YDN Magazine: MOVEMENT by Yale Daily News

the movement issue

A Note From the Editors Staff Editors-in-Chief Gavin Guerrette Audrey Kolker Managing Editors Ana Padilla Castellanos Harper Love Kinnia Cheuk Olivia Wedemeyer Associate Editors Brunella Tipismana Emily Khym Fatou M’Baye Isabel Maney Jonas Loesel Owen Curtin Andrew Lau Sophia Ramirez Sukriti Ojha Layout Adam Bear Illustration Thisbe Wu Columnists Eli Osei Keya Bajaj Chela Simón-Trench

This issue of the Magazine is on the move. Below, read Adam Liptak on the Mag’s storied history of evading YDN cost-cutting and “quality-control” measures to produce, in essence, a university rag. We haven’t changed. In her poem “Little Green Peaches,” Maia Siegel finds herself stuck in moments she’d previously dismissed. Ashley Duraiswamy profiles Heena, an Indian designer who has moved to London to alter her life. In her visual poem “Drift,” Du Nghiem visits an aquarium and thinks about drowning. On a road trip through the rust belt, Gavin Guerrette reconsiders the use of documentary. Thisbe Wu’s painting “George and Michael 1971” captures a moment in time. Finally, Tigerlily Hopson spends a month in Auvillar running into bird corpses and learning to accept death. We hope you enjoy the Movement Issue.

Audrey and Gavin

A note from Adam Liptak, Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times I got my start in journalism at The Yale Daily News Magazine, which was then a scrappy, scruffy, countercultural rag in the mold of The Village Voice. In my day, working at The Magazine was like sitting at the kiddie table of the News itself, which took itself pretty seriously and did great, sober work that could sometimes seem a little dutiful. What we at the magazine lacked in gravitas we made up for in mischief. And some of us built decent careers on the foundation of a lively conception of the journalistic enterprise. It makes me think of a reflection from the great critic and satirist H.L. Mencken: “As I look back over a misspent life, I find myself more and more convinced that I had more fun doing news reporting than in any other enterprise. It is really the life of kings.” Great good wishes, Adam

CONTENTS cover | Du Ngheim

Slight Alterations

Drift

States of Abandon

profile | Ashley Duraiswamy poem | Du Ngheim photo essay | Gavin Guerrette

24 art | Thisbe Wu

George and Michael 1971 On Baby Birds and Loving Them

Little Green Peaches

essay | Tigerlily Hopson poem | Maia Siegel back | Thisbe Wu

Slight Alterations Ashley Duraiswamy Heena’s fingers are greased with the guts of sewing machines. The space between machine and table is a no man’s land, full of dust, red thread, and splashes of oil. Flicking the shuttle cover aside, Heena plunges her hands into the breach. It smells of crushed sesame. She clicks her tongue. “Sister.” She pulls out the empty bobbin. Pops it into my hand. “No thread. No good. Two threads are compulsory.” 4

“Compulsory,” I soon discover, is Heena’s favorite word. Four months ago, she felt compelled to march into Amritsar airport, board a plane to Heathrow, and install herself at Gill Tailor Shop, Unit 23, Palace Shopping Center, 14 South Road, Southall, London. Heena doesn’t understand what’s so “South” about Southall. As far she’s concerned, anything North of North India is in the wrong direction. Like most of Little India’s inhabitants, Heena grew up in Punjab. As a child,

she’d shown little interest in the UK and spent her afternoons admiring salwar suits in shop windows. After high school, she took a rickshaw to the neighboring village and secured a B.A. in fashion design. This was theoretical stuff, Heena explains. Not practical. Instead of training her hands, she spent three years training her eyes. One afternoon, she passes my sewing machine and, with a squeak of dismay, informs me that I am using radically different colors. I glance down at the

