I was born in love, mired in it; in the mud of a woman’s blood. This is a letter. This is a letter, printed on the air above the Atlantic, to the only two who would remember my infant eyes.

Twist the verdict like a bottle cap, until the virtue and the venom spill, staining our necks and fingers with a pink both soft and bitter. Take your medicine. Wade out into the blue ocean between your throat and shoulder. Rest from this. No more pain.

We float on opposite ends of the still water; someone watches from the shore.

How do you explain to your mother that you still love her abuser?

The serpent used to sing to Eve. A lullaby from a kingdom of salt, where white flowers that lived through the winter grew into doves, and scarring on the body, colored sweet as cotton and sea foam, was left there only by choice.

No pain here, Eve.

God would beat the animal for this song. God would beat the animal until it was blinded, its eyes and spine broken into blossom. In the dust, it wept. But it still sang: No more

Even as her hand reached up into the branches, while He soaked the garden in kerosene: still.

pain.The angels with their swords; Eve’s hand, small as a new plum. The serpent sang: No

How do you explain to your father that he is an abuser, and you love him?

pain. The kingdom by the sea; Eve’s hand, opening.

This is an attempt.

I was born in love, buried in it; from snake to woman, from flower to ocean, from god to kerosene. Rest. Take your medicine. Forgive me. Find it in your doves and scars, in your blood and belly, to love me, still. Please,

no pain. 

Somewhere, Paradise is burning.

Spring blooms in my stomach like infatuation, decadent, heady, and fatuous. Spring makes the tips of my fingers tremble like newborn roses. Spring dribbles down my chin in milk-warm, orange-pink stripes; it fills me up like cream soda, like honey. Soft, smooth, so sweet, overripe, dissolved in blood, sweat, in floral oils: Spring leaves stains on the front of my blouse, on my sheets, on the doorknob to my bedroom. 

Spring is a season of love. Love: what does an aflame Persephone, stripping wheat for grain, cracking mussel for pearl, what does she do when breaking hearts? What does a bitter Artemis, skinning boar for meat, killing boy for pride, what does she do when breaking hearts? I am weaker and uglier than any Grecian girl but look at me, at the red on my hands, down my chest, where I have crushed and regrown, crushed and regrown my own heart, again, again — you cannot tell me I am not more bloodied than they.

March is a month of assassination in a season of love and you look like gold and almond liquor, you look like the knife, thumb pressed to the blunt edge, peeling a navel orange over a white kitchen counter. Even the evening, with its eyes and mouth of butter yellow, its touchable hipbones of violet and orange, cannot compare. I start with spring, goddesses, dream, March, lilies, birds, and now you; I find that there are many, many reasons to love. My mother and brother, their tender, green-golden voices like roses opening in the morning. Spring spreading like light through a room. A heart. My writing, the closest I’ll get to seeing my own soul, swelling, bleeding like a stuck pig, blending with the saltwater, the flowers, the perfume of your flaxen hair.

Love: I am the glutton God could not account for, and I dream of love like a wave approaches the shore. Dreams: cast in marble and moonlit blue, a nighttime poison, a nighttime blossom, enclosing the hint of fragrance in clothes, bodies, lips, that hint of fragrance that must always accompany love.

Many reasons to love but –

There is an ache in my body wide as the moon and old as angels, sweetened by spring, bared by your face, your warmth. It is called please. Please.

Spring’s sun is mute, and the oceans still and cool to the touch; but when I stand under and beside them, my fear held in my bare arms like a bouquet of trembling lilies, the wells in my heart fill with the first rains of the year and the birds of prey come down to the water, and fold their wings, and lower their heads to drink.

– you are the only reason. 

In in the morning she wakes up very suddenly, the dream caught painfully in her throat. She sits up and spits it out onto her hand. It is is small, soft to the touch, growing and shrinking to the rhythm of human breath. It leaves thin lines of blood and saliva on her forefinger and thumb, and on the sleeve of her pajama shirt, where she rubs it clean. 

The curtains are drawn. Her roommate on the other side of the room is asleep, face turned towards the wall. According to the her blue neon alarm clock, palpitating intermittently in the dim light: there are twenty-seven minutes before nine, and so twenty-seven minutes before she must leave the bed, wash her face, and prepare herself for the day.

Sitting in a pool of white sheets, her knees at her chest, her arms over her bare, unshaven legs; she rolls the dream between two fingers, trying to commit the weight and texture of it to memory. It is heavy as a marble, heavy as the moon. Holding it feels like summer’s end strawberries taste. She closes her hand around it; she lowers her head.

In the dream, a girl she loved (loves? She’s given up on tenses) held her hand on a school bus. Much too real; never real enough. A dream’s life is early and fatal like one of early April’s milky snowbanks, an instance of tender, pink-hued cold shot through by sweaty weather. That girl’s doe eyes, her baby blue jacket, her fragrant hair; the illusion of warmth of her fingers spreading through her body like a criminal’s car moving out of sight, getting away. The heat of the dream stains her, slick and violet, smooth as butter and sweet as honey in her blood.

An unpleasant, painful expression sweeps across her face — and then, as always, she recovers. She swings her legs off the bed. She is getting older, and her dreams are getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller. I’m not disappointed, she says out loud, to herself, to the translucent, beating dream resting in the center of her hand. I’m realistic. And yet somewhere, maybe not anywhere physical and quantifiable, but somewhere: she is leaning over to the girl in the school bus, in the sunlight, and she is kissing her temples, the apples of her cheeks, her toothy, blissful smile.

It’s difficult for her to learn not to be bitter. She is still trying.

