Letting go is the journey to the top of a cliff you’re not sure you can climb, putting on a life-vest you’re not sure will save you, and jumping down into the sea when you can’t swim. It is doing all these things for the freedom of falling: sinking into the gaseous sky like heavy fruit plopped into plastic produce bags. The air stretches and sags but it is strong, and there is at least a minute, which feels like an hour, before the bag will break and ground will claim me. I will no doubt bruise: parts of me will become soft and suspicious, testing the weight of the fingers that prod it, testing the weight of their touch. Purple, these parts will glow from beneath my skin. They will smell of sugar and the July sun, the sun that comes to strangle water from the crop…..

Since I was fifteen years old my mind was a mangrove bay collecting memories, pulling them in like shoes lost in a battle to the swamp. When someone loses a shoe in the mangroves it is always just one, as if the swamp wants you to remember when you were a pair, body and soul, and the soul did not leave without the body. Wasn’t that the promise of life – that the soul and body, for now, were one? I was the type of child to see the mangroves from the sand, wondering if mangoes and mangroves were etymologically kin, keeping my distance from the prospect of being sucked in but mesmerized by the fall.

I learned falling at six months, old already: born with dead skin, skin that would fall away when I walked, or sat in hot sun. I was born with dead skin: my portal to the world dry and hard, diseased, as if there was something on the other side of my skin that was dangerous

My Mother:

On the third year of your death I think of jail:

I think of the three days and nights I spent in a cell

With no way to mark the time and no bruise to prove

It was self-defense: I thought of how his lies were like him leaving, and leaving is when a lover takes a part of your life you both had agreed to share. I think of the days before the arrest: how I had ached for quiet, but when the quiet came

It was the third year of your death, I still miss your arms most – your arms were fields with no fences, and they are barbed wire; they were aloe and its thorns. At night my bed is both a river and the rapids, for in love, as in art, there is both positive and negative space. The black defines the white. The lines we draw define the space. And the lines hug the space like a dying child.

- Krys Assan

(ms.kassan@hotmail.com)

*FLOW NOTE*

This piece is simply beautiful. It is so profound and thought provoking with the journey it encompasses within the lines, assembling a piece so damn poetic in its expression towards the audience whether or not if it was its intention. I thoroughly enjoyed this Krys, I hope to see much more.

-flow