two “compulsory” threads in the machine. Both yellow. Now that she’s mentioned it, I can see how they might differ. One thread is a milky saffron, the other a crushed marigold. When I ask Heena what she’d call these colors, she shakes her head. “Different, sister,” she says. “Just different.” Heena kicks off chartreuse Crocs. These were the first articles of dress she purchased in London—round, rubbery things that won’t dent a sewing machine if they soar in the wrong direction. I look up. The walls are lined with spools the size of coffee cups. Heena hops onto a stool and stoops, her eyes a needle’s length from the threads. Today, she’s dressed in North Face track pants and a blue Scooby Doo t-shirt. With muscled arms, she coils her hair into a low bun and wraps a blue measuring tape around her neck. Aside from color-coordinating her tape measures with her t-shirts, Heena doesn’t care what she wears. She can admire clothes more effectively when they’re not on her body. Plucking a spool of mint-green thread off the shelf, Heena returns to her ghangra choli. She holds the dress out, away from her torso. Traces the almond-shaped mirrors around the sleeves, the gold zardosi embroidery around the neck. From my post at Sewing Machine #3, I recall the ill-fated sewing lessons of my youth. I ask Heena if I’ll ever be able to sew something as beautiful as those mirrored sleeves. She considers my question. “Sister,” she says, “you are

very intelligent. I think. I am thinking you can learn in four weeks.” The Punjabi word for sister is bhenji. Hindi—deedee. If you wander around Palace Shopping Centre, you’ll hear both bellowed with reckless abandon. Heena, on the other hand, is determined to do things the proper way—the English way—and confines herself to “sister.” She censures in a British accent, praises in an American one. With gentle pity, she calls my zig-zag saffron stitches “complete rubbish,” then graces my accidental backstitch with an “Oh my god! How cool!” Heena’s secret ambition is to get “the Accent.” This Accent is the difference between saffron and marigold threads. At the moment, Heena confesses, she can’t pick out the difference between American and British English. But she’s learning. With loving regularity, Heena tailors her voice. The Indian tailor cannot adapt. So claimed the Brits who flooded Indian ports in the eighteenth century. These were lackeys of the East India Company, ill-suited to their new environment. When they disembarked at Madras, humidity seeped into their frilled habits à la française like spilled soup. So the British employed Indian tailors. The tailor, or darzi, equipped his sunburned patron with climate-appropriate clothing. Cool sateen replaced cambric jabots; wool underwear gave way to cotton briefs; and black worsted wool—the doom of sextons and vulturous widows—melted into

white silk twill. Thus far, the darzi served his purpose. But he knew nothing of style. To keep pace with colonial fashions, British nabobs imported British tailors. The English tailor was well-versed in the latest technologies: the handheld sewing machine in the mid-1800s, the electric sewing machine post 1889. After all, nabobs said, shaking bewigged heads—what Indian could tame a sewing machine? When Heena swept into Gill Tailor Shop four months ago, she’d never touched a sewing machine. In four minutes, she persuaded Mr. Gill to teach her. Now, the fifty-something year-old Punjabi owner jabbers about Heena to anyone who drifts in for a fitting. The best student this shop’s ever seen, he tells a Welsh customer as he pins her wedding lehenga. Heena was so good he just had to pay her. In India, most seamstresses learn from men. A Punjabi mother might teach her daughter to darn kameez trousers, but professional tailoring revolves around Western fast fashion. It’s no secret that companies like Zara, Mango, and Primark have moved their factories East. From 2007 to 2019, the New York Times churned out gut-wrenching headlines like “Who Made Your Clothes?” Most of these articles declaimed the horrors of Bangladeshi sweatshops. But there’s another kind of Indian seamstress. When male tailors realized they were making as little as 15 cents an hour, they brought work home; they enlisted female relatives, female neighbors; they raised an army of seamstresses, 5

