interludes

I can count you every stain on the ceiling

Inside of the ugly blue, stuck with tape were lights and sometimes I like to pretend they’re stars, making up constellations and I thread it all into this strikingly clear sky, where you see all the stars. In my dreams, I wake up happy, content to dance when it rains and lie under a warm sun. When it is dark and late at night, I always end up counting sheep in my head, there’s too much of a beautiful black outside to be sleeping.

I do not want my roses wilting, and even under my sunlight I cannot keep them alive. I am painting a new one on the inside of my wrist. I am wondering if I can be saved, I am wondering if I will. When I bite the inside of my tongue, blood tastes half-iron and half familiarity. It still feels the pain in english, while the mouth utters maa. My first thought is always of my mother, and it is always of the pitch of her throat when she calls me by a name no one else does. It seems almost a different identity altogether, the daughter she loves and the daughter I am. She always draws out the ch in my name she has given, like it is trying to contain her heart. What is in a name, till it is her shouting in the bedroom and it becomes everything. What is in a name, till she is whispering it when I cannot remember mine. My first thought will always be her.

Inside of the deep end of the pool, I dive till I can touch the tiles and the feel the reek of chlorine when I gasp up into the light. It is funny how the light refracts and twists itself through water and it burns inside my lids. Whenever I write about love, I think of waves– they return to the ocean and crash against rock, and listening to them is what I imagine love might feel like. Always returning, infinitely ephemeral. I’m not running out of time, even as I set the alarm and not wake up and stare at the ceiling.

I can count you every stain on the ceiling.

The room is always in clutter, and I want to play my guitar off-tune. I want to paint my nails and have them clack at keyboards. Hanging paper flowers on the wall and wearing pink gloss too much, it is at very late nights that I am as alive as I can be. Books are piling up, I miss the summers passed doing nothing. Nothing being the life lived was simply filler, warm cozy and slightly surreal. Doing Nothing being half-finished sketchbooks, untitled pieces. Ink stained fingers and a hundred beginnings. Nothing was done, but there was a lot of doing. Summers before with ripe mangoes like the sun, summers as lazy as those rains. I want to love deeply and I am sitting with heavy words and heavier looks. I am fifteen and waiting to be picked. I am six waiting to be picked. I am twenty, all-above eye from wallflowers.

A map of life, little yellow lights inside and a thread of red. The baker down the street always leaves an extra loaf in my bag, his threat looping mine. The dog barks all nights but the old woman will leave out food each morning. Mother is thinking to call me and I am looking at her before she was a mother. I am lost among the little yellow lights. The red thread reaches me to my teacher, she would draw a star on the shitty poetry I would proudly present, it loops to the day I left home and searching for a home. It passes to the nights I fell in love a little. It passes to the stranger smiling. It reaches through more love than I would know.

I will always love,

I will know it is floating, somewhere back to you too.