Barn
“You’re leaving then?” my mother’s voice is flat as the horizon, only I am the one who imbues it with possibility: hope, always, that in crisis, she will know what to do — impossible to decouple from the knowledge that this has frequently not been the case. I hug her goodbye before I walk out the door with my father’s green carry-on in my hand and an overwhelming guilt that I lug like a well-designed Swedish backpack on my shoulders whenever I leave the house on Riverside Avenue in recent years.
I drive up 91 to Vermont, my thoughts interspersed by the change of season. How long has it been since I’ve driven on a highway? Already it is September and trees have inhaled the sun into their roots, and exhaled it into the gold handkerchiefs of silk that take flight and catch on my windshield. I cry in spurts as I have done every day for the past month.
The highways are empty and in the passenger seat of the car is a cloth mask, a plastic bottle of hand sanitizer, a box of blue latex gloves, the color of New England sky. A small untouched pint of strawberries accompanies these supplies, but I cannot eat them.
Since I saw my father the last time he was alive, looking small in the hospital bed as they shaved his chest with an electric razor, an oxygen mask fogging up the bottom half of his face, since I held his hand and told him, “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. You don’t have to worry, Papa. I will take care of everything you need me to. It’s going to be fine. I’m right here and I’ll never leave you,” I cannot seem to bring food to my lips without my throat constricting, without instinctively gagging at the smell of anything remotely biotic.
“The barn misses you,” my friend Val tells me over the phone again and again. “Come up and stay here for a while. Let us take care of you.” This is like Val, who, as long as I have known her, has nudged me out of all my prisons, especially the ones I’ve built.
The barn is Batten barn, and the us are Val and her partner Sam, a newly anointed lumberjack, who till recently worked in an office, their two daughters, Frankie and Jean, who I routinely indoctrinate with art and terrible eating habits, their two black labradors, Wilhelmina and Finney, and Val’s parents, Jane and Tom, stewards of the land they have lived on for over thirty years.
Val has relocated — as of a year ago and just in time for the world to come to a sputtering halt — from Los Angeles to the 200-acre farm in East Calais, Vermont, where she grew up. The land is partially woods and twisting trails, fields of hemp and raspberry brambles, but at the northern edge sits a bright crimson four-story edifice, glorious against those unblemished Vermont skies.
The first time I saw the barn, I fell in love with it in the way one wishes to fall in love, if one is me — laughing with mixture of abashedness and glee at the sight of it, before I found myself in tears. I visited the barn every day on that weeklong stay, taking pictures, reading poetry by Jean Valentine in the hammock at its mouth. Sometimes I wandered inside its hallowed depths, and whispered wishes like prayers in a temple.
This is the only way I know how to fall in love, and I do not choose who or what I love. A barn is my temple. Difficult people have been my boyfriends. My celebrity crush is the ghost of James Gandolfini, who I once saw perform in God of Carnage at the Ahmanson, the gravity of the theater tilting on its axis whenever he spoke. I remember being shocked to later learn he was capable of dying, the way I now feel about my father.
But maybe I don’t choose who or what I love. Maybe I never have — the seeds of the past are, after all, long forgotten once they bloom into a vital entity. Batten barn reminds me of the children’s books I read at Queen’s Public Library when we first arrived in America. It was from those books — among the first I read in a foreign language — that I learned that barns are often red because red paint was the cheapest, also farmer’s made it by combining ferrous oxide, milk and lime.
Batten barn is a bank barn; built into the side of a hill. But there are also tobacco barns, round barns, English barns. Even in those early days in America, I sensed this kind of knowledge would never supplant the various other skills I would have to learn to survive into adulthood in this country. Now I’m uncertain even those skills matter anymore.
I try to distract myself by remembering other things I’ve learned about barns over the past few months: if you dream of a barn it means you’re about to fall in love. The word barn comes from the Old English bere, for barley and aern, for a storage place: a storage place for barley.
I repeat these factoids in my head like a lullaby, like a fairy tale, like the stories my Papa used to tell me again and again, the tales I carry within me now as I drive on an eerily empty stretch of highway, north towards Canada. If I could keep driving forever, I would.
The stories that he told me feel almost mythical now, because they twisted the arc of his life, and mine too, as all good myths do — arriving like tornadoes, upturning homes and trees, leaving them on their sides, in another town, another state, so far from where they began.
