1. Back home, the Coromandel crashed and 300 people died. 300 was the government count, so it was 500 atleast.
2. With the guilt that comes on drawing on metaphors in a time like this - there is really no excuse, except that this is supposed to be my memoir and I need an opening to say that my life has crashed and is falling apart.
3. Should I list the reasons why? For some reason the tone of this as I write it doesn't sound as tragic as I feel. I have been reading Lydia Davis and perhaps that has given me the metaphorical wings to see myself from a distance and see the humor in the situation.
4. I dropped my phone from the top of a lighthouse and the display broke. I am writing this on my other, cheaper phone - dirt cheap, not nearly as good as my good phone where I talked to both Erik and A. for the first time. Or Oishi for the last time, or maybe it wasn't the last. This phone doesn't have enough history and what it has floats on an alternate existence of exile, perhaps that is why the writing doesn't flow as smooth.
5. But I am trying too hard to draw metaphors. The truth of why the writing doesn't flow is because the phone is cheap and not as good.
6. I also got caught out for plagiarism, and one of my papers got capped at pass mark. I could write some intellectual bullshit here about how plagiarism and attribution are white academic constructs, that it is impossible and unadvisable to trace ideas to their origin, and where I come from they flow into each other. Everything belongs to everyone in a collective conscious. But that is not the truth, the truth is that I was lazy and unmotivated after a bad grade on my mid-term so I did plagiarize a bit and didn't cite as well as I should have.
7. The truth is that there are no truths, everything is relative, memory is in constant transition.
8. My lover (past tense now) was cheating on me, and the betrayal stings.
9. I am angry at being made a fool of, about the rejection, about not being enough. But beyond my anger I feel free, free to think about this cold white city as I choose, this city that has given me the love I had always dreamed of only to take it away.
10. I am still living with my lover, because I have nowhere else to live.
11. I don't believe in karmic retribution but there is something funny about how this turned out just at the turn of the year. I was the other woman last year and I am the wronged woman now. I am the hurt one both times, but then we are the main characters in our stories and I do have an incurable tendency towards self-pity.
12. Its early in the morning I am out for a walk after sending 14 angry texts to my sleeping lover (past tense). I didn't want to be around when he woke up and saw them.
13. I have a feeling that is what character in a Lydia Davis novel would do.
14. But its early morning, the sun is falling like a river of gold on the red brick walls. The city isn't cold and white anymore, but, for this small window of time, its warm and red. And it is that kind of warmth that won't suit this piece, or whatever you might call it, so I will just make a note to write about all the warm things in this city. Hanyun. The lady who prayed for me because I helped her find the way to the station - and I prayed with her simply because I didn't have the heart to tell her I don't believe in God. The old man with one eye who helped me cross the road and called me beautiful. The drunk young man with cut marks all over his face who I gave some spare change in a deli, more out of fear than charity, and he brought back a deli waiter to clean the table for me because he wanted to return the goodwill. These are things I want to remember. These are things I want to write about, weave real poetry out of, but not now. Some other time.
