I run in fields of
your flighty laughter,
memories of you
spun like candy floss
for me to hold atop
a stick long after
you are gone.
I imagine you sit there
working through hedge
funds,libor rates, shell
corporations and other
mumbo jumbo that meant
nothing to me then or now.
We traded love in verse
or pun all through long
summer afternoons while
you worked and I pretended
to.That meant everything.
I did not tire of your
thoughts as you spoke
them loud, nor of the
gussied up lies of your
febrile imagination.
I just loved.
I soaked in all of you
until I changed hue. Willing
to be the chalice bearer
of love unconditional. I
would have poured until
deluge overcame you.
Instead you chose to
leave me in fields
ablaze with nothingness
smelling your absence
in westbound wind. You
did not wave as you left
you just did.
There is a word you have
missing after a
apostrophied departure.
You left for me to
fathom the infinite
ways to fill in a blank.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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