We Become Our Lovers’ Most Perfect Lovers

Only when the divorce papers are signed and sealed. In November 2014, my father cooked his first chicken for my sister and me, marinated with yogurt, saffron, and plumped golden raisins. And received in that one hour more praise than my mother had in her entire life combined. That very night I began to keep a diary that connects me from that last morsel to this present day in a continuous and unbroken line. Nevermind. You could stack the plates we have broken in this house and reach the moon. And then you’d have to ask the moon for more plates to get back home. In a photograph, my father’s mother is standing with her ankles submerged in a river with two warring names. She is looking across the water to the China border and licking her lips. Take my word. I am sitting in the dark and in the dark I have ceased wondering about politeness. I am looking for the Moon and finding the Yarlung Tsangpo River. The First Saffron Chicken. I am going for a swim in the lake after eating a pudding named for the man drowned in the lake. Take my hand. In truth, does anyone ever rise again from the water? In the bowl, twelve strands of saffron swim laps like a golden fish with a tail of fire. At the cabinet door, a photograph of my half-waning smile. Upstairs, on a piece of copy-paper, a handwritten list of my mother’s five best virtues—But where is my mother? To where has she flown? The jasmine tree behind me casts its shadow across the world. Remembering the months when it flowered behind my Zoom calls. And a scent rose over my body and out across the water. Today, it is not its season of blooming. Neither mine. Neither you. Neither she. Neither me.