1. SAGRADO: The storms here fill me with a blend of exhilaration and fear that crystallizes heavy and clammy over my thoughts, resting on my heart like unfamiliar cities, or unattainable love. But the air inside Briana’s car is warm, and I feel so safe, as though I am being taken by the hand and led through the delicate, gentle motions of a dance. Her minivan chugs steady and unfailing towards a horizon of ash, along the highway into the darkening apex of an evening saturated in slate and violet, and clouds move through the sky like seawater over calves, and subdued, languid rain falls, and falls, and falls.

2. SANGRIENTO: Pain is a place, and it has my mother’s eyes.  The air hums low, and the tunnels are aglow, lined with round neon lights like fragrant yellow roses.

3. SACIADO: I am sitting sandwiched in the backseat of a mustard sedan; the roads are lined first with a carmine and currant sunset, and then a viscous, starless night. The Bulgarian lily, the shadow in the water, the ache in my belly, the hour between, the low blow I, in an inevitable moment of weakness, have forgiven — in other words, the woman I love — she sits beside me. I want to take her by the shoulders. I want to put the world away, or at least reduce it until it exists only as an inchoate blur of roseate and saffron hair, framed in the dark by the passing of golden sodium vapor lamps and tricolor headlights. I want to tell her I’ve been asking God for someone like her ever since the dove left the ship for the shore.

The clouds rise off the mountains like smoke. Crows sit on telephone wires; they open their wings like Aphrodite scarring the foam. I walk through the neighborhood, in the yellow heat before the typhoon, in my sweaty tee, in running shoes trembling like orange blossoms.

Rivers travel from canyon to ocean, belly-up and boneless, in the receding bitterness of spring. They are loyal, constant; but when they arrive at the coast, at the lion’s mane ultramarine waves, do they hesitate, as I have? Do they ever think – no — I want to go back, I want –

Heaven help us. We move forward.

My mother is like a falcon lost in private flight. “Es que no hay pozo más grande,” she, in tears, said to me. “There is no deeper well.” Too much of her body is underwater. Too much of her body feels what her mind denies. It’s because of love; isn’t it all? It’s the fault of the lament, honor, and debt of love. I want to prove to her that she is worthwhile without love, that I could live forever without it, its delicate almond-shaped leaves falling, its direction as clear as exhaust ascending. I won’t be manipulated by love. I won’t be dragged by it.

When it rains here, the trains and the trees move like prophets chosen by brown-eyed angels; like their souls are crystalline, and pure, honeyed, and unafraid. I want to know that same gentle, complete peace — but I’m still distracted, by new days, new desires, their shapes when they settle inside me, round and heavy as peaches, their smell dissolving into the air, pulling me out of sleep like Athena bursting through the pate.

My body, twenty years old, can sit still, be quiet when supposed to, polite, good; but it doesn’t know how to hold my mother in its arms. My body, twenty years old, knows it’s time to go. Goodbye — no — I want to go back — I want — oh, heaven. Help me. Look at this body of mine, this river reaching the ocean and thinking of the gorge where it was born, look at me, in the middle of the fire, holding to my mother. Look at these, the wounds of intimacy; I don’t cry anymore, but God, how they still stink like oil, how they cling like anchors. In time, I know, I will grow accustomed to this. Repetition, I know, is the only real cure for suffering. Repetition, I know. Repetition, I know.

The clouds rise off the mountains like smoke. Crows sit on telephone wires; they open their wings like Aphrodite scarring the foam. I walk through the neighborhood, in the yellow heat before the typhoon, in my sweaty tee, in running shoes trembling like orange blossoms.

I take the night train from Narita to Umejima. I sit in the second of three seats facing a window, knees together, my head resting against the backpack in my lap. Every so often I check its pockets, confirming that I still carry three items: a square passport, a cantaloupe orange debit card, and the tiny notebook containing the only photograph I have of my parents together. Though cold to the touch, the weight of the photograph is familiar and comforting, like a nebulous, gentle memory of childhood not yet rendered bitter by time.

The woman next to me sleeps; occasionally her cheek falls against my shoulder, like a honeybee settling on a flower. The vertex of her summer’s evening has bent and met with mine, and her face is so meaningless but will remain in my memory like the smell of brine. Though I travel — and live, to a certain extent — alone, her touch on me is close, immediate, and dolefully, doggedly human.

Rilke said, once: Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

It has always been easy, and enjoyable, to be painfully, perversely hard on myself. I have pined for men who would not love me, and women who could not; for a release from shame, and a return to it; for thorny roses, phone calls, cool midnights, total respect, physical power, emotional intimacy. And I know it is wrong, to beat myself up over what I do not have, but I don’t know how to avoid, or correct, or suppress these feelings, which are half-man and half-beast, and which follow me even when I have left the labyrinth.

Maybe I am at my best when I am by myself. It doesn’t matter if I am a good person or just a good liar — there is no one to impress. I make it from point A to point B and point C; I feel proud of small accomplishments like counting out exact change in Japanese yen, or crossing the street in the dark, or noticing the beauty of a whole, red moon, partially obscured by apartment blocks.

On the train, the sensory hearts of the world are sliced away; no taste, no fragrance here. I don’t feel much of anything beyond the eternal, neutral desire to live, to complete a journey to its natural end. When I see my reflection in the window opposite me, the gentleness it rouses in my breast is both narcissism and pride, in my soft and tame face, which which may not be beautiful but is mine, in my alertness in an illusory world of ghosts, in my independence, which was not easily won. I am thousands of miles away from anyone who knows my name. I feel unknown, and tender, and pure, like nude, luminous snow. The world is easy, translucent, cooked down to its tendons; I am a twelve-ribbed twenty-year-old who treasures her life, whose soul is trembling, cracking, and spilling, like egg yolk.

