what i don’t know in this moment is that you think you have to turn the thermostat
this high, or perish a loved one. you’re showing me that begonias can melt if
you fill the room with enough steam. i’m explaining to you that the crack in the
mirror is fine, because reflection fills space with light and makes everything
limitless. it’s better than a white wall. a
white wall is only an end.
in india, you say, they would never let this be, and you beg me to cover the
glass with a cloth. i refuse. i don’t care about the wickedness it’s going to
bring. i can’t sleep, for the heat, and the gathering of white on branches
outside our window is telling me to feed your superstition. you ask me, did i
love the indian boy, truly? and i answer that he was only half-indian, and there
was red in his beard. and that i had never loved anyone that way. never. that i
had seen him cry, but i had seen him create the most beautiful moments. that now
i thought i saw his spirit in the desert air of our dorm room. and you say it
might be the pills, but it might be the weight in my heart, and no one could
surely know.

this is no home for you, and no home for me, and the fragrance that comes from the
drawers beneath your bed is an intrigue and a torment. but in years to come,
every time i meet the smell of curry i will want to weep for loss of you. you
are wearing everything you own, and most of what i own, and i am all but naked
waiting for relief from this thick air. the way you say Bombay
reaches into my brain and pulls at what mechanism moves me, and I am puppet to
your words. i go to whatever continent your mouth makes the shape of. what i
don’t know in this moment is that when you’re gone, i will work from the core,
earthen parts of myself to uncover the memory of your voice calling me
princess
and easing me to sleep through the torture of island winter. i will wish i’d had
a lighter hand when rationing my ambien, so that with years gone my recall
wouldn’t fill with sand. i will wish i had shattered the mirror into ten
thousand pieces of comfort for you and slept on the bare frost tile to hush
myself. i could have studied the pattern in the oak of my bedframe and sunken
into the rough sea of a fever dream.

but in this moment, what i don’t know, is i will stay awake nights in the days to
come wondering if you are more peaceful laid gently in the clay womb of your
country’s heated bedrock. you will visit me often, at first, or at least i will
believe that. i will trace the cracks in old thrift store mirrors with thirsty
fingers and wonder if my sweaty insolence cursed you. and i will never sleep
well in the winter.


Ashley Collier studied Human Ecology and Creative Writing on an island in
Maine, and is a graduate of College of the Atlantic. She is a born and bred
Chicagoan who can't eat hot dogs or pizza, and dabbles in fiction, poetry, and
lapidary arts. She lives in bliss with her boyfriend and dogs, all of unusual
size.