everything else: notes from here (ii)
dear internet,
everyone’s hanging laundry. in the house opposite mine, a family plays catch indoors, in yellow light. next door a lady wearing plastic gloves carefully tears more strips of plastic, winds them around her plants. i wonder if everyone’s talking louder in the quiet, or if voices are just carrying farther in the uninterrupted air.
at the grocery store a man asks for amla powder. do you know what it is, he asks the shopkeeper. yes, the shopkeeper replies, impatient, counting out my change (i have bought ten brown eggs and nothing else), i speak hindi, of course i know what amla powder is. (i do not know what amla powder is.)
i can see a basketball on the horizon, describing an arc in the corner of my eye. i can hear the thud whenever it isn’t caught. i can see a cat prowling in an abandoned building, confident, uncaring.
everyone claims the centre of the road now: an elderly man jogging, shirtless, panting; a woman carrying a tote bag of groceries; the stray dogs who won’t eat the food i put down for them, but wag their tails at me. we walk up and down the same stretch of road like we’re in a computer game and the graphics don’t extend beyond what’s in frame.
when people ask how i'm doing, i say, one day at a time—a sentence that means precisely nothing—and everyone always says, same.
one floor down from the family playing catch is a family praying. a candle flame draws circles in their window. very far down my street a child screams faintly, mama, mama. in the balcony below mine, in a house where no one lives, a purple flower has bloomed.
love,
t