Day 23/ The Isolation Journals: Hibiscus Neighbourhood

Meditate on places. If you’re working on fiction, perhaps choose places from that fictional world. The easiest might be your childhood home, but it could be: a restaurant, a street, a parking lot, a ferry station, a borrowed home in the Catskills where it rained for three days or a stranger’s glass penthouse where you once did too many drugs. Write down any images, details, or words that come to mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t worry about describing the place as much as describing what it felt like.

This isn’t research, or even a place to collect lines of dialogue or turns of story. It is simply to remember, to feel out for a tender spot, search your own memories for the surprising detail, the “punctum,” which Barthes defined as, “the accident which pricks me.”

Roundabouts to clay-made happiness

tadpoles at 7 

(and at 16)

Training wheels to the fear of falling

(ripened to haphazardness, powdered over self-illusion).

The floor plan

rooms with no designation

Mama, 你对我失望吗？

Hair like the flowers she so liked

White ones that hung downward like fairy bells

It was where I learned to cry hiding my face
Feigning sleep

Choked so much on the humidity my nose bled

My nose always bled

It was where I recognised the taste of iron

and not of chilli padi

Mama did not tell me

Yeye, 我还记得你的微笑。

Grief never leaves,

makes your body home.

I still love fantasies

and flowers;

On the other side of the river

a little further inland

I moved in synchrony to the sound of drums

and held my aunt's hand as she wept

sliding each bead, one after the next

ah mi tuo fo ah mi tuo fo ah mi tuo fo-

Six four four two four four

I made my first yahoo account here.

Screamed till I was hoarse

Quack! Meow!

kicks and flings to avoid the shower.

Millipedes just past the backyard

Falling into the drain

You loved me, didn't you?

Ran right over

I miss a possibility

Locked in the bathroom

I stole a birthday gift

and other things

I save my chicken wing

falling, avoiding a cockroach in the dark.

I cast aside with strokes on my hand.

(I am just as confused a girl

just as feeling

just as hurting)

my body is home

Yi Cheong used to bring me around the neighbourhoods to pick flowers.

There were some that were poisonous,

and some that were purple, yellow,

some pink hibiscus.

A tone of sepia

mixed of memory and the setting sun

past the flowers, she rode her bike away