Length. Length of string and extended hopes of flight. The invisible connection between this grilled rectangle rooftop and a square of colored paper stretched over wood sticks and set against the unknown, as if to say, it’s possible to rise. Careful measure of slack and tension, both ends tug to give you shape though you continually defy us and carve your own path in the sky. I hold an end of you in my hand, feeding more of you into infinity, lengthening you with my intentions.
And when the head of your purpose bursts off like a plump bud, you plummet as well but without the violence of falling. You drift gently towards the familiar element of earth; bound to its gravity just as you’ve floated above it, it is another home. I wonder where you land and trace your journey back to my hands.
I wind and reel and retract and you inch along the streets. Knotted around and amongst the coarse and crumbling barked branches. I pull you through a Banyan tree, the tree that named my first home in India, where roots crowd in curtains, draping down and dangling towards the soil they’ve left, making beginnings ambiguous in this swarm of life and growth. You run across the back of a street dog, cradled in dirt, her home wherever she can be unnoticed for a little while. You dip into the communal steel pot, triangle cuts of white plastic falling near the gas cylinder, mouths of milk releasing sharp streams, leaves loosening brown/red color in a seething bath. This moment is home for all those whose thoughts press into glass cups.
You weave a dance past commotion, sliding between the feet of four people staggered in the backseat of a shared rickshaw, feeling for ripeness on stacks of round and taut skin. The movement that crosses you never ceases your steadiness.
And soon I see your tail crawl up the side of the building, over the terrace wall, the spool in my hands containing your ephemeral journey and all I can think of doing is launching you out again and again because you don’t belong here, so tangible and material in my hands.
