I Am the Quiet I Keep

In Kolkata, heat arrived as silence,
thick, smothering.
The days clung to us,
draped like wet cloth,
the evenings stitched with the hum of cicadas,
their voices dense, layered,
as if holding the weight of something breaking.
In the kitchen, Ma washed rice
with a reverence I didn’t yet understand.
Her hands moved through the grains,
the water clouding,
then clearing,
as if grief could be rinsed clean.
Each grain carried its story,
its memory of earth and sun,
its slow alchemy of becoming.
She taught me to wait— 
to feel the steam rise,
to watch the grains split open,
each one surrendering itself
to the hunger it would fill.
This was her gift:
to make absence edible.
Years later,
I stood in the doorway of a lover’s leaving.
The sound of their suitcase zipper— 
a wound sealing itself shut.
I thought of Ma’s rice then,
how each grain held
its own emptiness,
how we learned to eat
and still be hollow.
In Paris, my walls carry ghosts.
I press my hand to the plaster,
listening for the faint breath
of those who came before me:
a chair dragged across the floor,
a name spoken too softly
to survive the years.
In my childhood home,
walls were paper-thin— 
a fragile skin stretched taut
over the ache of voices.
At night, I lay awake,
listening for the silence
that followed an argument,
its weight thicker than words.
Touch the wall now,
and it will tell you
of stone becoming ruin,
ruin becoming home.
I think of Ma’s hands
moving through rice,
her voice calling me to the table.
I think of water— 
how it remembers every vessel
it has touched.
How it carries absence
the way the body
carries the echo of touch,
even long after it has gone.
I sit here, not waiting,
but learning— 
to hold myself
in the architecture of my own skin,
to gather the fragments of light
and let them be enough.
To sit with absence
and call it by another name.