My mind often returns to August of last year, to that beach in Kamakura. I remember it was mid-afternoon. I was sitting alone on the cold sand, feeling time within me like an organ of my body, like a second heart, heated, and fast. That entire day I had been alone, on autopilot, but there, by the the ocean, I found myself shifting back into a realer, more organic state, and I thought of my life, how it had developed into this foreign animal I knew to belong to me, but did not recognize, nor control, a life powered by something other than me, something more innocent and magnetic, and free.

Life possesses its own momentum, I think, a type of gravity generated by the soul. Like the survival instinct, but more human, more mundane too; less about danger and more about memory, and desire, and the muscular, spiritual pull in the body that comes with the existence of beauty, the appearance of pain. I don’t always feel it but when I do its effect is tidal, and immediate, like an electric current. I think of that instance, a few years ago, in Washington D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Memorial airport, waiting in a shuttle bus on the tarmac wet with rain, and pausing, suddenly, to think: I’m living. I’m here, and I’m alive. It was a forceful, and tender, and gently, momentarily paralyzing thought, like passing by a garden for the millionth time and noticing, for the very first time, the row of tiny flowers lining the path.

There’s a difficult, intractable, callous, evergreen part of me that my mother often calls my “nature.” I love, and require, this solidity but I wish I could change the angle of it, give it substance instead of just density. I wish I could carry resilience like a physical object. I wish I could swing it like a sledgehammer.

I think a lot about my character, how it sees, and reflects, and pursues the world. I think a lot about possibility, and emotion, and owning up to my bullshit. I think a lot about how for years I dejectedly but willingly described myself as a neurotic girl, and then a neurotic woman, just because my father called me that once. I think a lot about what it means to judge, to separate, to reject, to forgive, to value, to cherish, and how love intersects with these, individually, and in a sequence, and all at once.

Instances of peace are close to my soul. They slow time down, prolong my life for just a few more seconds, and the pretenses of calculation — how to be, and say, and act, and to what degree — which have so sustained my identity slip away, and I am not afraid, for once, of excess, or hesitation. I return to the beach at Kamakura, alone, entirely responsible for my own life. No need for excuses; no need for lies. I go through my photographs of the trip, the snapshots of white-petaled flowers with rosette cores, the plain and dignified mountainside vistas, the gray roads, their subtle, gold-toned luminosity in the summer evening. I go through images of the sea, its mirada vidriosa (“glassy stare”) and of my face, which some have called “heart-shaped,” on those impulsive, rare instances that I turned the camera around to capture my tired but smiling expression, framed by iron and blue.

When I fell in love with you I lost my appetite for seven days.
My arms and legs ached, dully, tenderly. Along my throat, and beside my breasts,
lymph, oval-shaped, milky white, swelled like new peaches: Emotion, a pathology, pathos of.
The needs of a body silenced by the greed of the soul; my senses so changed
just walking to the convenience store in the suburbs I smelled the sea.

You’ve never even touched me. What would I do if you did —
Every nerve ending would dissolve into blossom.
The little death darkening my blood to hematite.
The largeness of love, the demands it places on pride,
would either cure or impoverish me permanently.
I don’t know if I could survive that fire.

This feeling has never been gentle to me, and fear lies
like a fragile gem in my skeleton: too tremulous
to touch, a breath away from rupturing
into a cloud of gold. The mortality of love,
its half-life a night in Pyrrhic, pellucid springtime,
is a lesson I have learned over and over again,
but never managed to commit to memory.

What does it even matter. Oh, it is not as though
I would dare think of forever. But I do
still remember the Yamanote line at six in the morning,
the train hanging suspended by a single thread
as I put my hand on your shoulder. The purity of
that instant like heroin. Like Mount Sinai.
My heart so changed when the doors opened there was lavender filling the air.

At the supermarket I wander through the narrow aisles in my cornflower blue work blouse, stopping every so often to stare intently at packages. I pick them up from off the shelves, and turn them over in my hands, trying to read the nutritional information on their backs. Each time I wade into the the mystery of the characters on the labels it is as though I am circling the center of a lake in a rowboat without oars; if I am lucky, I can pick out stray characters, like meat (肉) or sea (海), but mostly I am at a loss, mute as a beached mermaid. I end up buying five dollars worth of bottled green tea (お茶) and the cashier bows so low to me my heart rises into my throat; I am sure I have never done, and will never do, anything half so grand so as to deserve this reverence.

I walk back to the house, plastic shopping bag around one wrist, submerged in drifting air from a season the Japanese call the plum rain, feeling, not for the first time, like an actress in my own life. There’s a darkness inside me even here, in a neighborhood peopled by roses, but it’s comforting, and it tethers me, not to home, nor reality, but to truthfulness, to fidelity to the woman I am in other places, at other times.

The house I’m staying at is old, but pleasantly so, and I find I am not bothered by even the sound of rats in the walls, or the tiny moths that hover like stars in the living room. I have always been good at enduring inconvenience cheerfully, but as I grow older I think I’m becoming more mature about it; I’m not haunted by the need to congratulate myself for suffering anymore.

My morning commute to the office includes a fifteen minute walk to the subway station through a residential area. It’s a neighborhood I might see in a dream during a fever: sinuous, narrow roads lit by a blue sun enclosed in fog like satin. It’s always raining; the air tastes like an elixir of immortality. On days like these are gods from myths born. I find myself thinking of the future, with fear, but also with a warm-hued optimism that beats in my breast, hanging there like a single pearl.

