Tending

My sister had one planted in a pot. It was for a school project in Home Economics. She planted a balete tree and it must stay alive for a good amount of time. The tree lived way past her first year in high-school, though we may have had that tree for longer. My mother replanted it in a huge pot so it had more room to grow. She put it against the red wall of the townhouse we rented and there it spread its orange-red roots. At night, I imagined in blazed like a fire with small electric thunder issuing from its oldest aerial roots. Electricity that hovered in the air, like the tiniest debris floating in the aftermath of a house fire. Electricity that transmuted into words in the air. I caught some and pretended I could make beautiful phrases. It had been the balete all along.

Its leaves look like tear-shaped emeralds. I keep an emerald ring my mother gave me, but it only reminds that I am a burden. Even overseas, where I have made a space for myself and tend to my needs, it is hard to not feel like a burden. Everyday tending to wounds that do not show.

Teeth

At noon I watched steam rise from a kettle. Writing a book to lead me back to myself. I have a nickname for my child-self: Teapot. And I think about what Teapot liked, what she thought, and how she got out of any situation by talking through. Until she shrank and receded into herself.

I used to keep baby teeth in a box. From time to time, I would open it and feel the ridges at the root of a tooth. It felt as if I could know a deep, forgotten secret by simply feeling those roots.

I want to be incredibly generous. And there are two ways for me to achieve a timeless, infinite kind of generosity: to think only of myself and think of things greater than myself, that shaped this consciousness. When I think of what is greater, I return to the nuanced sea and the sky under which rests home.