that

we should love certain men, just because they love the girls we so love

today

i can't bear the me you created

some things

like the sound of that machine i don't know the name of- the one carpenters use to slice lumber- can transport me to childhood. also some things, like the fragrance of Johnson's baby blossoms, i just dabbed on my nape because Kathmandu is getting unbearably hot. it feels like Manila when i do that. makes me think of Germie's face and how she always dabbed Johnson's baby powder on her face in the Ladies, during recess. i have loved how that face lit-up when we talked stories, lives, books.

Germie is a child in her black shorts and Tee again, touching all her books, sprawling on the extra bed in our room, which used to be mine. I occupied Jana's bed in summer because she wasn't going to be on campus for that semester. So, Germie, her books, chocolate biscuits and wrappers. We quarreled over the mess sometimes- over the way the  beef noodles she ate made me nauseous. And she teased that I sounded pregnant. But you didn't want to get pregnant in that heat. And when the undergrad kid, whose name I can't remember, brought his girl friend over to the dorm on Friday afternoons, I always wondered how they could make love in such heat.

Our Fridays were a lot about planning and falling out. I felt betrayed when Germie didn't want to go out with me. In the two semester on-campus, I'd started planting a sort of possession on her- like she could only be my room-mate in the world. I was comfortable the way we could just be in our room- hair unkempt, underdressed, without words.

So, the day she didn't want to go to Trinoma with me, I immediately found someone else to go to Rustan's with me. Out of spite. Later, when she passed me on the Katipunan Ave, I looked through her like she were a lost lover and just walked on.

Later that evening, she'd brought me chocolate biscuits. I don't remember getting her anything.

Fever

your heat

cradles
me
to sleep

my bones

feel like wisps of smoke

frail-

they twist
and
dis
si
pate

against the skin

as they stretch me
a little further
than these nerves can bend

Aryaghat

scares me.
the first time i landed there was to cover someone's death. there was another passing away to cover today. this time, also with hands that reached out to touch A and tell him he had done his best.
i'm scared, nevertheless. i don't know where i find those words to console. do words ever console the dead? i've always wondered. nothing takes away the smell of the pyre you lose your loved one to. so, what can really console?
i wonder if that's where i will be laid someday and brushed down into the Bagmati. i wonder if my loved ones will join me there- maybe the Indian Ocean.
for now, i want to float away.
Kathmandu air is so thick with the dead.

Monsoon

There are dreary mornings
when a wisp of smoke
is set afloat the gloomy Kathmandu sky
by the old man
burning up his garbage in the backyard.

It's broken up
by the plunge of a passenger bus
into Trishuli.

Saurav says the river sucks people in.

I see Binod's smile behind the receiver,
as he tells me 20 people have gone missing.

photographs- II

and now
they tug at me
-moments
of lovers caught
in shutter speed

someday...
maybe we'll believe in love

photographs

It was only this sudden moment between flipping through someone's birthday photos on Facebook that I realized I hadn't had that kind of happiness for a long time.
Chocolate cakes, ice-cream, flowers. There were friends who made those things happen for me. For half a decade now, birthdays have been about apprehension. About trying to remember if anyone remembered my day, besides those on Facebook.
Why do we remember birthdays anyway?
But looking at those photos of the celebration a while ago, I found myself some smiles, as friends came back to me.