Suspension
“Vliegtuig in de lucht”, Pierre de Caters, 1909. Rijksmuseum
I.
I remember my friendship with Van, formed in the gap
between languages. Không biết. I don’t understand. Dịch, I pointed to my phone.
Google Translate was the third party in our friendship,
but I misspelt the Vietnamese words I thought I had heard,
and her hands hurt when she tried to type, and so much was lost in digital translation.
In my small black notebook are rows of words she taught me
over the weeks I sat beside her in that classroom:
please, thank you, teacher, raining, tired.
Nóng, the hot and humid afternoons that lulled us into languid drowsiness,
a round space between the roof of my mouth, my lower teeth and lips.
My chin dropped sharply towards my neck as I tried to fight off sleep,
eyes heavily lidded, ngũ.
The days her body ached too heavily to come to class, I found myself at a loss for words.
Immediately after asking my name the morning I first arrived,
she asked when I would leave. “The twenty fifth,” I told her,
signifying the numbers with my fingers. Hai mươi lăm. Twenty five. July.
Plane. Singapore. Máy bay. Xin ga po.
Every day after, she clutched at my arms each time I left the classroom.
“Hai mươi lăm máy bay? Bye bye, bye bye.”
She cried when she told me that Mr. Ben, a long-time volunteer from New Zealand,
had left. She said, “Plane, máy bay,” and her hand arced up into the sky.
II.
I re-enter. The air scratches the back of my throat; a scourge.
We drive past a bridge.
An old man stands on its edge, silhouetted
against a backdrop of deepening purple. He gazes over the fence
onto an immense construction site, once a vast swathe of rice fields
and farmland. He coughs
as if in anticipation of what is to come. The city has lost itself
to air. Drifts.
We move through the city and return home, lightly dusted in its past.
III.
What is written by light is built on pixels and
debris of war and the history cast upon
Bodies now waiting to be reconstituted, later
to be remembered.
In the waiting, they are dust motes suspended in air.
To be drenched in light is also to swim in dust. Out of my wonderment comes
the realisation: the tactile saturated quality of light I so love here
is in fact the city upended into air, foretelling at once
its expansion and loss. Motes of dust suspended,
bearing light.