By Pragya Dhiman
I’ve always wondered about interstices – stitches in time, the
moment between waking and sleeping, the movements between watering
and toweling, the quietness of sitting, waiting, standing in line, the
notches of life that crush ticks and tocks, space and reality.
It’s a wet blanket over my senses, a strangeness that makes me think
everything is wrong, a yellowing of the edges of my vision like
burning film, the smell of scented water in the air, the heaviness of my limbs, it
all tumbles together to make me feel like I’ve shifted universes, or I should.
It’s the time I spent at the Tibetan market, picking out a blue shawl that I wrap to
keep me warm; bring the sun into my bed, catch it on my woolen clothes, the
embrace I miss between two souls: you were so big and I was so small, now it is
the other way around. It’s all gone – washed up, memories are a different world.
It’s when I captured your heat in my lap and I let it ruin me. I don’t know what
Hume said On Suicide, or how The Stranger is meant to find me a will to live, and
I’m trying to bridge the gap between me and the rest –
I’m suspended in between these moments, in my loneliness.
It’s the vortex of my gravity; the ether of my mind. I skim the light from the top
of mornings, and remember the milk skins I pick off my drinks – tea, coffee, just
like early winter air nipping at my nose. It’s when I, bunny-spirited, leaked into
the crevices of my relationships and called them all off.
In between living and dying, between the sinews of when I was about to break
I found myself naked and a nerve-ending, but none of it is true. They have an upside
down face cradled in their hands, and I am all clavicles with a sparkling white coat on new
year’s eve, cold shouldered. Twenty-three is such a magic number. Separation parts worlds,
and I’m afraid to think for myself between dreaming and waking, because that’s when
I can’t control my thoughts.