Today

Today the old woman with the stooped shoulders rounded the corner the same way she does every day, like clockwork, her canvas bag bulging with mundane treasures

Today I saw that a tree had finally blossomed, its yellow flowers extravagant and poofy like meringues or Easter bonnets, adorning a small alley where its inhabitants cook over an open flame, crouching in the dirt

Today my elephant is chewing long stalks of grass, trunk curling and uncurling, jaws laboring in elastic circles, gulping air, fueling a lazy sway. I miss her.

Today the motorcycle under me feels like an organ digesting and processing the sharp turns and unexpected road companions, shuddering in its liveliness, swerving around motorized street vendor stalls carrying children in white uniforms, bouncing like joyful popcorn, school bound

Today the plumeria tree outside my window is shedding its white petals, making me sneeze, making me delirious with grief as its branches bare themselves

Today my new amethyst necklace hangs around my neck, the one I bought outside my dance studio, its stones like shark teeth, thin and long and aggressive. It is a deep, inconsolable purple

Today I will visit my favorite DVD vendor, the one who lets me pay 60 baht per disc, the one who always wears a wooden necklace and courteously blows his cigarette smoke away from me, the one near the Middle Eastern restaurant where cockroaches crawled out of our food and we didn't eat for days after that

Today is warm and slow and lingering, an unwrinkled pace, watching shadows stretch themselves along the grass like sated lovers

Today the hammers pound and progress somehow emerges from routine and repetition. The nails bellow a mantra in their stinging. ForWARD. ForWARD. ForWARD.

Today is celebrating the bliss of forgetting, the utter absence of grasping and holding. Time slides through my fingers, bringing its oily coating of memory with it.