Writing My Hyphenated Existence by Priyanka Sinha

Writing My Hyphenated Existence

by Priyanka Sinha

I remember everything

I remember the enveloping sound of my father’s voice, beckoning me to a book I remember weaving through a labyrinth of shelves, worlds held between them I remember laying for hours with a story clutched to my chest, Cicadas making the air hum… I remember, oh I remember. All the moments, the places I have gone and not gone because books render me still until the earth softens underneath me I am everywhere, so I go nowhere– my mind wayward but my body still .

I remember the nights… nights when translucent moonlight was sliced into shards as it cast through tree branches, nights with still air and humming shadows . I remember hours of sweet silence, Time seeming to sit back and relax as my partner .

And it was only when I grew up before my eyes, when the contours of my body changed, when I finally understood the way yesterdays can swell like a sad song, when I uncoiled my mother’s accent from my tongue… only then my words flowed. And oh, I remember everything .

My words became threaded into my senses, some melted on my tongue, some were hard to swallow . Some had a taste, like the delicious dissonance of the blues on a day of yellow sun, And some had a smell, like the saffron in my rice. I remember writing making me recognize the shape of my own face, forever branded by a Mauritian-American border, lemon leaves teasing maple trees, a vignette of my hyphenated existence .

I too realize that there are moments which elude my memory: when my hyphen evolved from a chasm into a juncture, when a border was washed away by Mauritian monsoons, rain drops rendering America meadows lush… the revolution that was explaining my world, disrupting a life-long tradition of being lost in those of others . And perhaps it is those subtle moments, unknown in time, that speak the loudest of all .

art|Rachel Liang