Vignettes

“We all have these snippets rolling around, not stories we tell, just photos that refuse to fade entirely away. These are the framed moments that decide a life and are lost to art because they aren’t complete, have no resolution. They’re nothing much. Essais, vignettes, memoirs — the French words our stalwart form-seeking Anglophone mind must borrow to articulate our formlessness.

You understood — I think you did — that I didn’t think of notetaking as material, bricks for the great architecture of a book, even if Henry James did. I was taking them for themselves. Life is not a story, a settled version. It’s an unsorted heap of images we keep going through, the familiar snaps taken up and regarded, then tossed back until, unbidden, they rise again, images that float to the surface of the mind, rise, fall, drift — and return only to drift away again in shadow. They never quite die, and they never achieve form. They are the makings of a life, not of a narrative.”

— From “The Art of the Wasted Day” by Patricia Hampl

Dim sums. By the beach. Quiet teasing with my parents. Suddenly, “AMEE KHALAAAAA!”

Imran shouts my name as he runs towards me. Irfan is trailing behind, curls flying in the sea breeze. My best friends smiling at the back, Aman in his carrier.

I run towards the boys, heart full.

Joy.

___

Note from my editor: “This is a very powerful poem, but it is let down by this closing phrase. The use of a contemporary-sounding colloquialism rings flat here. Can you please re-visit this last line.”

I love that his last sentence didn’t end with a question mark. It’s not a request, it’s an order.

Final edits are done. Emailed my designer. Bismillah!

___

“I know it’s a huge ask. I don’t mean to bring back any terrible memories. I just really feel the research is necessary and someone needs to do it. But only if you are comfortable ok?”

“I’m always haunted by those memories a number of times in a day, so don’t worry.”

God, channel this anger in the right way please.

___

Bedok Reservoir Park. A heartbreaking book. A contented sigh.