trained to perform simple tasks like looping lace around bell sleeves and stitching Corozo buttons onto blazers. The men earned a meager living. The women earned nothing. Mr. Gill, says Heena, is “a very nice man.” She expected him to teach her. She didn’t expect to be paid. William Crooke—esteemed British orientalist, chronicler of Anglo-Indian folklore—loved Hindi proverbs. He jotted them down on fly-away scraps of paper and shipped them back to England. One of his favorites went like this: Darji ka put jab tak jita ta tak sita. The tailor’s brat will do nothing but sew all life long. Heena’s mother never taught her to sew. She urged her daughter to design. Fashion design was—and has always been—respectable. According to the Devanga weavers of Mysore, men came into the world naked, peeling, dragging cracked skin across the earth. Brahma created Manu to fashion men’s clothes. Manu was a designer. He pulled threads out of lotus stems— bright stalks sprouting from Vishnu’s navel—and dyed his cloth with the blood of demons. The designer creates; the tailor destroys. A tailor, said the Moghuls, picks colors apart. A tailor is not Manu. A tailor’s brat will do nothing but sew all life long. So Heena learned to design. Not to sew. In the spring of 2013, my mom signed us up for joint sewing lessons. She bought matching sewing desks (honey maple for me, dark walnut for her); booted my dad’s yoga mat 6

to his study; and arranged our sewing stations, side by side, in the master bedroom. When Mom moved to Silicon Valley, my grandma assumed she’d dump the mending on a maid and make a bid for Apple CEO. That was twenty-three years ago, and my mother was now a homemaker. In these situations, Mom says, one has to adapt. After a reconnaissance mission to the March PTA meeting, she concluded that American mothers taught their daughters to sew. That weekend, she drove us to Quilting Bee, Sunnyvale, a place as cloying as its name, full of sunshine-yellow wallpaper and strawberry-shaped pincushions. I rebelled after three classes. Mom altered her plans. I’d spend my Bee-free Saturdays brushing up on biology. One day, when I was a cardiothoracic surgeon at Mass Gen, I’d pay someone to mend my jeans. As for my mother, she continued to slip away, Saturday after Saturday, bringing home a frock that pinched my armpits and a stuffed cat too stiff to hug. When I asked why the cat wasn’t soft, she shrugged. She’d used lots of stuffing because all the mothers had. One has to adapt. Heena unwinds her bun. It’s that sleepy hour between 1:30 and 2:30—no customers, Mr. Gill off on his afternoon croissant hunt. For ten minutes, the only sound is the chuff of the fan. Heena’s hair spools out like a scarf. To fill the silence, she tells me about her family. Snaps her strawberry hairclip open, shut, open, shut, because she’s crying now and needs some-

thing to do with her hands. She’s tired, she says. Tired in the head. And lonely. Chintz, paisley, silk brocade, Madras plaid, and Ikat flame-weaving have all braved the crossing from India to England. Heena immigrated for her dad. Three rejected visa applications later, he still dreams of living in Southall. When I ask why, Heena eyes me blankly. It’s his dream. He doesn’t need a reason. A mother and daughter burst into the shop. Hurriedly, Heena swipes a hand over her eyes, whips the blue tape from her neck, and descends on the daughter, measuring from waist to hips, hips to knees, knees to ankles, as the mother—brasshaired, bass-voiced—orders her to take in the bust and, for god’s sake, not to mess with the cut. A tailor never alters the design. I ask Heena if she tailors anything British. She gives her head a furious shake. No British clothes. Only Indian. Ten minutes later, she tugs a pair of black Puma joggers out of her drawer and sets to unpicking the waistband. Punjabis buy these joggers. Punjabis wear them. It’s a matter of altered definitions. If Heena only hemmed salwars, she’d be out of work. As she feeds a taffeta gown into her sewing machine, I ask about the fabric. Is it difficult to shape? Heena tosses her head. “No, sister. Easy.” I wonder if all this is a bit too easy. No lotus threads pulled from navels. Grab the seam ripper. Unpick the hem. Smooth the seam edge. Tuck one inch. Iron. Tuck another inch. Repeat.

