“i am the nightbreaker. i shouldn’t go to bed without singing.”
― Sheila Maldonado, “break night song“
Goodbye, summer. Goodbye, multiple showers we’ve taken due to midnight walks in a month-long heat wave, when there’s no sun to heat the concrete beneath our flip-flops with toe posts forever popping out of place, our walks long and sweaty-palmed, melding our hands into one another’s, the stifling night forging something new and dangerous when you’d stop me mid-sentence, mid-step, to kiss, slightly unable to breathe, breathless.
Goodbye late, late nights that made you arrive late to work at least once a week, because summer, because summer makes my insomnia worse and you stay awake with me, because in the morning you don’t want to find me alone and twisted along the sharp angles of my desk, crumpled near a dark screen. How many late nights did it seem fine to read Kōbō Abe’s Woman in the Dunes to you under the sheets with a flashlight? Goodbye, so many batteries we used. Goodbye, flashlight we did not save only for emergencies. Goodbye to Abe’s fishing villages in which we did not collect insects and dunes in which we did not lose one another. How easy to simply lift the sheets over our heads and scare the cat when she batted at us, like we are at camp, which probably should have left us feeling a little ridiculous in the morning, but never did, it was like a secret shared between us, our much younger selves. I would’ve liked to have known you, then, as a child, newly moved to Toronto and eating as much congee as you could before setting out into your first Canadian winter, your mother wrapping your head in a scarf and thick woolen hat. I would have liked to see your cheeks reddened in the blistering wind.
I grew up without seasons. Until I was eighteen, I did not know snow and slipping and piles of dirty, grey stacks shoveled at the end of the sidewalk that blocked my path, my almost adult path, in which I was not an adult at all, and still I’m learning the most basic things, like how to make up the bed despite the cat’s insistence to lounge in the middle of it all, having wrapped herself in the comforter, having taken the pillows and next my desk chair and the last of the ice cream and even all the trees outside that have yet to shed their leaves, she’s even called shotgun for the car we don’t own, and purrs ever so sweetly. I’m still learning to deal with despotic cats and not belonging to a synagogue and strangers who say terrible things to us while we are walking down the street at night, racist things, but that’s too easy, to call them racist, they are violence in flesh, they are challenge and desperation to be heard and seen, but the heat, like the first day I met you, has cemented your hand into mine, like being in the arms of Grandma Chan when we go back to Hong Kong, the first time she’s seen me since the last. Like the arguing for which my brother and I are way overdue. Like the feelings I get riding New Jersey transit, after an afternoon of sangria and poetry, taking over a train car from Newark to New York Penn Station with Sheila, Celeste, Deborah and Eddie, like how we shout CANTO at each other just to hear the other answer MUNDO, like Sheila with her hair down and swiping on my lipstick, which I should have given her, and every lipstick in my purse because Sheila writes: “i am the night keeper, timebreaker, shouldn’t go to bed without singing,” and neither should we, though sometimes I wish, my love, I could climb down a ladder into Abe’s dunes and it would be just you and me after they pull up the ladder, and say after seven years, we are gone, but no, goodbye to fear, goodbye to defeat, that’s how cemented these things are, and I to you, so goodbye hate, goodbye, we are learning nowhere is safe and that it doesn’t matter anyway because whatever they say, that’s not a world ending.
Goodbye, world not ending.