I gave the surgeon permission to lift each breast to check each lower boundary
My gaze fixed on his face, I feel comfortable with him.
The range of my vision catches the edges of body areola too large, mass of flesh too prominent
as always, numb to touch.
How long can one live outside the body?
Mystics and magicians find ways to float, disappear, conjure things that are not; hide things that are there.
And I have made parts of this peculiar arrangement of bones disappear for 45 years allowing fragments to enter my mind – limbs, a muscle, face, hair abstractions I accept as mine.
At times my magic is to slide into spirit, wear it like a body, so easily untethered.
He parts each breast to the side; confirming the aesthetics of tissue, position of nipple, length of the cut.
I am back to his face. One can get so used to enduring to ignoring to waiting outside a door to a place you could call home
and wonder what bleak quarrel with nature drove you out what terrible false will of the world kept you there.
I am not a magician, nor a mystic, a trickster, an illusionist. There is nothing special here.
Mostly I am a traveler, palm pressed on any door, willing to enter a place I can call my own.
My father and I walk along Snake Trail Canal, he landed a few days ago with my mom, both rattled by failing memories, endured on those long flights from Delhi to Miami, aging bodies scrambled from the crack in distance and time.
My father talks about time and how much of it has passed and how he could have used it gracefully He says he is living on borrowed time, his “quota is over.”
I listen. My father regrets many things. I search for the same feeling — that uneasy bitter weight under the throat.
Instead, I find the weightless certainty that our separation, my necessary fatherless journey, my queerness, my own flight was just so, just right.
Here we are under dappled light, wet tree roots like fingers pluck the sun’s glimmer from the canal’s dark water, I turn his collar down and he flicks his hand across one shoulder as if to unburden himself.
my arm rests around him as we gaze into everyday oblivion, muscovy ducks shuffling around our feet.
afternoon joggers scuttling by
There is nothing I can say to soothe him take on that well-worn role of the comforter the caretaker, just a child who learned how to survive using hands and words and mind to fix, to carry that which was not mine.
My father and I haven’t spoken for a long time, and now it doesn’t matter for how long. when I was younger, I would go years without hearing his voice so I am used to it and manage my time as reflection and respite from being what I am not with him.
But that day when the water, the trees, sky and tiny creatures of the world surrounded our insignificance, I felt a hidden joy the pleasure of finding him again, decades later, as I am
I drove often to see her, a terrible ache just above the chest. I would drive for miles, 17 years old, knowing the roads by heart having tried so many nights, only to turn back.
After all, I lacked courage, didn’t have the right words, or so I thought. My dark hands gripping the steering wheel filled with hope and longing terrified me.
Over the years I have learned to be brave as we all do in our own way, brave enough to leave, to stay, to pray, to speak tenderness into those broken places, to hold our ground against brittle old stories under our feet.
I was brave. I knew that one cannot betray the pull of love, the body’s fire
The desire
to be whole.
Even then, I knew that courage didn’t lie at her door, but travelled for miles, day after day, year after year, through the pale glare of street lights, daring to be loved, determined to be free.
Walk With Me 