The front and back passenger cars of the subway train are separated from an unmanned control cabin by a door embedded in a panel of glass; if I can, I like to stand by it, and look at the soft, tactile buttons, the electrical panels intricate as honeycomb, the off-white phone near the floor. When the train moves the tunnel falls behind in smooth, lush waves. For me, tunnels are not so much a location as an emotion, dusky but intimate somehow, like an evening in late, sensual spring, a period of violet darkness marking the rhythm of the lives of sacred flowering trees. There’s a fish-eyed other-worldliness there too: the walls around me, punctuated by occasional gold fluorescent lamps, temporarily illuminating my reflection in the dark glass. I imagine the veil thinning, from opaque, impenetrable to translucent, vulnerable. I imagine stepping through it, with zero resistance, easily, like rainwater seeping from soil under the slightest pressure. The objects, and people, on the other side vary from hour to hour, desire to desire; right now, for instance, I’m seeing mountains, and forests, and ghosts, in rain jackets.

Sensory details braided, manifold, into my psyche: a tiny store called Takahashi Fruits, a man, presumably Takahashi, in green overalls with one strap hanging off his shoulder, a pained, bitter expression on his face. A fire station, purple-pink hydrangeas, a young blind man in Shinjuku Station being guided to the exit by a stranger, telling him「助かりました」(you saved me). Peaches encased in protective netting, priced at five hundred yen each. The cashiers I see working the 2 AM shift at the 7/11, whose names, printed in hiragana on tags, I try to memorize with a desperation I don’t know how to explain. The garden of a long-dead emperor, a hotel room in a suburb outside Tokyo. The windows of the train, where on a few summer afternoons I can see the sun start to descend at the same time the moon makes its appearance at the opposite end of the sky. My mother’s voice saying: Ser feliz es triunfar. To be happy is to triumph.

My magnificently talented friend Hannah Connolly (here’s her art blog and portfolio website) made this illustration for my story Jesus in his twenties. You can read it here — I thought it might be nice to put it up in downloadable format.

If you’d rather read it online, click through to see more:

THE DEATH OF THE UNIVERSE

“Want a pop?” the Death of the Universe asks, rising from the armchair. “I’m gonna go to the kitchen real quick.”

Jesus looks up from the lease, signed moments ago, and nods gratefully. It is the hottest summer on record; even in his new landlady’s cool, umbral flat the inside of his collared shirt is beaded with sweat.

“Oh man, yeah.” He realizes, too late, how childlike he sounds and runs a hand through his hair, embarrassed. “That’d be great. Thanks, Dee.”

She smiles and leaves the room. Almost instantly, the exact moment she is gone, the laws of physics change. The sofa cushions dissolve underneath him, and he drops, stunned, flat onto the floorboards. Parts of his body fall off him — one leg, from heel to knee, and an arm, fingertips trembling — and then reattach, like magnets. The television set begins to ascend with all the self-assurance of a cloud moving through muggy air. Jesus gets up, panicked, and busts his lip on the coffee table; his mouth fills with blood. 

He is submerged in the disorienting but familiar sensation of being attached to an emotional state, but now it is a million times more physical, dragging him down as though he were tethered to it. The world shifts underneath him, precariously, fatalistically; objects in the room disappear one by one. The potted ferns, the glass-paneled doors leading to the small balcony, the shadow produced by his own body. He looks to the heavens to find the ceiling, roof, and walls gone. Distance thins to nothing. Next door, the neighbor, sleeves rolled up, is hanging up her laundry; three hundred miles away, rain is beginning to fall over the center of the Atlantic ocean. He’s dizzy, but impossibly lucid too, as though understanding the size of the universe for the first time.

Dee returns, two cans of Coca-Cola under both her arms, and closes the door with the inside of her foot; she laughs out loud at Jesus, lying on the floor, clutching the leg of the table, the expression on his face, and, in an instant, all is right again.

“Sometimes the world isn’t quite real when I’m not around,” she says, a bit apologetically. She gets down on her haunches so that she is level with him and hands him the can. “Life only makes sense when death exists.”

However shaken he is he has to smile at a statement like that, the contrasts embedded in it; how it is so hard to take but so casually said.

Dee pops the tab on the Coke and takes a swig. He lifts himself up so that he’s leaning against the sofa, where she now sits, elbows on her knees. She looks at him with her dark eyes so like those of his childhood angels and reaches over to pat his head with an unpracticed but unfeigned gentleness. The image of the Archangel Gabriel suddenly comes to him: how he’d pick him up from school in beat-up sneakers and a jacket of ochre leather, and ruffle his hair with the same sort of hesitant tenderness. Like Gabo, little about Dee explicitly suggests the supernatural, but despite her human form there’s something illusory, dark, in her shape, like she is a landscape in a woman’s body, a pyramid in the desert, buried, hidden in plain sight.

SOUL

He explores the neighborhood around the house. The eggshell-colored camellias, the yellow clouds at sunset, the warning bell of the freight train, coming from somewhere in the opaque distance — these sights, sounds, enter and exit his consciousness and invite a breed of emotion, halfway between tenderness and discomposure, into his heart. It’s the kind of feeling he wouldn’t know how to describe but it is never far from his mind, and he revisits it constantly, as though it were a memory of love, or a memory of fear.

Soul, who lives in the room across from his own, accompanies him, sometimes, on evening walks. The first few times he notices her following him, not at a distance but at his side, as normally as if they were close friends, he thinks perhaps she is a ghost, which he sees so often in the glowing, red-toned midsummer; but then he spots her in the communal kitchen, scrolling on a smartphone and eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and realizes his mistake. It is an easy one to have made: Though Soul looks like a young woman, the same age as he, perhaps, she is a touch too transparent to be human. In the right light, and at the right angle, she disappears from view entirely, an illusion in visual continuity. But this doesn’t bother Jesus; from birth he has believed nothing can stay forever, and he finds comfort in impermanence that confirms distrust in the immaterialness of his world.