Don’t alter the design. Twice a week, Heena leaves Mr. Gill nodding over his 11am cup of chai and catches the train to Brunel University, where she’s getting an MSt in Business and Management. Mr. Gill is very nice, she repeats. Then she glances up, makes sure he’s on his croissant break, and leans forward until her measuring tape brushes my wrist. She wants to be a tailor. Her own shop, her own customers. And she’d do some tailoring. But mostly—here, she breaks off and eyes the left wall. Heena’s favorite part of the shop. Choli blouses flutter from the racks, golds and pinks and Persian blues, bright as demon’s blood. She made these. Of course, nobody buys them. Most customers stroll down Indian Broadway, to Monga’s and Prathana’s and Preeti Fashion. Yet every morning, Heena kicks off her Crocs, hops onto her stool, and rearranges her cholis. Because—mostly—she wants to be a designer. On my last day, I smuggle black jeans into the shop. They’re my favorite pair— threadbare and ragged, ripped in all the wrong places. This, I’ve decided, is my final project. Mending my jeans. My mother will be proud, and I’ll appease the poor ghost of Quilting Bee. When I yank the crumpled jeans out of my backpack, Heena squawks and sweeps them out of my hands. She folds them, running her fingers over the tears, crooning like a vet with a bruised black cat. Feeling mildly guilty, I slink back to my sewing desk. We work in lines here— Mr. Gill at the front of the shop,

Heena behind him, and me at the back, where no customers will glimpse my crooked stitches. Heena decides I need more practice before tackling jeans, so she tosses me two slivers of saffron silk. I’ve never held fabric so soft, much less mutilated it with my sewing machine. Heena flips the scraps belly-up. She instructs me to sew them together. “Down this length, sister,” she says, tracing a line with her finger. “Nice straight length.” This sounds simple. It isn’t. Three lessons in, I still struggle to coax thread out of the sewing machine’s innards. Back at Quilting Bee, a lady in a cupcake apron flounced into our first lesson with a diagrammed sewing machine, labeled with mysterious phrases like “bobbin winder stop” and “feed dogs.” The only useful things about this diagram were the numbers. They went from one to six and showed you where to loop the thread. Heena’s explanation is a bit different: “One, there, here, there, five, five, done!” As incompetent as I’ve always been at math, even I’m put off by the superabundance of fives. But this is my third lesson, so I set to work, counting beneath my breath: “One, there, here, there, five, five, done!” After speeding the presser foot over two sides of fabric, I notice a problem. I haven’t made any stitches. So I tap the needle. Count my compulsory threads. Shove my hand into the no man’s land of bobbins and smudge my fingers with sesame grease. Heena lets me struggle. She believes I’m learning something. Ten minutes and several

“five, five”s later, I’ve sewed a line. It’s not a straight line, but it holds the pieces together, so I figure I’ve succeeded. I present my work to Heena. “Sister,” she says kindly, “this is rubbish. Unpick, please.” She hands me a seam ripper. I set to work. After another twenty minutes, I’ve managed to sew a line that is not straight— but isn’t rubbish either. Heena whisks past on her way to fluff the cholis. She stops. “You’re making a sleeve?” she asks. I stare back, uncomprehending. The thing in my hands is two finger’s thick—an unfit sleeve for anyone besides Jiminy Cricket—but Heena wraps it around my arm and shows me how the silk would frill a salwar cuff. She smooths an affectionate hand over my project. These are no longer two scraps of fabric. They’re the inklings of a design. The next forty minutes are more stressful than my premed exams. Heena, who is now invested, hovers by my shoulder as I primp the edges, grab a hook that resembles an Egyptian brain-extraction rod, and flip the fabric inside-out. At long last, I have something resembling a ribbon. It’s unimpressive—the kind of thing a Punjabi milkmaid might wear in her braids— but with reverent hands, we slide it away from the presser foot and onto the ironing table. Steam beads in our hair. The silk feels warm in our hands. Ripped jeans forgotten, we clutch opposite ends of the ribbon, smile, and realize we’ve made something. Like Manu. 7

drift

a poem about drowning fish by du!

today i held my breath for nearly a minute at the aquarium, thinking that i would beat a moonfish

i have drowning dreams now and then, but every time still feels like a first can you ever get used to dying?

i hate swimming but wouldn’t every tongue speak the same under water?

our lungs filled with withdrawn breath isn’t a word unsaid a statement spelled out? i’m glad we don’t have gills.