Just a week before he died, I sat with him in the sunroom, a curtain of light warming his face as I made him tell me the story I loved best, the one of him oversleeping the day of his physics final. He was an All-India Science Scholar, and had studied for days through the routine power outages of Delhi in the 60s that left him tracing equations written in his careful cursive in lamplight, memorizing them with every step he took to the bus stop and back. He was meticulous in his efforts, as he was with everything, till the day of his final, when he overslept.
Some combination of the heady bureaucracy the British left behind as their legacy, and the general malaise and indifference that overtakes a nation of a billion, most of whom must spend a good fortune of their time waiting: at traffic stops and train crossings, in queues and at bus depots, for the tide to turn, for colonial legacies to dissolve, turned my father’s fate down a path he didn’t expect, an extra hour in the dark halls of lunar consciousness, combined with administrative powers-that-be derailing the direction of his life.
“Not derailing!” he insisted when I used that word. By now, he couldn’t get out of a chair on his own. He couldn’t walk from one side of the house to the other without assistance. He struggled to tie his own shoelaces and so my mother had bought him a collection of slip-on shoes. Even these, I bent down to slip on his feet, as he had once done for me. A home health care aid now lived at the house permanently. Her name was Amy, yet he routinely forgot her name, even though she helped him every day in the shower.
His old stories, he still remembered, even if he was no longer certain what day it was, or even what month. I wrote this off — the pandemic had melted time like the ice cream I placed in his jacket pocket at four, for safekeeping, without him noticing. Whenever he spoke, I held on, knowing that these stories, this time, it was all receding too. But there was something else as well — who was I, if I wasn’t preserved in his stories, in his memory?
“At the time, it was devastating,” he told me, “I thought I’d never recover. Physics was my first love, after all.” Then quietly, as though it was a secret, “It’s a very weird story,” he articulated with his hands that layer of language that hid beneath the words, each gesticulation wild and restless and full of feelings he rarely expressed anymore.
“I would study for my physics exams in high school — do all the equations, memorize the textbook. And then I would go to bed and have a dream. I would dream the exam, all the questions and answers. When I went in to take the exam that day — same as the exam in my dream! I could see all the questions and all the answers in front of me. Has that ever happened to you?” he asked me, as he always did.
I shook my head. “I guess it doesn’t run in the family, prophetic dreams,” I told him.
“All the time for me. Vivid,” he said, “They always told me what was coming. But not that time. That time, I took the exam in my dream and failed it in real life.” He was animated again, and this consoled me, gave me a teaspoon of hope, daily medicine that I relied on. “Still, if I hadn’t overslept, I wouldn’t have had to rethink my path, and if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have gone into the field that I did, and if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have met your mother. We wouldn’t have had you. We wouldn’t have come to America.”
And I think of that first disembarkation at JFK at three, running across the arrivals terminal and into his arms. He was wearing a blazer, his hair a mop of waves, his hands already reaching for me as his face broke into a smile. If his absence — for nine months of my life — had been a perpetual hollow in my throat, the sight of him set my chest aflame with joy. I can still remember the smell of his cologne as he lifted me up, and his face when all the stories I had saved within me tumbled from my mouth with ferocity, surprising us both.
I remember leaving the airport and seeing, for the first time, a white shawl draped over the trees and the tops of cars, what once only existed in the glass globes he brought home as gifts, now made real. The sky was raining diamonds that melted cold on my skin.
“It’s snow,” my father told me, the diamonds falling into his hands and his hair before they disappeared.
“Snow,” I said, taking in the word, a foreign word for a foreign thing in a foreign land, the chill of whiteness overtaking every surface, coming in so fast and so furiously now. It was different than what I had expected, being inside the snow globe.
The yellow cab lurched and we huddled within it till we reached that first apartment in Flushing, Queens, apartment 5F at the Stanton on Union Street, across the street from a church and a two-minute walk to the Queens Public Library, where my mother took me after school every day.
As this hinge opens to reveal that past, I sense that it is all going away, disappearing before our eyes. He and my mother and me, we are the only ones left who can recall any of it now. And his memory is failing him, and so there is a knot in my throat, an urgency in my voice when I tell him about the research paper written by physicists that I read the week before. “I was googling meditation and the nervous system. And I know you think it’s all bogus, but in the 80s, a bunch of physicists did this research on brainwave output between the hemispheres of the brain, Papa,” I tell him. “It has all this physics terminology I don’t understand. But maybe you can explain it to me.”
He is getting discouraged lately, not just because of what the experts tell him, but because he has been locked inside for four and a half months while a plague has overtaken the land, and a ruthless and depraved king plays golf and incites violence while the citizens of the land suffer. People march in the streets, their faces covered in masks, integrity in their eyes. If my Papa wasn’t so sick, I would march with them too. All I want is to spend every moment with him now.