Soul likes to carry around a small, outdated digital camera; her taste in photography is what she self-deprecatingly calls “sepia-tone Instagram tacky,” meaning dimly-lit, impersonal images of the flowers, the bicycles chained to lampposts, and Jesus’ dark ponytail, which she sometimes tugs on to get his attention. Her expression, when he turns to face her, is immobile but her touch is gentle, and unassuming, and it reminds him powerfully of his mother, affecting him like balm to a wound.

Once, he shyly suggests they get a passerby to take their picture together; immediately, Soul shakes her head. (She doesn’t tell him, but she was told her once that photographs steal souls and she’s never been able to quite shake the fear.) Usually the directness, the finality, of this refusal would disconcert him — Jesus has always been more sensitive than he would like to admit — but around Soul the possibility of being hurt, of feeling painfully, somehow seems to have been removed, wholesale, from the pressures of emotion. Life is simpler, more mechanistic, with her, and easier to bear. Is this what a relationship between nonhumans looks like? Is this, he wonders, how the Earth and moon think of each other?

DAWN AND DUSK

Ox returns one rainy night. She drops her suitcases down and immediately gets to work repairing everything that is broken in the apartment block. Sleeves rolled up to elbows, she fixes the A/C on the third floor, and then moves onto the washing machine, the flickering light bulb over the entrance, and the kitchen sink, clogged with grease for three weeks. Jesus wakes to the sound of her off-key singing and he lays awake in the cool violet light of very early morning, listening to her; he feels renewed, like his heart is traveling, and he forgets his exhaustion.

Her brother, Pike, returns that morning. Unlike Ox, he brings nothing with him but the clothes he wears: a navy cable-knit sweater, gray slacks, and rubber flip-flops embossed with the name of a seaside hotel on the Mexican coast. He finds Ox immediately, sitting on the kitchen floor; she winks at him, and then reaches up to briefly, but meaningfully, squeeze his hand, before her attention returns to the plumbing. This is the first time she has seen him in thirty-six months.

Jesus meets them at breakfast. Neither of them are particularly impressed by his introduction of himself as the son of God.

“So what?” says Pike, not maliciously, but not kindly either. He sits on the counter, ankles crossed, a toolbox in his lap, as Ox combs through the pipes under the sink. His eyes, dispassionate, and yellow as sand dunes, survey Jesus, from top to bottom, in one long look.

Despite himself, Jesus bristles. He’s ashamed by what he wants to say but he says it anyway. “Well, who are you then?”

Before Pike can respond Ox takes the handle of a screwdriver out of her mouth and smiles big. “Does it matter?”

(Dee tells him later that they are the dusk and the dawn, second-gen twins descended from a long line of famous meteorological phenomena.)

After dinner that night, the five of them around Dee’s coffee table, Ox tells them about their maternal grandfather, El Niño, shooting through oceans with languid regularity, and his romance with the Atlantic hurricane. Ox is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of storyteller. Her voice and stride flow back and forth along a gradient of prophecy and delicacy, like dense coral, porous, sensuous, but also concentrated, impenetrable, diamond-like. She stands up, gesticulates, walking around while she talks, resurrecting scenes from her prodigal memory with her physicality, her presence that fills the room like smoke into a vessel. She can make Dee laugh out loud (a true rarity.) Even Soul pays rapt attention.

But it is Pike that Jesus finds himself looking at most often: his aromatic limbs and hands, his almond-eyed presence that is honey and amber, the clarity, permeability of his expressions, which are unambiguous and unconcealed, and tempered by his silence like iron submerged in saltwater. For Jesus, who has always thought himself incapable of romantic love, this new, sudden interest is a revelation, as well as a source of terror.

Pike is aware of the attention, and bothered, in a vague way, by it. He doesn’t like this boy, he’s decided, or how his hands twist in his lap, when he’s sighing and fidgeting and has his head tipped back, looking at him, at Pike, his brow furrowed like he’s undoing the Gordian knot. When he can’t take the self-consciousness anymore, he leans over Soul, seated between them on the couch, and meets Jesus’ stare.

“Keep your eyes to yourself, son of God,” he whispers, heatedly, but quietly enough that it’s a private exchange. Jesus is so surprised he forgets to be embarrassed and smiles foolishly, brightly. In front of them, Ox is pacing, hands held in front of her, palms upturned, saying: “He loved her so much, the year she left there was no wind over the ocean.”

Pike turns away quickly; outside, the setting sun flickers imperceptibly.

On the bus I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The day moves
like silk through the windows, in vertical sheets cast in graphite
and indigo. My mind has leapt from my body; it floats
above and around me, in gentle circular motions, like a great

white shark, aglow, bloodied. The angel of the ocean. The
Shakespearean recipe: “Love-in-idleness,” plummy and dripping,
applied to the eyelids,  and — moon as my witness — a man wakes
flooded in infatuation. How fatuous. And how delectable, how tempting,

to wield love like this: Cupid pricked by his own arrow. My mind, taking
this opportunity to be unkind, precipitates down to my ear and says:
you’re more yourself than ever, but love still riddles you like stigmata.
I sigh and reply: love, or the lack thereof, you mean?

While in line at the CVS, in matted hair and rose pink sneakers,
I think of the honeybees. They have been gone for months, bred now in
Valhalla’s scalloped terrains, but we still talk to each other as they did.
In tones, and memories, rather than honesty. Would you tell me

what you’re feeling? Not since Eve have there been eyes so evasive. There’s
a stillness to you, like a blistered chunk of flint, of basalt, a year
with no spring, the ribbed shadow between moon and tide. The
particular pain of a ghost’s homecoming, a figure tender and trembling

but exiled forever. The debt of the heart: a payment to emotion,
who in my dreams arrives as a jean-jacketed millennial
Mephistopheles. You liar, he says, from the stoop of my rental home.
He’s looking for the soul I promised him, but chose, instead, to leave with you.