let’s go swimming and love so well under the blue coat of a ripening sun dipped into the crest of a wave, silvery urns poured out in salt and seaweed and stench of june heat

and let me weave love like a thread of water that never retreats that always finds a direction to flow

a blade that cuts sharp can you quite catch my drift? will the sea echo my name?

i will send fish to your dreams, let’s once again learn how to breathe.

today i held my breath for nearly a minute at the aquarium, thinking that i would beat a moonfish i have drowning dreams now and then, but every time still feels like a first can you ever get used to dying? i hate swimming but wouldn’t every tongue speak the same under water? our lungs filled with withdrawn breath isn’t a word unsaid a statement spelled out? i’m glad we don’t have gills. let’s go swimming and love so well under the blue coat of a ripening sun dipped into the crest of a wave, silvery urns poured out in salt and seaweed and stench of june heat and let me weave love like a thread of water that never retreats that always finds a direction to flow a blade that cuts sharp can you quite catch my drift? will the sea echo my name? i will send fish to your dreams, let’s once again learn how to breathe.

drift

States of Abandon

Gavin Guerrette

“… these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of others still more alien; and they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who were actuated towards this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy, curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly in a lack of consciousness, and conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they are doing.” Let Us Now Praise Famous Men James Agee & Walker Evans

Given the chance, I would take you back to these places myself. But rather than inspecting the desolation, I’d search your eyes squinting in the cloudless sun, watch the sweat drip down your contorted face. I want to see you stand where I have stood, shoulders square to a crumbling building, desperate to make sense of this one among many thousands, entranced until a swift breeze shakes you. I’ll have to settle now for postcards, snapshots of decline captured in a road trip across the rust belt, but just know that nothing save your own experience could suffice. I crept along streets across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, peering into the lives of people impacted by decline which began decades before they were even born. I sought abandon. I read economic papers flush with explanatory

terms in preparation for my trip. Prosperity and decline. Industry and the lack thereof. Line graphs up and down. All were rendered obsolete when I faced the people of the rust belt. Three days into my trip, I stood near a highway exit overlooking a neighborhood in Pittsburgh. I took some pictures and then heard a distant shouting voice. I didn’t

turn my head – nothing was my business when I was the outsider. “Yo! I’m talking to you.” I turned. Staring back at me from across the street was a man with a wide-eyed look I still have not forgotten. “What the fuck are you doing taking pictures of the hood?” he asked me. I called back across the street: “I’m doing a documentary project on post-industrial economic decline in the –” “Are you from here?” “No.” “Then why the fuck are you taking pictures of the hood?” He moved to cross the street. “I mean I’m just trying to –” “I think you should get outta here before I fuck you up.” “Alright, alright, I’m sorry. I’ll leave.” He was right in front of me now. We looked at one another. He just

might fuck me up. I turned to leave. He called me a piece of shit. Maybe he was right. A few days later, I drove to South Bend, Indiana. I walked down South Michigan Street on a particularly sweltering day. At first, I encountered the occasional abandoned building and snapped some pictures, but as I walked further, my camera weighed heavy in my hand. The street held homeless encampments between abandoned homes; the sidewalk was lined with bodies slumped in the midday sun, exhausted, drunk, or high, their possessions next to them in bags or shopping carts. The only businesses that appeared open were liquor and convenience stores, payday loans places, and a plasma “donation” center offering $400 cash to those who slept in tents only hundreds of feet away. This was the rust belt that I sought, but when faced with it, I could do nothing but put my camera away. I couldn’t bring myself to further the assault on human dignity. There had to be some other way. Almost pleased with my moral realization, I was approached by a man from across the street. He asked me what I was doing. I fumbled through an answer, adding that I had stopped to pack my camera and turn back. He motioned across the street towards a cluster of tents: “It’s

just that my good friend lives in there. I’ve been helping him best I can, trying to get him out so he can get cleaned up and work, and I don’t think he’d appreciate having his picture taken.” I could walk down any street in the rust belt and point my camera at a dilapidated façade. I might take an artful photo that I could bring back to Yale and publish in a magazine. People might ponderously scratch their chins at it, even talk about it over dinner. Maybe their hearts