But perhaps these words can ease some of his anxiety, after all, my father has always appreciated the advice of experts, even as he is witnessing the collapse of an empire, his old ideas are stubborn as tree roots. I don’t argue with him anymore about these kinds of things; I no longer tell him that the world is entirely fictional, because it appears as though I have been cruelly proven correct, and right now, the only things that are real and not fictional are the ways in which his body is failing him, and his unsettling quietude, even if he papers it over with good cheer, which I am beginning to fear he has learned through engaging with his own fictions. There is no use in pointing out that all expertise ends when a kingdom, the entire container for a story collapses.
This is when I invoke the theory of retrocausality for the first time, like a spell, like magic, as though it is an ancient language we must now learn.
“Maybe you went through all those years of learning theorems and equations and stuff about quarks or whatever, because some part of you knew that one day, decades later, I would come to you and tell you about this study, written by physicists, about the nervous system, about healing. Maybe the past version of you knew we would have this conversation, even if you had no idea who I was, or whether I would even exist one day. So we could find you a cure, somewhere, somehow.” I gesture to his laptop screen.
It is magical thinking, but it is contagious, I can tell from the way his eyes brighten. “I think you might be right,” he nods, and I hold his hands, which are so beautiful that I can barely tolerate it. His fingers long and tapered as though carved by a particularly careful artist.
A week later, I am holding the same hands pumped through with steroids as hundreds of clear tubes descend upon my father as though he has been stung with venom and become trapped in a web.
They tell us we are lucky to be here as he breathes his last breaths. That few people are able to say goodbye to their loved ones in person these days. This is what they say as they press a red button on a machine that says “OFF” and leave us, until his breathing slows and his hands become cold.
Can he see us, right now, as we are? My mother, silent, unable to speak. My sister, still unconvinced that any of this is real. Me, hysterical in a way that I have never in my life allowed myself to be?
It is like a dream or a parable. There is something unreal about it. It is a trick or a joke. How can it be that a whole life, memories, breath, laughter, all the terrible jokes and stories and arguments could be gone with the mere flip of a button?
My mother sleeps in. She comes downstairs to watch the news as she pushes four spoons of kitcheree and yogurt and a slice of mango, the comfort foods of her childhood, around the Corningware plates that my family has eaten off of since the 80s. She barely sleeps and never cries. At night, I see her wandering the front yard in the light of the moon.
My sister blames me. “You fed him all the wrong foods. You were supposed to give him soup! You were supposed to give him the mushroom soup with all the minerals. You didn’t do his physical therapy with him. You killed him!” she screams at me, before she runs from the room.
How can this be what is left of my family? I wonder, late at night. And then I remember that he was my family, the entirety of it. And so where does that leave me now?
I build him an altar, fill it with pictures, flowers, cards. Each morning, I place a bowl of his favorite foods before his photographs: blueberries, sliced pears, chocolate truffles. One night, I dream that he asks me for colored pencils, the kind that he once brought home for me from a trip to Geneva when I was 5. I sort through my old desk, finding journals I filled in high school, copies of Sassy magazine. Underneath a pile of Post-its is a red tin box of Caran D’Ache pencils with a picture of the Swiss alps in the background. In the foreground, a sturdy-looking barn.
I place the tin before his ashes, which sit in a clay urn that I collected from a woman at the front desk of a crematorium, her face covered in a black mask as she handed me a canvas bag that was surprisingly heavy. I carried the bag to the car, holding it in both hands, and when I got there, I had to gently tap on the window so my mother could let me in.
After a month, I can no longer stand to be in the house on Riverside Avenue, the house in Connecticut where I am still holding my breath, as I have always done in this house. My mind, like time in a pandemic — or perhaps always, if I am honest — is like a circle, insistent and suffocating, a hula hoop I must spin with nothing but will to slice through a persistent weariness.
“Leave home, Betu,” I hear his voice one night in a dream. “Don’t stay here. Go out into the world.” Within the landscape of my dream, I have forgotten that he is gone, so instead of relief, I am merely annoyed at what appears to be a flippant suggestion.
What world can I go out into, in the middle of a plague?
“This whole world is yours,” he insists. “Do what I did. Leave home. Your life can’t start till you do.”
I want to argue with him, tell him my life had started. I am not a child, after all, even if I am his child, and always will be. I list every excuse I can find: a syphilitic king runs the land, his lackeys are murderous and stupid. A plague has swept through the kingdom. He is gone. He left me here, alone. Everything feels dead and hopeless now. Where can I go? There is hardly a world left. It has all shut down.
