1. Elegy for Rotten Love

Once when I was eight, I went fishing with my nanajī. I didn’t like fish nor fishing but I wanted him to like me, and he always said it is a grandfather’s duty to teach his grandsons to fish. Having none, I was the next best choice. No one was more surprised than me when my line was the first to tug. I pulled it up with all the strength in my little-girl fingers and held up my prize. The fish, stinking softly, had been dead for days.

2. Blood and Guts I 

My mother loves meat products. Pork sausages, beef keema, lamb stew—if it ever had blood and guts I’ll eat it, my mother says. She laments having raised an American child who eats meat off the bone and refrigerates eggs and doesn’t particularly like ants in her food. Rotten fish is a delicacy in Iceland, she chided. My nanajī joked that in Miani all the fish were rotten. This he punctuated with a short sharp bark. If I had a time machine, I would bring a tape recorder back to that moment and grab hold of it: the first and last time I heard my nanajī laugh.

3. Interior 

When I have a thought, it starts in my stomach. Good thoughts are helium balloons expanding all at once, sometimes threatening to carry me up and away. Bad thoughts are stones. Most are somewhere in the middle, dry autumn leaves or bird feathers or marbles. They travel up the pinball machine in my chest, bouncing off my ribs as they go by. Sometimes they make a pit stop on my lungs and it takes me a while to notice that I’ve stopped breathing. They wind their way to the hollow at the base of my throat, and this is where the trouble begins. If I try to swallow them down, they start hammering from inside to be let out. If I try to let them come out, they might get stuck in that throat space where my Adam’s apple might have been. In the space where I’ve started collecting a suitcase of I thinks and I feels, just in case I need to up and run at any moment. So I try not to think too much. If there is a finite number of thoughts I can compose, I’d rather save them for when I really have something to say.

4. Blood and Guts II 

My mother had to clean my nanajī’s blood and guts (her words, not mine) off the kitchen floor after he fell for the third time last week. She said she and dad would happily go to an old folks home once they got too old to take care of themselves so I wouldn’t have to deal with their insides being on their outsides. I wondered: are old people’s insides wrinkly too? She was mad that I asked. I said it was her words, not mine.

5. Destiny Herself 

A poster on the wall of our bathroom lists twenty-nine useless facts. It’s much better than a magazine because our guests don’t have to hold anything while they’re pooping and get their germy hands on our stuff. #12 Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. #6 All of the clocks in the movie Pulp Fiction are stuck on 4:20. #19 The microwave was invented after an engineer walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. This fact is not on the wall: I was banned from using the microwave in the fourth grade because I put too many things in there that don’t belong. #1 Tinfoil. #2 A metal spoon. #3 Plasticware that promptly melted. #4 Sticks of butter that exploded into golden fireworks. #5 Mugs of tea that boil over because they’re never hot enough. #6 The eggshell-blue bowls my great-grandmother made that explode into bursts of blue clay. #7 The time Destiny called me a dyke on the bus and I didn’t know what it meant but I knew I didn’t want to be one. #8 The time Destiny called me a dyke on the bus a few years later and I knew what it meant and I knew I couldn’t let her see how it got to me. #9 The shame. #10 The avoiding her eyes. #11 Destiny herself.

6. Taxes

They say that nothing is certain in the world but death and taxes. My nanajī is determined to evade both. Says if Trump could do it why can’t he. Says this country gave him nothing but grief and made him retake his medical exams twice and calls him an Indian when really he is from India. Never mind that his children went to public school and his grandchildren go to state-funded universities. Never mind that the hospital where he spent most of his working years and much of his retirement is paid for with tax dollars. Never mind that the county firemen always come to pick him up off the floor when he falls, never mind that his packages come every weekday from the same postal worker, never mind that nothing else is certain in this world; my nanajī is determined to avoid death and taxes.

7. The Piano Keys

The piano keys were stained when they arrived. I was ten, limping through Clair de Lune and perfecting Menuet in A Minor. Our old piano untuned herself when she felt like she needed a break, which by the ripe old age of sixty-five was nearly every month. Hence the new piano. It pulled up in a big moving truck, a Steinway from my grandmother. Apparently, Steinway wasn’t such a good guy because the keys were stained with red when they arrived. It took so much scrubbing to get them white again that the epidermis was stripped clean; now when I touch the tips of my fingers to the keys, I can feel the piano’s tendons shifting, her pulse quickening to match the beat of my own. I try to touch lightly. I worry that if I press too hard the keys will feel how badly I want them to sound like something, anything, else, and be hurt by it.