will bleed. Mine sure has. But what good does looking do? After talking to the man in South Bend, I apologized profusely and left in tears. It would seem all that I have given the people of the rust belt is tears. And it would seem all I have given us here is the material for catharsis, an absolution of our complicity through a perverse sort of pity. And what good is this pity for anyone? I haven’t picked up my camera since my trip through the rust belt. I thought I was 21

helping with my photographs, although I never knew exactly how. At best, I was documenting a reality already understood by my subjects and unable to be understood by my audience. Now I am stuck in a place of half-understanding, between living this reality each day and forever imag-

ining it. Maybe I should be grateful, but all I can muster is disgust. I spoke to a journalist this summer about the difficulties I faced with my project, thinking he might have some advice. He gave me a look of tired understanding and told me, “Well, you’ve arrived at

these problems pretty early in your career. Good luck. I still haven’t figured it out.” We shared a laugh at that — what good were our tears?

George and Michael 1971

Thisbe Wu

On Baby Birds and Loving Them Tigerlily Hopson “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –” Emily Dickinson I open the door to the terrace and there is a baby bird. She is a milky translucent gray, her only color the small yellow beak tucked into her chest. A fly buzzes and lands on her body. One week in Auvillar, and I have seen five dead birds. They come in different sizes and shapes, different stages of decay. Some with feathers fresh, others with feathers falling out. I run away from the terrace to hide on the first floor. I refuse to go back to the second floor kitchen. The items I had taken out for lunch sit waiting on the counter to be spoiled by the heat. Dead bird. Noun. One whose death or failure is or seems inescapable. The flies follow me. Darting about my body. They buzz, buzz, buzz in my ear. All I can hear is their restless vibration, now inside of me. I decide I am dying, or am already dead. I call my mom the next day and break the news to her. The birds, the flies – there can be no other explanation – I am going to die. “You have it all wrong,” my mom’s voice responds from half the world away. “Don’t you understand? We can’t have life without death.” “What?”

“You will have just as much pain as joy in your life. Stop running away. Go up to death and study it. Thank it.” On my way home I talk to the owner of a new family of cats. She tells me the mama cat caught a bird and brought it home for her babies. We watch them. The babies curl up on their mother, tucked between her legs, heads on her belly. She licks them proudly. I walk up the stairs to the second floor. On the terrace, I clean up the dead baby bird. Gently scoop its little body into a plastic bag. “Close your eyes,” a classmate tells me as I go in to grab. But I keep my eyes open.

“A lot of people enjoy being dead. But they are not dead, really. They’re just backing away from life.” Maude from the movie Harold and Maude Keerthana, my friend from school, sends me a playlist. Thirteen songs meant to create a “look-at-how-beautiful-thisworld-is vibe.” She writes me a long note as an accompaniment. “In all seriousness, Tiger,” it reads. “I hope you can find your own special ways to bring out joy.” I am in Southern France,

escaping myself. I walk down the cobblestone streets and see my reflections in windows and doors and storefronts. “Go write your beautiful words,” Mama told me when I left, going for a summer month to study and write. But, how can I put words on the page when they catch in my throat and chafe at my tendons, refusing to come out onto my tongue or through the tips of my fingers? I listen to the words of the playlist songs. The Cults, Strawberry Guy, Sufjan Stevens. The songs sound like colors – golden hour orange and sunrise pink and seaside turquoise. I get to Mac DeMarco and I hear him sing “I’m home, there’s moonlight on the river, everybody dies.” I keep walking. Thirteen miles on the Camino de Santiago canal path I walk and have nothing to do but look. I listen to the playlist. The path is edged with flowers, some brown and withered, others flush and grown. There is another dead bird — this one is squished and looks like its insides have been sullied with little red pomegranate seeds. There is a burning smell. Black strips – feathers? – fall from the sky. An older man walks alone on the other side of the stream. He shuffles along, and for a moment our eyes meet. I wave. He – a little unsure? surprised? – waves back. Then he 25

