SONIA FARMER
It’s not that you don’t love your home. But it’s true that you feel indifferent
in moments where love is expected – plus, anyone can fall in love with any
place during twilight, when the incoming night makes brutal editors of shadow:
pulling each tangled mangrove root into the inky water; scrubbing away
the limestone cliff’s pink face; redacting palms from the inside out, leaving only
clusters of black bared teeth. You see it then: the violence of tropical light,
all living things now reduced to chalk outlines against a bruised sky, knuckled
daylong into perfect blue performance. And you too, you realize,
are knuckled, sore with the weight of expectation, pummeled by the script
of nationhood, its exhaustive choreography. Each sunrise a spotlight
from the prison tower, a spotlight on stage. Now here comes the soft night
to defang and silence; to expedite, in spectacular display, all the colors
of hurt; to kiss your swollen eyes and blistered feet. In its arms, you become
what you have always been here: two dimensional, then invisible –
indistinguishable from the landscape. What a relief, at first, to be nothing.
Who wouldn’t, in those tender moments, think of night as the lover
you return home to each day, who unburdens your body of that fifty-pound
fringed costume, or that hotel apron, or that tailored jacket with its shiny name tag–
even your name is gone now, vanished into his dark palm – see there
how he snuffs out each candle in the room? How he gathers silence
like a smiling politician standing still at a podium after the crowd’s welcoming roar?
He opens his mouth, a perfect void. The sky is almost black now,
and you can no longer find your hand in front of your face. Ah,
each time you fall for it. Night’s creatures emerge: wings beat your neck;
critters scream into your ear; the sharp points of a hundred insect legs scatter
over your limbs. Suffocated by his hot breath of crushed jasmine
and the stinking smoke of cigars branding your skin, you lie
back, lock eyes with every punctured star, unblinking, your only witnesses now
to the dark unspeakable things done in the name of belonging.