Five hundred million years ago nature could only dream
of the kind of life that you are. Back then love existed in
dissolution. Smokestacks of ozone. Topaz trilobites squatted

in prayer. A generation of gods later, you appear. In hands,
and a voice wanton as deserts in spate. In eyes that own
all that they touch. A personal punishment for the planet

that bred original sin. My dearest killing blow, you are so
far but it’s inconsequential: I notice you imbued in
the deepest sinews of atoms. A presence as permanent

as this flesh is delicate. Did you know the full moon sweats
in terror at your beauty? To adore you is to challenge
every single eternal, universal falsehood. Every syndrome

of creation. I don’t wonder, anymore, if cloud forests long
for dust storms. I know they do, and I know you do. Please
know there is strength here that could devour the divine.

THE PAIN OF PRINCESSES
Every three hundred years a wolf is born
half hologram, limned in that breed of light
that is searing, and shameless, and adorned
with blood; a wolf with hands, and nails, and bite.

The king’s daughters wasted the finest days
of youth in the hunt, training bionic
eyes and moon faces from castle to highway,
but they caught not a stitch of furred onyx.

Sebas, the youngest, and our heroine,
knew the proof of value lay in killing,
but she loved that wolf, the adrenaline
in preternatural night. Not willing

to expose to malice something so rare —
She lived obscuring its scent in the air.

ANGLERFISH
Nelumbo, goddess of cybernetics
is at her laptop, furrowing her brow.
She’s lambasting the Internet critics
who poison the good-natured Wikihow.

Meanwhile, in the data stream, binary
code is working to mediate between
the heirs of the digital dynasty.
The cyberspace sea, blue and bottle green,

cries out in glum mourning at their quarrel.
Why fight like this when information lies
at their fingertips, tactile as coral?
Nelumbo answers: humans agonize

as easily, tenderly, as they love.
Been this way since from the ship left the dove.

I watch the night approach us through the sliding glass doors. Thinned into bloodied violet, it descends with the same preternatural inevitability as a vow of love. Inside my body, a similar sun, no less red, is setting.

There’s a tender (soft/sore) intimacy to the emergency room, in its small dimensions bathed in desert tones. Dun, milk-white, olive-yellow, carmine. Emotion has receded into my hands, but I don’t have any physical contact with the world; I feel as though I am interacting with shadows, or mirages. Only tiny images remain: the burst blood vessels in her eyes.

She is at the age now where Death comes with us everywhere: I watch him, through the rear view mirror, sweat jeweling over his brow, leaning against the palm trees. His smile is more apologetic, and comforting, than I would have anticipated. In the heat shimmer of early summer, the distance between us is like the space between me and God. Natural, and unnatural, in equal measure.

The closer she sways towards the edge the more fiercely I believe she will live forever. I won’t pretend to understand the logic of this. It is something I have long since chalked up to the useless beliefs of suicidal women and their failed daughters.

Every morning, from Monday through Friday, I stagger along on a borrowed bicycle through the pale green pearl of the rice paddies. The commute to school takes me past the local bait and tackle, a Yamaha dealer, and a luminous river that leads into the largest lake in Japan. Before this month, the last time I rode a bicycle I was fourteen, and though I am older now I am just as ungainly, and more distracted than ever.

Danger tracks me, as always, through the trees, in the moonlight, but her manner here feels unusually, charitably benevolent. I pass her on my bicycle, resting on her haunches by the red gates of the neighborhood Shinto (神道) shrine, and yell out, foolishly, daringly: Can I assume I am immortal until proven wrong? She rolls her eyes but it’s a lenient gesture, like she understands, and forgives, the cockiness of girls like me. In a parallel universe half a degree away, she knows, I collide with a chrome Honda, slide off the slim country road and tumble, head over heels, through the fragrant grass. The clouds, massive and supernatural, continue to cast their shadows of dark lilac over the water.

Adult life–or, rather, the expectation of living a convincing adult life–arouses the bitterest courage in me; like all emotions revealed when dislodged by weakness, it starts behind clenched teeth, moves to the soul, and erupts there. Self-assurance still doesn’t come easily to me. I don’t know how it’s possible to be simultaneously so afraid and so determined to never be afraid. Was there a young adult seminar on this topic that I missed? “Fear, fearlessness, and the twenty-two-year-old who isn’t a child anymore“?

Thank goodness for this landscape, its green-blues, and especially for the mountains. Even while inside the classroom, I think of them constantly, and their vision in my mind expands and pools behind my eyes, thick as slick gore. During a field trip to a Buddhist monastery, we practice zazen (座禅) and I imagine the mountains emerging, painlessly, from my chest, ribbed and gray-gold, and my breath traveling, zig-zag, over them. Where these images come from, I cannot say, but somehow they don’t belong to me, and never did.

Maybe the imagination isn’t some proliferation of my jellied neocortex, but a thousand-armed body, loaned to me only temporarily, accompanying me everywhere, and eternally sick of my shit. I hound after it until it sighs: God, what do you want now, Emma? Well. I want a great many things, but right now I want you to open that hand that houses my memory of that night. You know which one. When the rain chopped through my teflon jacket, soaking everything–from scalp, to nape, to the elastic band of my underwear–until the coral-red fever of my own breath and the smoke of your eyes on me were all I could feel, and we were both lit only by the bloodless duo of Venus and the moon shredded by clouds and the sudden flashes of snowy cranes in flight.

Recently, I was passed at an intersection by a young man in sportswear and muddied white-orange sneakers. His forearms were resting atop the handlebars, neatly folded, his hands cupping his elbows. His weight was shifted forward in a way that seemed to elevate him a foot off the asphalt, like an angel, exiled to Japanese suburbia. I can still picture his total stillness, broken only by the circular movements of his exposed calves, pushing against the pedals in a constant, gentle motion.

