Sad face, little space, lamplighter by the riverside!
There are many sad birds in the sky, but you only want to see the happy ones.
Evenings are for coming back home, so I do. Whenever I open the door, I see the book on my bedside still lingering in the corner, half in the air, half resting. So is the laundry pile, the flipped slippers, the kitchen tap crying one drop at a time; it’s all the same when I come back, yet when I was outside, so much had changed. In your life, you always have two places, one where it’s all the same and one where everything keeps changing. You visit both daily, but you never know which one you should prefer on any given day.
When I go outside, my sad face gets sadder, I believe or perhaps made to believe. You know how Anne Sexton said -
“Love and a cough cannot be concealed, even a small cough, even a small love.”
I feel it is the same with sadness. Yet, I try my best to conceal; behind my ears, between my fingers, beneath my tongue. Then I think I am ready, good to go out into the world without anyone noticing what I’ve not come with, but then it’s the face that is my undoing. A baby crying at midnight in a silent train coach. People are unforgiving that way; when they want to sleep, they want to sleep. Else, they will ask what’s the matter, which is even worse. Ask the parent to turn off its sadness or reduce its volume, as if they hadn’t already tried that. I do feel for the parent;
There are many sad birds in the sky, but you only want to see the happy ones.
It is nothing new, yet very new every time I am told or asked at my workplace,
“Why do you always look so sad? Why do you choose corners? Your face looks really down.”
It is like my sadness is handed back to me. The world likes doing that, for all the good and bad reasons. Initially, I would laugh it away, “Oh that’s just my face, I was born with a sad face.” Then, something within me shifted, I started believing that maybe I was born with a sad and lonely face. The narrative starts to change, and very slowly, you begin to lose your face to sadness, it’s not yours anymore. I mean it sounds unnecessarily poetic, but when you read all the poems I do every day and feel the things I feel every day, it only sounds fair. But I must admit, it does break my heart a little every time someone says something like that.
Sadness isn’t my inheritance; it isn’t my responsibility, I want to tell you so, anybody who feels remotely close to what I feel. Yet, when you have anything of your own, carry it with grace. There have been times I have defended my sadness unabashedly. Even if I am a crushed rose in a book, I am still a rose. I was given to someone fresh and new as a mark of love.
You know I was telling this to myself the other day -
“You like leaving a little space, you always do. You leave a metre of space between the bed and the wall, and they ask you to join the bed and the wall. Yet, you don’t. You feel that much space is needed for breathing, or an insect to make it its playground; or maybe, just maybe, you don’t want the leaning bit because then you can’t figure out who’s leaning on who, the not-knowing bothers you; you want to know the details, the amount of weight someone carried off someone across different times of different days.”
What I mean to say no one way is better than the other. As they say, “Sometimes you’ve to be the lamplighter, and sometimes the lamp.”
Leave the space, or don’t, you’ll just be fine.
I like this space. It’s like a quiet river I could hide into and sleep or shout when necessary. I do have a dream that one day I’ll take my friends by the riverside and the river’s mirror will reflect all our sad faces. The good part will be that we will still have faces we can recognise each other, that one day even the faces will fade and the dying will come with all its might, but not before we love each other,
never before we love each other.
Everyone knows how much I love Virginia, here’s something for you -
Some poems for you:
“HomeGoods” by JANICE LOBO SAPIGAO
Immediately after the diagnosis, we flip through the racks.
Each of us yearns for a sweater or spoons—a reason to stay—a bargain—a bet.
Ma and I search different sections of the store for something—then each other.
Her—in lamps. Me—in clothes. Striking wires—
The clacking hangers clapping one after another—bursting at the joints
mimicking the sounds of knobs turning,
or window panes breaking in slow motion, the air knocked out of them, too.
I stack clearance candles in our cart.
Ma checks out bathroom rugs and kitchen towels.
These days we build separate homes from red tag items.
I miss Ma the most between the Kitchen and Women’s Clothing departments.
Unraveled by the operation of how
one builds a house from the inside.
A second diagnosis that day: I won’t ever come back here alone after she’s gone.
Isn’t shopping a series of searching?
On the best days, everything is a grab—a steal—cancer and—my mother from me.
My hope is that every space with four walls—that every day of treatment
will be a door out—will be sunlight in bags—despite discount—let it be—big—
all the time we buy back.
“i know the grandmother one had hands” by JAKI SHELTON GREEN
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always in bowls
folding, pinching, rolling the dough
making the bread
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always under water
sifting rice
bluing clothes
starching lives
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always in the earth
planting seeds
removing weeds
growing knives
burying sons
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always under
the cloth
pushing it along
helping it birth into
skirt
dress
curtains to lock out
night
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always inside
the hair
parting
plaiting
twisting it into rainbows
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always inside
pockets
holding the knots
counting the twisted veins
holding onto herself
let her hands disappear
into sky
i know the grandmother one had hands
but they were always inside the clouds
poking holes for
the rain to fall.
“In the loop” by BOB HICOK
I heard from people after the shootings. People
I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely
the same message: how horrible it was, how little
there was to say about how horrible it was.
People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed
because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,
to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually
I answered these messages: there’s nothing
to say back except of course there’s nothing
to say, thank you for your willingness
to say it. Because this was about nothing.
A boy who felt that he was nothing,
who erased and entered that erasure, and guns
that are good for nothing, and talk of guns
that is good for nothing, and spring
that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,
and scotch for others, and “and” for me
in this poem, “and” that is good
for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise
go about going away, bereft of us and us
of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing
like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,
empty of everything but a scarf, still opens
its doors at every stop, because this
is what a train does, this is what a man does
with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,
why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,
and then it had just begun.
“Bird-Understander” by CRAIG ARNOLD
Of many reasons I love you here is one
the way you write me from the gate at the airport
so I can tell you everything will be alright
so you can tell me there is a bird
trapped in the terminal all the people
ignoring it because they do not know
what to do with it except to leave it alone
until it scares itself to death
it makes you terribly terribly sad
You wish you could take the bird outside
and set it free or (failing that)
call a bird-understander
to come help the bird
All you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly useless
but you are wrong
You are a bird-understander
better than I could ever be
who make so many noises
and call them song
These are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurt
you have offered them
to me I am only
giving them back
if only I could show you
how very useless
they are not
Something to read for you:
I think this is the best thing you’ll read in a long-long time -
Invisible Lives: Cassandra Jackson on Keeping and Discovering Family Secrets
The love for quotes:
I went to Alibaug to celebrate a friend’s birthday, and could not stop thinking about this quote -
“I remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, I don't really remember yesterday all that well.”
— Dory (voice), Finding Dory
Ahmad Faraz and nothing else:
Until next time,
Prashant.