Notes Upon Arrival: Diary of lost love
2020; Wiley; Volume: 108; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2020.0032
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
Resumo104 hat is her work? Who will she love? Think of everything she left behind. —Andrea Spain, from a talk on Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto this is the start of not writing, the first time I’ve stopped since I began. All of the dreams I’ve had since returning to England are about translation, travels by air or train, vehicles disintegrating beneath my touch. I can’t see where I am going. essay Notes Upon Arrival Diary of lost love Bhanu Kapil W Notes Upon Arrival | 105 I’m thinking of pulling over, when the dream ends. Hamesha pyar, texts D. “I will always love you.” With a click, I delete his text. loughborough borders the Charnwood Forest, a Precambrian portal to the world of fairies, according to a local story. Each afternoon , I slip into the woods with a library book. There, in an oak, I read until darkness falls, a candle balanced on a bough. Here in the forest, I am surrounded by things that are intrinsically faint. My brown skin feels like a benefit, a way of staying connected to the moving chemistry of the forest, the way it overproduces stems, buds, and grainy-red or pink outlines.*** Thirty-two years from now, a friend will use the phrase “thwarted belonging,” and I will recognize myself in the pressured way she says it. I am thinking, in particular, of the day I brought D, then a boy younger than my son is now, to the forest. We lay down beneath the oaks, and when we woke up our bodies were covered with flowers. All night, the flowers dropped out of nowhere. There’s nobody here, said D, but I saw them: the violet crinkles and gleams of the fairies as they snapped their fingers in the mush of the forest air. ***after so many years, I can see that my discomfort in the lived space of the university was indexed to the strangeness of my being there at all. This is 1987, and so nobody uses this language yet. Nobody asks, “Who cares for this space?” Nobody looks around the room to notice who’s not there. My tutor is a poet who plays saxophone in a local pub on Thursday nights. I attend “jazz night” only once, braving the hard stare of a cool third year with a mop of 106 | Bhanu Kapil blond hair and bright blue eyes. Ensnared in a conversation about literature written between the first and second world wars, I excuse myself to go to the bar.** The image of a carcass* swinging from a hook fills my mind, the story of a butcher in Lahore. Prewar, the mangoes are lowered into the river Ravi to cool before they are guzzled, juice on the shins and the muslin of my mother’s lap. Is this the moment I become the person without consistent access to these stories, or a way to tell them? The person who drinks cask ale and pretends to enjoy jazz? Six years later, just south of the ballpark in Denver, I will order a Rolling Rock for a dollar in El Chapultepec, where Jack Kerouac once drank a beer, and I will love it. I will sip lager from a green bottle, letting the clarinet and the double bass bite my heart. *The soldiers were coming. And so he stuffed the jewels inside it, said my mother, tucking the duvet beneath my thighs. **It’s here that I meet D, whispering, “Just act like we know each other.” On cue, he rubs my upper arms as if he wants to get me warm. “Come outside,” he murmurs, “into the dark green air.” Soon, I am outside with a responsive stranger, losing my chance to socialize with adequate peers. There’s a great rushing softness in these English trees, and soon they are above me, like an antidote. Hang on, let me do some math. Yes, precisely twenty- eight years later, on a brisk November morning , I meet this early boyfriend on the Millennium Bridge. We duck into the Swan for coffee, and I’m knocked almost sideways by the love I feel for him. When...
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