The perfect plum sits in the palm of the hand like a flushed cloud
during sunrise, or a bowling ball of decadent purple hardwood.
Sliced into half-moons, the meat, fibrous and dense like pork,
starts a deep red, lightening into a blend of rose, orange, and bronze,
before finally pooling into a core of soft blonde. The skin pulls off easily
with teeth, thin as lily petals but firm, and its taste fills the mouth
with brine that recalls the sea, with the final promise of sweetness.

The perfect boy drags me into the intimacy of a dark place, and his hips move
over me like the revving of a engine running on blood. In a blazing corner
of my mind, a rifle goes off. The shot strikes Eve in the heart and returns
her, instantly, to dust. Later, he tells me I touched him as though begging.
Both too tender and too calloused, this body, both too ashamed and too
proud; how to describe the violet shadow that’s beaded over me, like sweat, seeds
of pearl, the reminder that summer’s heat will make maggots of chopped plums?

When it rains, the tall, thin palm trees blur into the horizon. At five in the morning, the single florescent rod in the hostel room flickers on, so abruptly I mistake it for lightning. An ant crawls across my laptop screen. Mosquitos bite my little toe, buttocks, chest, and wrists. A cat with eyes so yellow I’m half-convinced it’s not a cat at all, but some supernatural creation, roams the hostel grounds, scaling the wall in a single, fluid leap. A white cow, ears like a puppy dog, trots languidly beside the road. “It belongs to the city,” Manasa says, patting its side with a tenderness both casual and profound. Pastel pink walls in the office of a politician, the paint peeling and migrating onto the door frame. A baby like a tiny God, his eyes lined with black, a burgundy dot smudged on his forehead. Hundreds of dragonflies in the air above the fruit, vegetable, and flower market.

I learn how to scrub laundry against a stone, how to take showers with a bucket, and how to eat with my right hand. Looking shyly back at the girls that stare. Bat swarms in the purple evening. Machetes. Motorcycles. Pools of urine. Sellers of diamonds, silver, and pearls. Cane sugar, sweet corn, coconuts. A rat half the size of my forearm, jumping in a bucket on the roadside. The auto-rickshaw, that bedazzled contraption with the horse power of a souped-up go-cart, which I ride every day for ten rupees per kilometer. Inside: glossy photographs of 80’s Bollywood actors in opaque, squareish sunglasses, baby blue, glittery images of Ganesha, decals with Saibaba, Bob Marley, and “Jesus saves.” Bhavani covers the tips of my fingers in lumps of black, muddy henna. The smell is fruity and earthy, red-orange when dry–a human caressing of the sunset–and it alters the look and feel of my hand, my body, entirely.

The temple and its combined odors of incense, manure, and blossoms. Mounted ceiling fans rotating over the framed family portrait of Shiva, Parvati, and their infant with the elephant head. Barefoot, in the half-dark of a twilight sweating through the open windows, I walk through the rooms: a ceremonial fire burning, a pair of shirtless Brahmin building a small mountain of chrysanthemums. The lap of a cobra, a mechanical drum, a handful of fragrant lemon rice. A shrine hidden by thick magenta curtains, plunged in lime green lighting, a pewter bowl filled with camphor, a man singing along to an electronic recording of a Telugu mantra. Two miniature orange buses with license plates from Tamil Nadu. Durga lying in oleander, her face black, eyes spots of ochre, and along her tarred neck, a garland of raw, whole carrots. On the road immediately outside the temple, a dead cat lies splayed, blood and brain matter emerging from a wound along its face.

The love in my body doesn’t understand the white bees, dark stars, and ships of hyacinths that Neruda knew. My love doesn’t understand his metaphors of twilight shadows, lavender kisses, and sea foam. My love has chosen, instead, the bloodied half of the moon. The visceral side of the soul: bile, breath, bowels. Very occasionally, emanating from the breast: blossoms.

There’s no beauty here, in these feelings for you, trapped and droning like house flies. I think of how little I deserve your virtue, your hands that are as guileless as the wind moving over fields. Forgive me. My love doesn’t live in the real world. Honestly, it builds nothing of purpose. The perversion of the empire of my love by the coast, made from mist, muscle, and magnolias. It exists half a mirage away from collapsing into the saltwater.

Did you ever suspect that I hid so much dominating energy within this body? Neruda would have recoiled at how much I desire–so shamefully–to see you sob each time I leave. He would have warned me against this decadence. This gambling of suffering, paid for with your purity. But there is still time, isn’t there? So much time, yet, to dream thoughtlessly, and to inflict those wounds that can be cured only by nakedness.

A continued panorama of odors. Mango, goatskin, flower garlands. Smoke, vanilla, dog feces. Guava, gasoline. Human sweat, chili chicken. One-hundred percent pure coconut oil, which to me smells like a blend of sex and soulmates.

Every so often, we lose power in the hostel. I lie supine, in the dark, my arms folded over my head. In only my sweaty bra and churidars, my roommates would be embarrassed by this state of undress. They themselves change only in total darkness, and hide everything but face, hands, and feet. Somehow I don’t think the boys in the hostel next door do the same. Here, I’ve encountered an aversion for the female form that manifests itself in conservatism of speech, behavior, and clothing; while this attitude not unfamiliar to me, the woman I have grown into cannot help but find it unacceptable.

