frosting

In my country the love one holds is the grains they serve. With every spoonful is another “I love you,” and with every call to dinner is a song that wraps you tight. The feeling is easy for them; what beats their heart and moves their joints. My country only bathes in love.

My father used to take my brother and I to the movies every weekend. We were rich with too much time and money. Shoving kernels and raspberry blue acid down like air, pizza grease sewn into my patterned shirts. I don’t think the employees had love in candy wrappers or three day old pretzel knots, nor did my father, the theater being his abode to escape from my mother and swipe gambling games with a greedy haze in his eyes. He would stand up occasionally, phone cradled in his arms, eyes pressed tight and a harsh growl in his breath, possessed: a business call which I couldn’t understand. 

At home my mother carves another’s love out of takeout boxes. Some cook’s pride tossed in a plastic container picked up with the swipe of her card, forced down my throat with eyes squeezed, pretending she made it for me. When I close my eyes I can feel the love fading against my throat, like an ombre of a haunting. I always try to pinch them a little tighter, because maybe the darker it is and the less I can see, the more my mother will love me. 

I picture it a rosy pink with sprinkles, a frosting piped in dances and traced among the edges with torn seams. I hear it with the hollering laugh painted through the rain and the touch of wrinkled hands, folds among folds embracing. I think it’s a kind of syrup, the ones that make rivers too fast and gushes between open corners, till stuck. It is the hymn of my steps on a cobblestone street, with the air crisp and tingling my ears, with my body numb and worn yet happy. 

 There is something in the air in my country, some kind of glittery wish caressed carefully through the sky, raining down and coating my mouth, sugary. Kneaded in the breeze and braided within clouds drifting: it chants. It chants that I never want to leave. 

When I go back to America the chants are still laced around my heart. It drips down from every breath I take and forces me to chug, but I can’t ever swallow. At home I eat week old pretzel knots and the stress of my mother, I eat my fathers smirk at every dollar lost and sloppy fast food burgers falling apart. I eat it and hope it doesn’t come back up. I chew and swallow and hopefully break its heart, the needle that slowly twists into my chant.