I am grateful that you never throw anything out. If you will not tell me about your life, I will at least be able to piece it together through your belongings.
Browsing: Perspective
In my ongoing preoccupation with pirates and Peter Pan in particular, I have dedicated myself to the study and analysis of his character. I can therefore pass judgement on any interpretation.
I always sought out what it is that ties Bangladeshis together. In my few sheltered years of living, I’ve decided it was the war.
I take a deep, frustrated breath when people refer to others in the theatre as ‘family’: why are we a family? Through what process or context, do friends, perhaps strangers at first, get to the big F-word label?
When the wounds seem irreparable, the food of my family has always been a generational plaster.
El-ghorba translates to ‘estrangement’ in English, but to adopt this modern definition would be to overlook the word’s nuanced background: nostalgia that is intermingled with trauma and hopeless optimism.
I feel a sense of shame associated with admitting how disorganised my room is. When I have people over, I apologise for the state of my room reflexively, even when I’ve spent ages cleaning it. I’m not so sure, however, that messiness is the flaw we treat it as. I think messy rooms are worth defending.
It takes genuine effort to recall the sequence of events in the unfolding global catastrophe of COVID-19. Instead, I am left only with memories of reconnecting with nature and family, and discovering new friends and new eyes through which to see the city I had spent so much time as a child.
I was five years old, or thereabouts, when I developed this alibi — I was not different, I was Andy.
I am patient and polite with the experts because my life is quite literally in their hands, under their stickers, compressed into a luminescent, zigzag display in a darkened room that only they can read.
