Timepass
Time and horizons have become lost in this pandemic
Welcome to my substack #4. Soundtrack to this post: Dancing In The Moonlight, Love Language
1. With my Ammu’s silver plated handheld mirror, I would walk around my house trying to discover the world on the other side. I was four years old, maybe five, and I’d walk around the house with the mirror facing up. Through the mirror, gone were the brown shag carpet and white walls of our California ranch home. All I’d see was the reflection of the popcorn ceiling through the glass, and the outline of the top of my head. I would walk slowly from room to hallway to another room. I was in a different house, an upside down house where the floor was the ceiling and I would have to walk over door jams, and the slanted ceiling was a slide. I was in awe of how I had entered a different world, like walking blindfolded through my imagination. I wondered if my toys came alive in this other world like they did in my sleep. I’d walk out the front door and blue the sky became lava. Just like the floor.
2. I don’t remember what ever happened to the silver-plated handheld mirror. But I do remember at some point the mirror broke, the silver tarnished. I can’t recall if we had found the frame amongst her things after she died. What good would it have down now, tarnished and mirrorless.
3. When I look out the window of my downtown apartment now, 35 years later, it is like looking through a patch of sky in a hand held mirror. My 2nd floor apartment windows face into a courtyard of a crowded and dated apartment complex in Koreatown. I have two windows – one wide in the living room shaded by tall banana palm leaves and a second sliding glass window framing a side of my bedroom. Because of the angle and the shape and construction, all I see is a patch of north facing sky that never reveals the moon or the sun or horizon. Sometimes, if I’m lucky the corner of the patio gets patch of sunlight. I place all my succulents in that corner in hopes that they can get the vitamin D that I can’t.
4. In quarantine, I never get to see the sun and the moon move across the sky.
5. At night, I don’t even get to see stars through this patch. It’s just a dark gray dirty patch of sky. The light pollution of Los Angeles, after all.
6. It didn’t used to matter.
7. Quarantined in this box of an apartment I’ve lived for years and years, but lived feels like a misnomer. I just stayed here as home base, between all the traveling and campaigns and life outside the house. It’s where I stay at, as the kids say. I got my fill of horizon from hotel rooms and sunsets from beach views and starlit moon from lying under the desert skies. Time used to be marked by gazing dreamily at the moon from different area codes.
8. Home was always Ammu’s house in the burbs, I guess my parents’ house technically, but now it is dad’s only. The place where the guava trees are planted and the rose bushes bloom and the trunk that holds all my old journals fading and the Tupperware box of old blue aerogram letters from Ammu’s back-home home. Dad bristles now when I call that house his home. I used to go home every weekend – Sunday nights were a time marker, like the mark on the doorjamb measuring a kid’s height. Now, for all the reasons, it is no longer my home to go home to. Dad would bristle if he knew I no longer called it my home.
9. The banana palm tree directly outside my apartment window never “turns” colors, and the leaves on the trees in the courtyard never truly fall. It took this quarantine for me to finally notice. In the courtyard, there is no grass, but instead dirt patches littered sporadically with white gravel. Some years, we will get rainy seasons, and every November I pull out the heavy blankets. In the June gloom, the sky will be gray and in the fire season the sky will also be gray, but so thick you can’t breath. The smokey smell will always remind you of winter smoke filled dawns in Delhi. Seasonal time markers don’t exist in Los Angeles, which is exotic, until it isn’t.
10. My succulents on my patio and windowsill stretch long like a giraffe’s neck. This is not normal, I will learn later. They are stretching because they are seeking sunlight – they are craning their necks searching for light from the sun. As am I.
11. For the first few months of the pandemic, I moved back into my childhood bedroom at my dad’s house with my Dad and sisters. Every morning, I would wake up and open my blinds to let the morning eastward sunrise heat in. My bedroom window faced east to the front of the street – out that window I would see the sun rise then the moon then the sun again. Each day was marked by the drama of a suburban street – kids riding bikes, a football bouncing off the hood of a car, the mailman delivering packages. The guy going door to door with a cash-for-house door hanger. Yelling out “ice cream truck!” when the white truck playing jangly Christmas music year-round would slowly roll by. When the neighbors across the street would fight on their front lawn, my sisters and I would call each other to the room to gawk out together. We would tell each other the fictional narratives we crafted about the neighbors from how we saw their Ex delivery them socially distanced groceries. Out that window, time marker is notched by how high the tree on the sidewalk strip grows each year, or how the mockingbird will return each spring to his favorite tree and keep us up all night with his mocking. The monarch butterfly migration through our yard from southwest to northeast remind us that another year has passed as does the return of snow to the mountain range to the north.
12. Every night from the vantage point of this bedroom window I can see the moon rise. When it is particularly full it hovers golden, I will exclaim “Go look at the moon!” and we as a family minus one will run to the front yard. We will all look at it slack jawed, noting how big it is. How pretty it is. There isn’t much more we say about the moon – no notes about memories, or astronomical facts, or symbolism. This family isn’t like that. Ammu was like that. But she wasn’t here anymore. So we just stood, slack jawed, and said, “Wow.”
