The Complete Poetry Of a Half-Life
From my 2016 archives:
I wonder if my mother knew when she stood in front of her mirror the day she turned 22 that she had something in common with the half-lives of uranium and plutonium.
I imagine her standing in front of a mirror with brown borders. One that she would’ve bought at a local plastic department store where mugs and buckets of different colours hung from the rafters like tassels and bobbles — synthetic and unintended Christmas decor.
Her milk skin softening her sharp features, small eyes framed that twinkled even if her mood was somber.
And just like that, a little more than a score of years she would’ve carelessly tucked away behind her ear like a strand of curly, disobedient hair — a crown my genes prohibited me from inheriting — and then I’d see the reflection leave the mirror; a timestamp no one would ever know.
A cup of coffee half drunk. Pens purchased in full packs savagely split from its frat. Elementary school erasers. The tragedy of a single sock.
Stories built within objects that were paused, stopped, halted by other destinies that clapped into this linear strand of time.
The coffee is too cold, the date has gone home. That pen knows only half the novel you wrote, rolling off into the dustbin with mystery and suspicion coiled in its nib. Erasers half finished with names like Taru-, Nim-, Swe- hibernating in desk drawers or under the file cabinets — mute observers of the glow in the dark stickers on the kindergarteners’ ceiling.
It is in these broken stories, that light finds its way through. Cracked beams of whispered potential.
The stories remain unclosed, but your eyes alone see the finish line — the mirage to the desert of your wandering heart.
I wonder if anyone of us realize when we reach our half-life. The gentle downward spine of the sine curve representing time around us wrapping itself tighter and tighter, till it’s ready to eject us out of this universe.
If we could, would we stand erect and stare at the road ahead of us knowing fully well that we have come so far and are heading back into the same space like a circle?
At the cliff of our half-life, at the edge of our glory, at the brink of unknown adventures, if we knew that the next step was the same as the previous step, the next journey was stepping back into time, the road ahead was not going anywhere into the future but taking you right back into time, would you still stay on the amusement park ride?
The poetry of an incomplete story lies in the deafening absence of its ending.
Of things cut short, too swift, too soon, candles put out, forcefully emptied laundry baskets and the salt in the shaker that got knocked out.
A photograph is no longer a memory, the smiles no longer innocent and sweet — they’re signboards of where the story wants to go. Back in time, or forward into the unknown; as long as you reach the same smile somehow.
You plead, you cry and turn the hourglass around but the grains fall only into a new tomorrow and sooner or later, so does your heart.
I look at a picture of my mother when she was 31. Same hair, same eyes but different hands and heart I imagine. I’ve come into her life, swollen and throbbing — a baby that takes away all her time.
And the story goes on as all stories do. Mine filling hers with gasps and exclamations points, hers filling mine too with a chapter that ended in a comma but felt like a full stop.
At that point, I look back to when I was 8, and when I was 4 and when I was 2.
Several half-lives and half of half-lives that swept by unnoticed, un-commemorated but perhaps innocently celebrated with a kiss or two — it doesn’t matter I realize.
It doesn’t matter.
I stand in front of my mirror and think about the poetry of half-lives. What could’ve been and what was. What happened and what might not have. Who I would be and who I am not.
I look at my reflection and I wonder. I'm 21. I don’t have her curly hair or milk-white skin. In fact, I’m a replica of her other half. The man she fell in love with.
But perhaps within me is a Horcrux, and therein — a timestamp.
Perhaps.
Perhaps a Horcrux that not only looks but carries the rest of her half-life.
