The carpenter’s machine whirrs somewhere nearby. It sounds to me like the wailing of a broken person. The person, who sometimes feels like her entrails are filling her up to the brim, bloating her up like she would burst from the seams of her skin. It makes her want to throw up everything that is inside of her; vomit everything until there is nothing left inside. Hollow. No trace of entrails. Nothing even of the heart or brain or soul or whatever it is that makes her ache enough to want to retch. From somewhere nearby sounds a hammer. Loud, loud banging at something, hammering the noise in and out of her head. 

Constructions—such a vibrant side of Kathmandu now. Not after the earthquake, but since longer before that. Concrete, iron-rods, sacks of cement freezing into blocks as workers step over them to get to another flight of the unfinished staircase. Concrete.

There’s something perfectly lifeless about these fast-growing buildings, these quickly cemented roadsides. There’s something cruel about bulldozers pulling down damaged buildings; like monsters mowing things down ruthlessly. It makes me long for the Kathmandu I used to know. The Kathmandu with crisp air, where white frost covered the grass on winter mornings. The mornings would be about people breathing-out wisps of fog when they spoke. 

I know nostalgia best when gradual yearning for the Kathmandu of my childhood kicks up dust inside me, clouding my chest and my sight. It makes me want to weep, run amok, pull down the walls and take everything back in time, so that the spaces are wide-open again and I am a child walking about carefree, pocketing marbles. 

I know nostalgia best when something in me is so mad that I want to tear down the city so I can see open fields, barren just after harvest, with piles and piles of hay stacked like little huts. It drives me almost insane—this longing for what isn’t. This yearning for the Kathmandu that used to be is nearly, nearly as intense as the need to see you again.

.............

The streets felt taut with memory. Everywhere her steps led her there was something of what she knew from conversations that had become him. She walked every place they had walked together. She feared she would go insane just re-living those moments in her mind. Her lips would fall open in an ugly twitch, as though she was about to scream, sometimes. Or she would stare at the sun long enough to hurt her eyes so that the passersby thought the tears were caused by the brightness.

.............

When I woke-up this morning, I stifled an ache that was beginning to rise up my throat. It has become a ritual. Every morning. Or in the middle of the night, if I wake up half-way into a dream, it is this ache I try to smother. 

Today was just another of those mornings. Folding the quilts-up and putting the pillows back where they belong, staring at the walls, trying to figure whether solitude is bliss or an excuse, I put the pot on. It always is followed by coffees, teas, and a bite, the humming and screeching of the machines at the under-construction building next-door.

I can’t draw open the curtains to catch the sky because the view is interrupted by tall buildings and I live too close to the ground. There’s longing for the sky, the moon, the stars, while I pine away for you, who promised to be sharing in my solitude and my sins.

But I must get on with the day, carry your words when I turn the keys in the locks, walk out on to the streets, jump buses and take elevators up and down work. It is actually a nice way of finding us again. If I run your words in my head over and over again, then I know I can still find something to makes sense of this silence that replaces the chaos that was us.

.............

Dead ends...dead ends...these should not have been the words to pronounce as winter crossed into spring. But how else should it have been? We never discussed that when we parted.

The city has started soaring above us again, staggering in a heat we call global warming. I think of it as claustrophobia. And I think of claustrophobia as a feeling of people breathing down my neck—all of them pushing me into believing you will not return.

I’ve often thought of how you spring from my entrails, consume my fears and lie low inside me again like you never changed anything. But what’s that to the city? The city, like I said, has begun to rise. I see it in the honking, the swirling of dust in the afternoon wind and the stench lifting from massive gutters that once were rivers.

The city has no memory of rivers. Only the sewage now and the stone spouts that trickle droplets into plastic containers. 

The butcher’s wife stands across the street and looks up at the sky, shielding her eyes with her hand that is stained by blood. With the other hand, she clutches her apron- soaked in blood. Flies swarm her best, succulent chicken breast. She waves a hand at them and looks up at the sky again. The sky is blue, blue, as though they draped an ocean over the city. Not a single hint of cloud. The butcher’s wife must love the blue, I think. But she turns away to look at the city and I follow her gaze.

I don’t love the blue anymore. It reminds me of these endless spaces where I cannot find you. And the city is a constant reminder that you don’t live here anymore.