My childish heart has seized upon perceived censure by developing a type of perversion that enjoys provoking reactions to immodesty. I casually bare the sections of my body that straddle the line of acceptability–the twin shallow dips at either hip, the plumpness of the breast visible underneath a tank top. Maybe I should know better than to play around like this, goading the girls into confronting what they think is depraved. But, truthfully, I no longer associate shame, as I once did, to these parts, which I now recognize form a whole that is as natural as the moon rising. Does that sound conceited, and hollow, in its extravagance? To be a woman–and not even cute enough for mauve-toned, soft-focus Instagram–comparing herself to the moon. Fortunately, I never claimed not to be self-obsessed.

I’m getting to know my body better, now that it has assumed its adult form. In the summer, my nakedness was called “doll-like,” in reference, maybe, to my tiny hands and feet, strawberry mouth, baby fat. When I myself look in the mirror, I usually fixate on the leftovers from my fulgent, brutal adolescence: the acne scars, puckered like kisses, the misaligned shoulders, the eternally dry and messy hair. My left breast, which is visibly smaller than the right. The face that has no shadow of Helen about it. In the still, lightless room, I touch, mostly exploratively, a bit licentiously (can you blame a twenty-two year old in the throes of spring awakening?), but always with the flavor of an innocence that is still learning. This body, its textures, its scent and salinity. Its avoidance of death, its instinct for love. In growing to care for this body, I have brushed up against its easy naturalness, that quality that is unassuming, simple, and–no matter what you have been told about shame–fundamentally incorruptible.

From the back of a two-wheeler, I spot a wall mural of a many-faced Hindu goddess done in matte, unshaded colors: Pepto pink, mustard yellow, a blue that recalls the intimacy of the ocean. She sits atop a fleshy lotus that looks like a triple labia, which is either a purposeful artistic choice or further proof that the only parts of my mind that are constantly online are the erogenous zones.

Moonlight, bruised, crests over the hills as Niharika, whose name means “morning dew,” pauses at a roadside stall to buy chicken pakora. Mangled blossoms of chicken breast, dense with bones thin as strands of hair, chickpea flour, and spices in dissolution are deep-fried in flaxen oil, and then adorned with circlets of lilac-white onion and lemon slices. The process is quickly and nimbly performed, and lit by a single buzzing fluorescent bulb. The street vendor, a devotee of Ayyappa by the smear of red between his eyes, pours the mixture into a newspaper cone with uncommon deftness and delicacy, as though arranging long-stemmed lilies. A laminated print-out affixed to the stall informs us that “PayTM,” a sort of Indian PayPal mobile app for micro-transactions, is accepted in lieu of cash. Across India I’ve been noticing this new millennium spin on everyday tradition: Facebook pages for temple sites, color televisions in remote villages fenced in by slim coconut trees. This union of the digital and the ordinary feels intentional, but natural, somehow: a marriage of wireless, and the wild. The father, the son, the holy spirit, and the semiconductor. I imagine an appearance of the goddess Durga, astride a collared lion, her many arms wielding a trident, thunderbolt, lotus, sword, and cellphone.

Morning dew and I, chicken pakora in hand, make our way up the hillside. The change in topography does not seem to daunt the locals, who have built, along the incline, what I imagine most closely resembles a labyrinth from the playbook of darker Grecian myths. That mood particular to twilight, sulky and foreboding, has descended. Add in a few gray clouds, a scattering of English wildflowers, and this could be King Lear’s cliffs of Dover. But, for me, this is a journey through memory rather than sentiment. I peer briefly through alleyways and am reminded of Gion, in Kyoto, where slim, forest green wood-paneled streets would terminate in urns of veined marble, or with a sliding door, opening noiselessly with the emergence of a geisha. Here, the gaps between houses are lit by ochre-toned bulbs, and feature pools of filthy, yet luminous, water encircling sleeping dogs. The occasional woman, barefoot and wearing a sari of patterned cotton that reveals the midriff but conceals the shoulders (a contradiction in modesty that I like to call “the paradox of the Indian crop top”) leans out of a window to look at me with a blend of curiosity, restraint, and a third quality I have not yet been able to name.

Strange, to think I came to this country, at least partially, to understand my Rajasthani father and have found so little here that reminds me of him. Sometimes I do think I notice him, in the taste of raw tamarind, which is midway between citrus and brine, or in the expression of a child who could have been him half a century ago. My mind suddenly travels to the poem by Li-Young Lee, “Visions and Interpretations,” which starts: “Because this graveyard is a hill / I must climb to see my dead, / stopping once midway to rest / beside this tree. / It was here, between the anticipation / of exhaustion, and exhaustion / between vale and peak, / my father came down to me / and we climbed arm in arm to the top.” But if my own father were here, I know he’d be two steps ahead of me, walking in short but quick, unflagging strides; he always did move at a pace that was difficult to match.

The color palette of the houses is dilapidated peaches-and-cream: exterior walls in coral pink, white-hued green, with the paint blistered in several places from floor to roof. But it is the brand of decay that suggests not death but the necessary experience of life, that asymptote approaching, but never equal to, immortality. I feel an expansiveness, as I stand atop the cascade of stairs, that brings to mind the soft yellow Ohioan wheat fields at dusk, a recollection from early childhood I’ve not had in years but that emerges now, fully formed: that same sense of distance being eclipsed, and of time acquiring the viscosity of a gelatinous physical solid. The glimpse of not precisely forever, but maybe a coarser, less pure form, a forever-ness, contained within the unctuous, sensuous waves of nighttime overwhelming the earth.

Halfway up the hill, we come across a tiny temple, shuttered closed for the night. To the immediate right is a mural of Durga, killing the demon and sticking her tongue out. The temple is labeled on Google Maps, a revelation which does not phase Niharika in the slightest but leaves me feeling intensely incredulous. But, then again, if Notre Dame, Giza’s pyramids, and Mount Everest are on the web, then why not this? Perhaps it is only appropriate that this be the way to achieve modern godhood.