But my father merely shakes his head, patient as ever. “Leave home,” he says again. “It will all make sense once you do.”
In Vermont, I don’t fall into a rhythm right away. For days I don’t leave the guesthouse. I sleep and wake to eat a few spoons of three sisters soup that Val has prepared for me, slices of pear or an apple, a handful of chips. In the evening, a glass of wine. I wake under a plush blanket, a view of the mist swirling like a man’s hot breath against bristly pines. I lean out windows and inhale smoke from a slim white vaporizer that gives the circularity of time a manageable current: falling asleep in a carwash, rather than waking up every morning on the same roller coaster.
Val and Sam drop by and build fires for me in a wood burning stove while I lie on the couch watching, a blanket over me, till I am finally ready to learn how to make one myself. “A pyramid made of cardboard, sometimes a bit of egg crate, a few twigs or wood scraps. and Voila!” Sam exclaims before he pats me on the shoulder and hands me a joint. “It’s okay, dude. You’re going to be okay,” he says with an assurance that makes me trust his word, though his face conveys a concern I have never before seen in all the time I’ve known him.
“I don’t know why I never learned anything important, like how to build a fire, lose a parent, invest money, raise a child, care for the planet, plant a garden. All they taught me was useless garbage. Like salutes to the Empire. And square dancing. And Algebra II. And they’re still doing it, even now.”
“Who should we blame?” Sam asks, prodding the fire with an iron poker. “I’m sure you can come up with at least five people.”
“I’m sure I could come up with ten. I would start with the Reagans, also Henry Kissinger can reliably be blamed for everything, but I have a long list. I can write it out and give it to you.”
“I’m glad to see you raging again,” he smiles a little, and I shrink back into my blanket.
I watch the flames floundering before they learn their own potency, constantly shifting, new hands grasping at rough edges. I wonder how long it takes for fire to learn to burn steadily, to avoid flickering out too soon, the glow devouring dry leaves, broken twigs till it turns into an even roll of zeal and light.
Val is the most masterful fire builder. She makes small structures in the ashes, lights a match and a flame leaps from her hands like a bird. Val is resolute in everything she does. At the farm, she has erected a yurt. She grows blueberries, marks trails, teaches Frankie and Jean the names of flowers. She checks on me daily, bringing me bottles of local kombucha, blended with blueberries, and Chaga tea, brewed from a mushroom she harvested from a tree. She urges me to take walks, to join her in the sauna her father, Tom, built at the farm.
As a show of my gratitude, I teach her children profane words in foreign languages and repeatedly talk them out of any plans for exercise, though occasionally, when they get me out of the house those first couple of weeks, they convince me to jump on their trampoline with them.
That first fortnight, when I drop by the farm, the dogs and the kids run circles around me and the adults offer me glasses of wine. Outside the window, I can see Batten barn silhouetted in the moonlight, stars glittering in a vast bowl of darkness. Crickets chirp and the wind rustles through trees. I stay for dinner and tell all my wildest stories, making everyone laugh, because it makes me feel like myself again. By now, the dogs are asleep in the kitchen, their bellies rising and falling in rhythm with frequencies only they can hear.
Afterwards, I return to my guesthouse and wonder what it is called when a survival mechanism becomes a personality. As I curl up in bed again, I can hear the distant roar of Kingsbury Brook.
“Do you want to feed the chickens?” Tom asks me one day before he leads me to a patch of greens where I pluck kale, lettuces, a few beans and tomatoes into a basket and carry them to the coop underneath the barn, where all day long a speaker system plays classical music.
“Why classical?” I ask him.
“We experimented with some other stuff…jazz, country. Some Woody Guthrie. But they really like the classical, it seems. They’re…particular.”
I spread the lettuces on the ground and the chickens circle round, clucking and pecking at the scraps.
“You’ll be here for graduation day this year,” Tom tells me, pulling more kale from the basket, feeding one of the chickens with his hands with such care that I can’t help but stare.
“I take it that’s a euphemism.”
“An annual Batten Farm tradition. Every fall, we graduate a hundred chickens.” He pauses, before he adds, “Ninety-six this year. We lost a few.”
“I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. But I’ll come,” I tell him, considering the quaintness of giving chickens art and beauty, before giving them death.
