Breathing in Stormy Seasons

To start again is the hardest thing, to leave behind the pock marks of memory. I think of the time I left you on the side of a road to thumb your way from east to west. There were three letters that year, each one grimy and creased from where you carried them too long. I think of the first time you came to meet my train, unexpectedly, and I had already left the station. I waited for you on the steps outside your apartment with the smell of cannelloni beans cooking somewhere nearby. there was one other time, at the airport, when you went to the wrong terminal. I stayed then too, knowing you would come.

In the shadows you are as quick as a cat, slipping through doorways, between corners, your whisper so soft and light I could almost forget you. I feel your breath on my neck, just at that place where you used to lick me, afterwards, tasting salt and blowing gently to make me cool again. In the shadows, through the slippage of summer sight, I can almost see you, flicking your plait like a tapered tail as you climb through the line of trees. In the shadows, sun fades as if evening had already fallen and maybe all I have to do is listen.

What were you to me but a flimsy screen door slamming at the end of a wooden corridor, leaving me nothing but half-remembered dreams? In the mornings, I only knew the rising sun that silenced the noise of the insects. In the afternoons, I only knew you brought coolness and rain, as women ran to turn louvres or snatch washing from makeshift lines. I never walked in your forests or sat under a giant flame tree with my basket. I never wore frangipani flowers in my hair. If the first voice I knew was my mother’s, it was yours that later brought me to tears, as you sang stories in the lilt of your own language. If the arms that held me carried me from you to another land, I never forgot your embraces: the scent of mango, dancing fire smoke, or the soft kiss of a harbour breeze, full of longing to return.