Some Prose for the Blue Soul

It’s like this. School is filling up my head. Like whoa. And so I took this idea and turned it into some prose which is presented below for your enjoyment if you so wish.

My mind was over capacity. So I divided it into compartments.

One box in the center in which I put myself. School, gum wrappers, nail polish in starry blue, books read too often, several diaries containing secrets too precious to speak aloud. A mascara wand and a vial of tears from the first time my heart broke. A few fragments of hopes I still carry and blue boots that I no longer wear. A wilted frangipani and a seashell so I can hear the sound of home whenever I want. Strands of hair and a heart still beating.

On the side in the yellow boxes is my family. My mother’s smiles. My father’s surliness. My brother’s dreams. My other brother’s cynicism. My sisters in law and their little happiness clutched in paper cranes. My cousins with their rhyming names and the little people who claim parts of me as their own. My nieces and nephews. All the multitudes. Little bodies whom I love so much it hurts sometimes. Pancakes for breakfast, hot rotis, the smell of henna and the laughing till you cry feeling. Whispering between mosquito nets in beds that housed childhood dreams. Feeling yourself grow from the fingers and having the whole world thump in your chest.

Then there are the miscellaneous items. The future in a golden thimble because it is only still one strand of hope. The darker stuff in old dilapidated cartons that are almost bursting their seams. The dark nights in a country so far from home. The winter cold dancing its fingers up my spine. The moments when absolution seems like the best escape. The tears that feel hot on cheeks that are wan. The pain that has nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with the heart. Ah, the heart. The stuttering heart.

Under it all, where I can’t easily find it, there’s a silver case. Locked shut, just in case I am tempted. And in it are the memories. Of you. Of us. The beginning, the middle and the end.

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