puts his hand down and keeps walking slowly along. I am one of thirteen students in this study abroad program. Some days life is easy, effortless. On others it feels hard, heavy. Three weeks into the program, I go into hiding. This is something I sometimes do. Close the door and shutters and curl up into myself. Like a bird burrowing in the winter, hiding head and feet in her feathers, so she looks only like a little handful of fluff. I will stay in here forever. Or at least until I stare at my blank computer screen for hours, but really sleep for hours, and cry in intermittent spurts, and try to stare at my blank computer screen again, and then sleep again, to wake, feet curled up, head pulled in, wondering when it will end and be time to open the door and the shutters. Patrik knocks on the door, and he has three bits of Finnish chocolate wrapped in purple paper. He places them on my bed like an offering. An unexpected friendship. He is blond and Finnish and wears button-ups. I am brown-haired and American and wear punk rock t-shirts. Now, we have matching thin golden friendship bracelets which we click together like preteen girls. I do not know how to thank him, but take one piece, unwrap it, and taste the milky chocolate on my tongue. He sits on my bed and we talk, and then he holds out his hand. He is going to a concert at the outlook of the village. I know about it. I am avoiding it. All the people, the noise – it wouldn’t be good for my condition. But he 26

asks. Would I like to come? I look around the room, shades already drawn, stuck between staying and leaping into the living. Okay, I finally say, and take his hand. For the first thirty minutes I look for an excuse to leave. This is not good, this is not the place where I’m supposed to be. But, the band, all dressed in pastel pants, is good. And there is a woman in bohemian bottoms and a flowing black button-up blouse who is dancing like it is only her in the world. Letting the music carry her, she moves every part of her body – head and neck and fingers and toes. She stamps and swerves and kicks her feet. She closes her eyes. I wish to be like her. A few songs pass. And I look up at the woman, and our motions lock into each other, and I am dancing too. I am feeling the music, letting it roll over my body, letting it rattle my soul.

“I find ecstasy in living – the mere sense of living is joy enough.” Emily Dickinson I spend a day with the owner of the cats. She walks barefoot or in those shoes that wrap around each toe like a second layer of skin. She wears green dresses and bright beaded bracelets. In her walk, in her eyes, in her smile – an ease. We sit inside the bar she owns and bunch bouquets, picking out dead roses and rearranging the living. We go to the supermarket and dance in the aisles. We walk her dog along the canal.

She tells me her story. It is dark. Her family was dysfunctional and abusive. “But, what is your secret?” I ask her. “How did you get to the other side? Now, you seem so free.” She answers right away. “Don’t escape from the pain. Don’t run away. Go straight into it.” She sums up my life-discovery in three sentences. For the moment I have her ease. “Nature is like an open book about life,” she says, waving at the world. “You see everything lying on your path. You can see flowers blooming, and you can see a big bird eating a baby bird of another species. You can’t save any baby bird. But you can stand and watch with love.” We walk, the trees swaying by the water. We feel the breeze and her dog dips his paws in the canal.

I let a fly land on my hand. Six thin legs — he presses his front two together like he is in prayer. He tickles my skin as he walks. He perches on my ring while I write with my pen.

Little Green Peaches Maia Siegel I missed you while you were beside me and the feeling filled me like a gas, ballooning me into a mascot of myself. Last night at the overpriced Japanese restaurant I chewed up little green peaches, handed you their pits. When I left you for a few days I felt you leave me entirely. My brain was reduced to a pit, its meat gnawed off. The way you gritted your teeth on the ice skating rink or blended tangerines with milk and called it sorbet or flicked your tongue out like a lizard while I held your enormous, hard head—suddenly these felt essential, fibrous. When these moments had played in front of me I found them limp: the way you wouldn’t let yourself fall on the rink, how you were stabbing the ice to stand. How you sweeped grocery store after store looking for the right oranges, how you were so hurt I hadn’t finished the milky pulp in my bowl. I wasn’t ready to finish. I am not ready to finish.