Once again. The night grows dense and sharp among the ailing bell towers that play on through so many nights of forgetting. There is a lament suspended in space that divides the vast universe that builds my many selves. I am sorry it cannot not be, and yet it loves being alive, and the moon shines, and tears slide their bittersweet taste into what is real. Once again. The ship migrates from ocean to settle on land and become a serenely barren thing. A wandering journey that must be the perfect mirror of so many absences that, remade, build our souls. Once again. There is no silence that withstands the monotonous crackle of bonfires, night fires that must be—only withered echoes of those haunted, endless mists from which he loves to be more God and less intention. Again, it rains: days, weeks, years... and my hands keep emerging from nowhere to become this: illusions of peace, uncertain nights.
# Once Again Once again the monsoon returns, water drums its fingers on the tin roof— that old percussion I've known since childhood, when I lay beneath quilts counting the beats as if they were prayers falling from heaven. Once again the earth drinks deeply, gulps the sky's generosity with open mouth, and the paddy fields transform to mirrors holding clouds hostage in their shallow depths. Once again I am that child, barefoot in the mud, laughing at the frogs that sing their amphibian songs, at the earthworms that surface like refugees fleeing the drowning dark below. Once again the mangoes swell and sweeten, the jackfruit hangs heavy as a secret, and my grandmother's voice calls from the kitchen— *Come, come, the rice is ready.* Once again I taste the world through her weathered hands, each grain of rice a small miracle, each lentil counted with the precision of love. Once again the sky breaks open, and I am remade— not the person I was yesterday, but someone washing clean, someone learning again what it means to be porous, to let the world enter and change shape within me. Once again, once again— the monsoon knows no other word. And neither do I.
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