13. It’s hard to believe that it’s been nine years since Ammu died, dying in this house. There are no time markers for grief after one is buried. Time stands still.
14. It is decided that graveyard visits are safe during the pandemic. We visit as a family of five minus one, when we can. Our visits are limited to Birthdays and Death days and Eid Days and Mother’s Day. We pull out the weeds that grow between the dirt cracks. We place new flowers from Vons, every time. Sometimes I will remember to pluck a jasmine from her tree to fragrant her grave. At this graveyard they don’t let grass grow on these graves – it would be un-Islamic to have a lawnmower go over the dead. So there is no growth in this grief. I take a picture on my phone every time because I never want to forget that I made these visits. Each photo looks the same – there are no markers of time in these photos, except, I guess, for myself taking the picture.
15. It is always bright in the California light and blue skies at the graveyard. Here the wind whips from the horizon, always tickling at your feet and tugging the dupatta in your hair. No matter the time of year.
16. The last night I stayed at home, we stood on the sidewalk and watched fireworks explode around us on all the horizons. We stood in the middle of the street and pointed when we heard an explosion trying to spot the direction it was coming from. Because of the pandemic, there was no “firework display” but in the suburb fireworks were illegally being lit everywhere. We see a smoke plume rise on the street behind our house and my sister and I grab our face masks run over the couple blocks over to see where it was coming from. There were all kinds of people running to the smoke, everyone trying to be socially distanced but curious. Two streets away, an errant firework had caught fire to the dry shrubbery along the wall behind the house. The neighbors had all turned on their garden hoses and were fighting the blaze. It would take the fire trucks five minutes before they finally arrived with sirens brashly screeching. We would return to the house feeling a rush, like we had actually escaped danger. As a family we sat on the driveway and lit our own sparklers and watched the explosions all around.
17. I don’t remember if the moon shone that night. The next day’s fight was so explosive it was like the joy of the night hardly happened. And I haven’t been home since.
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18. As a child, time markers are so definitive and concrete. Getting new shoes for school every summer, the marking on the doorjamb the taller you got, bedtimes shifting from 9pm to 10pm to midnight, allowances raised by 25 cents, and the amount of chores you were made to do. There’s the summer you were able to be old enough to ride your bike down the street on your own, or babysit your kid sisters by yourself, or your first sleepover with the first PG-13 movie you saw. The first boy-girl party you were invited to. Your first period. Your first school dance. Your first car. Your first kiss.
19. You grow up and older, and time markers become significant in a different way – your first time moving out of the house. Graduating from high school, college, grad school. These are the time markers of growing up.
20. And then it starts going grey. You start marking the time by the boys you’ve kissed and the men you fall in love and the heartbreaks they leave you with. You can count the years by the bridesmaid dresses in your closet. The baby showers of your friends you attend. You keep falling in love with men that you think will be the one to save you from yourself, but the heartbreaks remind you only have yourself. A year turns into years and more time passes between the dates and setups. You become the friend the kooky friend with bad date stories that everyone looks to with envy when bored of their own husband and kids. You wish you had a baby, for all the typical reasons, but also, to help remind you the joys of passing time.
21. You lose track of time.
22. A decade passes. Then another.
23. Time on this side is marked by death anniversaries. And years of celibacy. And doctor visits remind you of how your body Is aging without you. The cycles of your life revolve around the four years around each election cycle. You didn’t think that would be the time marker you relied on. Time is marked by solo travels to exotic locations. Sometimes hobbies. Sometimes circles of friend groups. You are grasping at adult markers but it just feels like grasping at straws.
24. In quarantine, ironically, time is unmoored. Every day is Groundhog’s Day. The view through the mirror is so small now.
25. “Go outside and look at the moon” we text each other. “Right now, go look at the sunset,” we call each other to declare. And we will. No matter who I tell, or who tells me, we will run outside of quarantine to gaze at the sky. I will put on the mask, lock the door, go down the elevator get in my car and drive to circles in the streets of Los Angeles looking for the most perfect vantage point. Outside, the sunsets are painted like sorbet. The horizons are lined by palms and mountains. The moon is always rising large. I wonder if other people do this or if we used to do this or if it just feels like the importance is accentuated by the quarantine. I wonder if this will be habit after the pandemic. I will take pictures and share them on Instagram. I will look at the picture later at night reminding myself of the miracles of outside.
26. On the phone, we don’t say much besides go look at the moon. Dad will exclaim at the size. A friend will exclaim at the colors. My sister will just sigh in pleasure the way mom would have. We will exchange pictures we took.
27. The moon reminds us there is another day that has passed, another night has arrived. And that it will happen again and has happened before.
28. When this pandemic is over, I hope we still remind each other to go look at the moon, the sunset, and horizon.
29. I am declaring - look at the sky through this mirror with me.
oh my heart!