8. Closet 

My closet is four walls of luxury, replete with: clothing, lots of it; a band shirt (The Neighborhood) I borrowed from an ex and will not be giving back; socks with holes that I’ll never get around to turning into a sweater; Ean’s acoustic bass, for when he comes over and gets bored with playing with my tits and decides to play chords instead (I keep it there so he has an incentive to keep coming back); girls. There are girls in my closet, lots of them. I feed them every day, sure to laud them with my attention and praise—forever careful to tightrope walk the line between friendly and flirty. The girls in there come in all shapes and sizes, I haven’t found my type yet. Dark-skinned girls, tall girls, girls in leather pants and safety pinned-shirts, androgynous girls who would never give me the time of day. It doesn’t matter- they’re in my closet, and safe and sound and silent, in my closet they shall stay.

9. Insides

When I get bored with the existing connections between inside and outside, sometimes I have to make new ones. Usually, I can switch up the pace sufficiently: stuff my ears with Chopin, ply my nose with sandalwood, fill my mouth with insides from other people.

10. Lucid 

Ean has been lucid dreaming.  He got a book, one of those learn-a-new-skill-in-thirty-days manuals, with exercises to manifest his dreams in his dreams. He wants to be able to practice bass in his sleep. Think of all the time he will save! I don’t approve of this plan—dreamscapes should be left to the realm of the unconscious, in my opinion. But he is persistent. Last night he was fucking a celebrity (I didn’t care to find out which one), when the lucid door opened. I’ve never had a lucid dream but I imagine it as an Alice-in-Wonderland-kind-of thing, in which you fall down a rabbit hole or drink a potion, and suddenly you’re in the driver’s seat. So, Ean’s fucking a celebrity when the lucid door opens, and he decides that it would be more fun to jump off the balcony. His balcony is twelve flights up and overlooks a parking lot—nothing but ten seconds of air and solid tar to break a fall. At this point in his retelling, I grab his hand to remind myself that his blood and guts are not splattered all over the Subarus outside of Berkeley Towers, that his pulse beats in the waking world. I ask him not to do that again. He tells me it was just a dream, relax; anyway, he only did it so that he could fly. I ask him why he couldn’t start from standing, just jump into the air and fly. Ean looks at me as if I have missed the point; it’s just not as fun that way. He continues: so he was fucking a celebrity, then the lucid door opened and he decided to jump off the balcony, now he’s standing on the railing looking down. Layers of air which are usually invisible became sharp, blues mixing with greens and browns across the shimmering expanse of a dream. My heart beat faster. His feet wouldn’t move.

11. Swing

Some kid once managed to swing all the way up and around the swing set at the park. No one knew who or when or, most importantly, how, but we all knew someone had and therefore it was possible. Every kid who came through that park wanted to be the second one to do it; we imagined soaring through the air, reaching the apex of joy and accomplishment, soaring back down. We were invincible in our imaginations. The expanse of colonizable sky overhead just out of reach—if we could get close enough to touch it, that might be enough. We’d swing as hard and fast as we could, getting parallel to the ground or even higher, when the bottoms of our stomachs would fall out of our open mouths and we would drop with them like stones back to the ground.

12. Clouds 

I have learned many times why the sky is blue but I have more important things to remember: the subway stations without station managers where I can hop the turnstiles; my mother’s phone number, for emergencies; the combination to my bike lock. I don’t know what other color the sky would be and that’s enough of an explanation for me. I do know this: the clouds are white because when the sunlight moves through the droplets of water it illuminates every color, and they cannot agree on who gets to be loudest so they shout over one another in a cacophony of pigment and all we see is white noise.

13. Blood and Guts III

At 1 a.m. on November 12, 2020, my nanajī began a new life. His heart betrayed his mind, which remained as sharp at ninety-six as it was at sixteen, the age that my sister is now. My mother didn’t want to tell anyone; I promised I wouldn’t. I wondered: if he passed away mid-thought, would there be a bubble of think trapped somewhere on the path between his stomach and his brain? Would the doctors release it when they went to move his body from the hospital bed, or cut it out when they did the autopsy? If they did, would they try to capture it in a butterfly net, take a picture or write it down? Or would they let it float away on the breeze, out the open window, over the cars passing on the street below, oblivious that the last words of a man at the end of his road were drifting right over their heads? Would we ever know what he had to say?

14. Epitaph

A newly minted plaque at the Huntington Hospital in Long Island, New York reads Om Prakash Mediratta. May the light for which he was named be seen forever in his generations. When we cleaned out his office we found: one note to the gas company requesting they credit the $10.89 they had overcharged him to his account, and to please not make such a grave mistake again; every letter he and my nanijī ever wrote to one another (plus every letter my mother’s suitors ever wrote to her, every Christmas card the Mediratta family ever received, and the mailing addresses for what looked like half of Punjab); and precise instructions–penned in the steady script of a man who was a professor, a real estate agent, a father, a grandfather, a husband, an immigrant, and an aerospace engineer–on how to change the overhead lightbulb in the garage.

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