And then one particularly misty day, when the farm is cloaked in haze, a small red truck, the size of a private school bus appears, driven by a man who looks like a young Santa Claus, if Santa Claus wore overalls and a mask and slaughtered chickens for a living. The man, Abe, and his sister, Kerry have made a life of driving to farms across Vermont to oversee an ancient death ritual.
Mounted against one wall of the truck are three stainless steel cones against a pegboard wall — not unlike the ones that my local diner in LA uses to blend milkshakes, but bigger. In the back of the red truck is a large metal cylinder. One by one, Tom and Sam bring the chickens from the coop, holding them upside down by their legs, which are rangy and orange and peddling as though they believe they will be able to bicycle their way out of this mess. Wilhelmina and Finney bark and jump and the chickens flap their wings but there is nowhere left to go. They are slid, upside down, into the cones with only their heads and legs extruded, their feet continuing to vend in hope.
Whether it is projection or imagination or some free-floating fear that arrives like a fog at the edges of a portal, I intuit their terror in my fingertips, can taste the metallic fear in my own mouth, but also other sensations and memories that do not feel like my own, as one by one, Abe cuts their throats with a small knife, a line of red thickening as their heads drop to the ground. The floor of the truck is covered with the viscous crimson of life, half a dozen empty eyes glaring at me. I watch the syrupy glaze drip from the steel floor into the veins of the earth. Even then, those slender legs continue to kick furiously in the air, as if in protest of a somatic autonomy that has been denied them.
“Do they feel anything?” I ask Abe.
“No. It’s just the instinct, the nervous system keeps working. But pain is in the brain. Not the body.”
How is he so certain? Till recently, I was squeamish about any volitional exposure to terror: violent video games, roller coasters, horror films. The peering at shock by choice is a luxury only a few can afford. For the rest of us, it hits too close to home. But now that I have held my father’s hands as they turned cold, I cannot look away from that dark edge, and I know that I never will again.
I watch Abe and Kerry place the limp, headless chickens in a tub that spins like a carousel, yanking away feathers till they are plucked and naked. Then, chests puffed and goose-fleshed, almost in defiance of the countless indignities they have been subjected to, they are plunged into an ice bath, and then another, before they are hosed off and weighed on a baby scale, not unlike the one my pediatrician in Delhi had in her office. I instinctively feel the cold metal against my own flesh and start.
Val bags the chickens, tying each one with a plastic tie, marking their weight on each bag with a Sharpie. With a clipboard in my hand, I record their weight on a sheet of paper: 5.5 lbs, 6 lbs, a rare seven pounder.
Frankie, tow-headed and three years old, her chest puffed with a growing confidence that I hope will never diminish, sits down next to me on a stone wall.
“Does this…freak you out?” I ask.
“No.” She does not even flinch.
“It’s your first graduation day too. I think you’re handling this better than I am.”
She turns to look at me. “I think you’re handling it okay.”
“I tend to not express my most terrifying emotions in front of other people.”
“I know,” she says, patting me on the thigh before she hands me a thermos of tea and speeds off. I watch her walk away, confounded. She is neither gripped by horror nor amused and I wonder if this makes her more mature, more of an adult than me. There is something powerful about her acceptance of what is, and it makes me wonder if we age in reverse — an understanding that becomes more primitive and brutal with age, an unwieldy repression of the spirit.
It is impossible not to look at death straight in the eye now, after everything that has happened; and yet it requires a dissolving of every fiction, if that’s even possible. Still, death squats low and dark like a van parked on a side street too long, remaining as elusive as ever, refusing my gaze directly, even as it is unthinkable to ignore.
My father did not die of the plague, but of a rare, neurodegenerative disease that atrophied his muscles, degenerated his mind. He was not counted in the death toll that continues to rise daily, but he watched those numbers go up, each one a person embarking a ship to another world. Did he wonder where they were all going? Did he believe he would join them on that ship too?
Val and I lift the bagged chickens onto a wheelbarrow before they are loaded into a freezer in the basement, as I wrestle with both the wheelbarrow and the confounding paradox: the ritualistic nature of what I have just witnessed, life dissipating in terrifying violence, and yet amid plastic bags and ties, a weighing scale, a wheelbarrow. A foot in each world: one that offers a comforting tangibility, at the cost of some humanity, and then another one — the dark void that reveals as much as it obscures. It reminds me that everything is sacred and nothing is.
“I’m going to go take some pictures,” I tell Val.
“Come to dinner tonight?” she asks. “It’s not…chicken, I promise. Not for a few weeks.”
