white. Just like you see them.

3. Conflict keeps life on its toes. A good fight is an enriching experience.

Places I never meant to be

One of the golden rules of writing I read a while ago was to avoid the "noun as story idea" trap. I'd often find myself coming up with these ideas, for stories/ articles on 'Memory' or 'Taste', and wander around with this grand notion like a teenager writing poems on 'Love' and 'Heartbreak'.

This idea of lists (blatantly copied from a fictitious blog by a fictitious writer with writer's block), and this particular title (unrelated to the blog or writer) caught my eye. It's the name of a book I've never read, but would probably like.

Considering the amount of time I spend berating people around me for speaking and acting mindlessly, its a little humbling (to say the least) to realize how many times in life I've found myself in places I never planned to be in.

1. In the kitchen. Nowhere in the grand life plan that involved me being the celebrated writer at age 25 did this feature- That I would one day find myself perfectly content to be cooking recipes my grandmother once made, spending hours glazing a cake, or just creating dinner with whatever is in the fridge. Or (the horror of it !!) finding myself righteously shocked that a 24 year old girl didn't know how to fend for herself, food-wise.

2. The back of a police car. Yes, I realize even criminals don't really plan on being there..and maybe I shouldn't include this on a list of places I 'meant to be'. But it was interesting to find that even after a car crash and a loved one getting out of a really close shave, we sat there and joked about the weather as the cop dropped us off at the car dealership.

3. The gym. Me. The gym. Lifting weights. Running. Not a long walk as I chat with a friend, but running. And getting annoyed with girls who strut along at 3 miles an hour, chattering away and claiming to be 'running'. Ha. Beyond fat or fit, strong or fast, empowering or falling into cliches.. its just so much fun!

Kaathadi

Some days I feel like this- A brightly colored piece of thin paper, twisted and bent to a a shape sent whirling on a child's puff, ripped to shreds by a strong wind. Some days are like this, when all my form is weak and hollow, held in position by a pin on a twig. A word sends me soaring through the clouds, the wrong tone can blow my temper through the roof.

On days like this, I reach for this sense memory, the feel of my mother's hand holding mine. A time when that meant I must reach upward.

Her sari brushes against my cheek, silky cool. In the midst of a crowded Bombay pavement, her hand and her sari are my little wading pool of calm. What goes on in her head, rushing between afer-work errands dragging me along by one hand, her bag of vegetables in the other? I know now she must have been tired from work, and thoughts of the dinner that must be cooked. There must have been stress from the workplace, something all too familiar to my grown up self.

With my hand anchored in hers above, and the street vendors hawking such delights, I couldn't have known of these thoughts, or even cared. Every time we shopped at this particular junction, she'd buy me one of these. A kaathadi- Pink and yellow, blue and red, scraps of paper twisted into pinwheels. There was always one, unconditionally. (Is kaathadi the wrong word? But it is so apt to the purpose, and so I use the word).

How does one weigh the memories of childhood one against the other, to decide which to use for a particular spell of happiness? Looking back now, I cannot explain why this one stirs me so. But when I need a charm against rainy gloom, within or without, I use this one.

Some days, I am still too shallow for wells of stillness within. I am still short enough that I must reach upward, outside myself, for calm. And when I feel like a scrap of paper whirled through breezes of words from others, I fall back into this.

The warmth of her hand, the feel of silk on my cheek. I reach for bright pinwheels of memory, twisted into joy by a breeze not of my making. Leaning back, sometimes I let myself fall, and hope to catch the wind and rise again.