Summer 

Is the color of the sky from my foggy window as I board the flight back home.

The taste of my silent tears which I try to inconspicuously wipe in an airplane full of sleeping people.

The sound of my heart beating louder at landing as it realizes it is almost touching the soil it came from.

The voice of my mother, in my ear, welcoming me home. The scruff on my father's chin, an itch I never thought I would crave. The new wrinkles around their eyes beaming with unsaturated longing. The delicate unrelenting arms of my littlest sister as she holds on to me for dear life. 

Summer 

Is my room with its butter yellow walls and pretty lace curtains and my bed as freshly made as I left it months ago, warmly beckoning.

The tears that shouldn't still fall but do as my head settles into my pillow and I inhale the unique fragrance of my own safe haven.

The first breakfast I have surrounded with chatters of love and life, and the days of timeless bliss which follow with not a hint of reckoning.

The voice of my mother, in my ear, saying goodbye. The unshed tears in my father's eyes which I want to erase from my repertoire. The new wrinkles around eyes still beaming with unsaturated longing. The delicate quivering arms of my littlest sister as she slowly lets me go, only to come back for another hug and another and another until I force myself away and into the car, and wave even after the bleak night has long kidnapped them from sight. 

Summer is going home and somehow finding a portal to that magical land of innocence and safety and peacefulness and warmth which I had left behind, and leaving home to growth and possibilities and chances, all beautiful, but distant from where my spirit lies. Summer is feeling painfully whole for a little bit only to once again fracture a million times. 

Summer is coming home

for a little bit

to where my spirit

forever lies

Summer is feeling blissfully

painfully whole

for a little bit

only to fracture a million times

Paris was the world in between. A suspended entity. Neither my home, nor the foreign land where I lived. Neither the origin not the destination. Just a stop along the way, where I witnessed sunrise after sunrise, year after year, as I waited for the next bus the next flight the next journey.

So how is it that my heart has chosen Paris a home to calm its erratic beat? How did the world in between become the world my spirit craves? Is it that in those moments in time - surrounded by strange people strange tongues strange skies - I feel most like who I used to be? Paris was the world in between; now it's the only world I come to know peace.

He smiled, but it didn't seem to touch his eyes, and it made me wonder, if his spirit was like mine.

But then I realized, broken does not need more shards, and pain will not let go of guards.

I realized hurt does not invite compassion and suffering is a locked down mansion.

That love does not glue back a fracture, that he and I, equal disaster.

So I smiled, but it didn’t seem to touch my eyes, eyes he caught, his forehead creased

as his hand found mine in the crowd, to hold on for a second, then release.

And we smiled, but it didn’t seem to touch our eyes.

It manifests itself in the afternoon rays of sunlight dancing through the ancient vines

Which he himself planted, when the world was still in black and white

In the smell of blackberries and plums, and the grape he used for wine

In tears which ran freely, when sensing anyone’s blight

It manifests itself in the babies he didn’t get to meet

His grandchildren’s children, with tiny hands and feet

In my grandmother’s retreating memory, her half-hearted hymns

Breaking wisps of thread which still reach out to him

My grandfather’s spirit manifests itself in every niche and bend

Of the mansion where retreating sunsets, mean anything but the end