I begin to take long walks around Kingsbury Brook, where I cry as the water swirls around my ankles. One day, something silver glimmers in the light and I instinctively reach for it, stunned when I pull a living thing from its habitat.
To hold a fish in your hand is like holding a beating muscle. I feel its struggle against the length of my arm, its shock contagious, its mouth opening and closing before I let go. It swims away furiously, flicking its tail. I shudder afterwards at the idea of what might have happened if I had held it longer. I can feel it then in my bones, my hands still slippery when I rub them together: that everything lives at the edge of precarity, that nothing is spared, and ignoring this fact is all I have done in order to survive. Did my father do the same? I never got a chance to ask him.
That precarity always feels close by on the farm, a humbling part of life: after a cold freeze, the lettuces and kale wilt, but the kale is sweeter after the frost. The leaves turn, a psychedelic carnival of foliage, wild and glowing like a million embers against a crystalline sky. It is as though there is a direct correlation on some cosmic x/y axis: as time grows more viscous, nature becomes lapidary, plucky even. It refuses modesty in its last hour, and I find that this moves me to tears also.
Later that week, I make my mother’s keema recipe for everyone. A mixture of ginger, onions, garlic cooked in ghee. Fistfuls of salt and Kashmiri mirch, turmeric, cumin, coriander and garam masala. Ground turkey because we aren’t ready for chicken — not quite yet, fresh peas from the farm, tomatoes and boiled eggs sliced in half. When I cook Indian food, I never measure, just estimate and taste, because this was how my mother taught me to cook the recipes of her youth. When I prepare French food or Italian, Lebanese or Spanish tapas, I measure everything in spoons and cups, as my father taught me.
Everything I know is paradoxical and yet specific, and I have learned to live in these containers of propriety over the course of a life. I wonder now if all of this has been to distract myself from the fact that years, even a lifetime ago, my father bought me a one-way ticket to America, and since then, I have measured every ingredient and word and thought with a kind of care that may no longer have a function or purpose now.
I visit the farm every day from my cottage a mile afield. I wander the woods, plucking the last of raspberries from the brambles and bringing them to my lips. I kick the tops off toadstools, watching a silver fairy-dust enveloping my boots. I climb to the top of Owl’s Head with Val and Frankie, from where I can see the crisp patina of orange umbrage surrounding a glistening lake. I circle Number Ten pond, where the gnarled roots of old Oaks cradle the lapping waves. I sit in the wood sauna Tom built and allow the heat to purify my skin till it gleams, till the anti-reflective glare coating on my glasses melts into streaks and my eyes cry grit, because, as the local ophthalmologist later informs me, I have run out of tears.
I take an endless stream of pictures. I want to document everything lately. The chickens, Frankie and Jean as they are growing up, the turn of leaves, the fields of hemp. I’m often trying to catch Batten barn in the best light. This isn’t difficult; she always appears stately, a burnished pantheon rising from the green-gold hills. Or silhouetted in moonlight, a ghostly shadow. Each shot looks like a painting; impressionistic and yet shimmery, evaporating at the edges, like in a dream or a pandemic. Who knew time was always impregnable, its thin shell fragile to new or perhaps even recurrent paradigm; that a little bit of give can turn something seemingly impenetrable into a glutinous slurry?
I send my mother pictures of the barn with the hopes they will make her smile: in the foreground, an edifice, iconic and cheery. In the background the hallucinogenic golds, reds, oranges of old Maples and Oaks and conifers.
My mother reads something deeper in the kaleidoscopic otherworldliness of the photographs. Maybe you’re seeing the world the way your Papa does now she texts me.
Maybe he’s trying to show you what he sees.
How does my father see the world now? How do I see the world now? Do we all see something different in a picture? In words? In a language? What does it mean to actually see the world clearly? Is this even possible? What does it mean to be able to tell a story and be understood, for the story to make its way into stroma and cells, for it to live inside another, the way all of this now lives inside me?
But it’s more than that. Documentation softens the ache, it gives me something to do with my hands, with my mind. I pretend I am taking the pictures to show to my father, even though he will never see them. I tell myself I can do this: live with this version of him that I lived with for so many years when he travelled far away and returned, always with a box of chocolates in hand.
Distance and severance are, after all, the very things he has prepared me for, this language that I have learned to speak fluently from a lifetime of leaving people and places behind, a language of longing that I imagine will dissipate too after I am gone, into stroma and cells, a wreath of glistening water around my ankles, froth lapping the bank of the brook, the negative ions that land on the barn. And a newly-emigrated child at the Queens Public Library picking up a picture book to learn to read again.
