Postcard from Hawaii, pt. 2

Another postcard, issued by Coral Cards in Honolulu this time. Fold it open and it says “Mele Kalikimaka Me Ka Hauoli Makahiki Hou.” The cursive font is intricate and beautiful and bright red still. Below, a slighter but capitalized font provides a translation: “Merry Christmas” it says and “Happy New Year.” The date is December […]

I packed my bag

Guilt is a heavy bag. It has no shoulder straps, no wheels. You lift it by a single leather handle, carry it with one hand and then with the other and when it gets too heavy to carry you twist your body into a sideways hunch and drag it along behind you. It bumps into […]

Postcard from Hawaii

There is a postcard my grandfather sent. “Lovely Hawaiian Hula Maiden” the description says, in bold print, on the back and below, a little smaller, “sways to an island melody.” The postcard is dated July 25, 1967, when you had just turned fifteen and is addressed to you, his namesake. On the front, the Hawaiian […]

Eavesdropping in the East

In the museum, the woman sitting next to me is sobbing, shoulders hunched, hands fumbling. Confusion clogs her voice when she tells her companion of children vanishing from school. When the wall came down, she says, we found devices in our phones and fittings. We never knew, we never knew. They, on the other hand, […]

All I want now

All I want now is to have back the time: The time spent searching for the moment of the fall, the precise moment when having done, said, thought X must have led to Y. All I want now is to have back the time spent sifting through all the possible Xs in a silent frenzy; […]

Unlike grief

Unlike grief, death was what I thought it might be. What I hoped it would be, even, as it turned out. Death was life’s last courtesy to my father, who had always been so lucky until he was lucky no more. He was fortunate in the way he died. This belief is not, I don’t […]

And yet

And yet, in spite of my recent obsession with loss, the feeling of being abandoned is not a new sensation. Taking up from where we left off, he might say, and I would agree. He stayed away for a whole year, or that is what I remember. So his brazenness in dying, in leaving me […]