i was tagged by Sebha.

i am tagging JP losanjalis tazzystar sockrebel mareekho

The six word memoir rules are:
write your own six word memoir.
post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like.
link to the person that tagged you in your post.
tag five more blogs with links.
leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

There are those times when a story you heard from a friend made you laugh in ways that would elicit suspicion from some people in some circles. When the story is intricate, detailed, funny, and lovely. Yet simple. Not elegant in the slightest because everything is messy. Just like a human condition fraught with loops and tangles and ridiculousness. That my friend’s people are just like my people. The people there are just like the people in my heart and on my mind.

And then there are those times when you just want to make your own stories. When you want to take everything and turn the people here into people there, and vice versa. When you want to turn the connections that you feel in the deepest parts of you into a legible mess for others to take a look at. When the spaghetti loops between the dendrites and axons light up, flashing off ways in which my people, imagined and otherwise, begin moving and talking, embodying my hopes, fears, lives, laughs, and wanting to burst out of the tiny spaces in my head. And onto paper canvas, onto emails, and into blog posts.

My parents’ garage burned down at the end of last year in Texas. Luckily, no one was harmed, but my wonderful cat Neelu passed away in the flames. Our other cat, Shanti, escaped somehow and was only found two days later, her formerly white fur now a dull smoky shade, her little body bruised and suffering occasional nighttime coughing fits. Nothing else survived; all was burnt. The smoke had creeped into the house and anything exposed to it was taken by the insurance company for cleaning. My parents can’t work out at the gym because their shoes are being dry-cleaned. The stuff in the fridge was rotting. Electricity and water, cut off. My sister didn’t want to look at Neelu’s body, which was luckily taken care of by one of the Latino firemen who was wearing a tulsi mala and had pictures of Krishna at home, on his Altar.

Fires in my neighborhood is a subject of a short story that I had worked on (and a piece of it posted here) a few months back. In it, I was driving up to my neighborhood late at night and became quickly concerned for my family when I saw the flames emanating from our slice of suburbia, the Orchard Lakes subdivision. These worries came back to me when I got the phone call about Neelu and the garage. I couldn’t believe it, and after being immensely thankful that my parents were okay, my thoughts eventually turned to my long-standing fascination with natural yet odd things, and how this is the second time that what I write is connected to what happens to me, and my family.

The first was when I was writing another short story about a suburban Muslim family not unlike my own. When thinking about a certain character, my friend Birj came immediately to mind. His irreverence and illogical nature, dedication to social justice, our kinship over bad jokes and puns were a “natural fit” for the character I was contemplating. Once I figured out how to incorporate him, I decided to make the character disappear. Two days later, I find out that Birj had passed. Since then, I haven’t been able to finish that story.

I gradually became afraid that what I write shadows a later reality. I remember my exact thoughts when I decided to make that character disappear – I thought it novel and an interesting plot twist. But more, it just felt natural and furthered the story along in a direction I hadn’t yet thought through but knew was right. That I was fascinated with the giant fire is not abnormal – but when I chose to write about that over other odd things, it foreshadowed what happened a few weeks ago – and another disappearance.

A friend recently said that it could be that I can see the future, that I have the ability to make premonitions. But before that, that same friend told me I should stop writing. My sister said the same. So because of that, I’ve had a tough time writing.

So this is more complex than mere writer’s block. I’m afraid of what I might write in the future because it might turn into something I never expected. Its hard to know where to go from here.

Oh, this is a half distraction because I haven’t read the whole story yet. I’m a slow reader and I have to study for final exams.

I promise, though, that when someone does comment, I’ll promptly read the story in full. Click here for story please.

Writing makes motion.

Write to doubt, to make mistakes, to search and experiment, to imagine the possibility of saying “no” to authority. Without writing, all is frozen.

No doubt, no making mistakes (or anything else), stagnated and repetitive, closed down to all thought, always “yes” downbeat, downtrodden, a slack rope.

(from bad texas, who is paraphrasing from Ignazio Silone on Lornadice)

I think there’s more than truth to that. Write to experiment, to create, to destroy, to live, to stay awake, alive.

Writing is a way to jostle yourself out of forgetting. Because forgetting is a state of frozen, where you are stuck in the present and cannot remember or posit.

Memory is a favorite subject of mine. Memory is that haunting thing that magically brings logic to the heavy, gray mishmash atop my shoulders, straddling my neck. It pervades my senses, spotty reminders of that one time, the first time, the almost time, when I remember the smell of the arcs made by their movements, the feel of the stare they gave me, the subtle impressions of the air.

Writing is masterful excess and a wonderful timepass. It is the clickety clackety, the notes of love and labor, the spinning of the mishmash in a way that forces structure and significance.

It is the process that makes me make sense.

I dug and dig until I saw Zadie Smith speak. She read an excerpt from On Beauty and had a conversation about her work. And I discovered that she’s no different than any of us – we, with our heads filled with strange ideas, configurations of neurons that fire along, triggering memories and bridging connections between us, between people with similar or distant connections.

Zadie is an inhabiter. Her novels are considered ’social.’ She is an inhabiter because she explores the bodies, the social chemistries and configurations of those she doesn’t know anything about. She was once about to give a talk and as she stepped to the mic but before opening her mouth, she received a letter from the Bangladeshi community (delivered by an East Asian boy). The letter was more a list, indicating the various ways Zadie had screwed up in her representation of their community in White Teeth. For her, inhabitation comes with its quirky sets of incongruence and inaccuracy; no one ever said she was an accurate inhabiter.

Part of the reason she can inhabit so well is because she is a professional reader; at least, thats what she calls herself. She has taken up writers that many of us would never dare to read; she purposely mixes things up and reads everything she can get her hand on. She juxtaposes Kafka with Wallace and absorbs everyone (or everything) in between. She has a way about her that oozes of experience, of understanding the world in a way many of us also experience it.

But more than that, she doesn’t place any special onus on herself. She’s just a person who writes. She doesn’t call herself a writer, she doesn’t gesticulate wildly while she’s speaking. She wears cute boots and is amusingly self-deprecating. Most of the time, though, she has no agenda and is honest about the effects her fame have had on her.

Did I mention that I like her a lot?

I near the huge bubbling, bursting apparatus. I hope and I hope its not my house; my parents are asleep. I near the nearest bend near the fire, and I see it; its my neighborhood. Orchard Lakes consists of many houses, priced between 200 and 500,000, a series of beautiful lakes, one natural and the rest man-made. It abuts the alligator infested Cullinan Park off of Highway 6 – one of the trails offers this savory warning: Please be careful with little children and pets – Alligators in these waters. On any given day, when there is sunlight, there are women walking – their husbands away at work. These women wear sunglasses and sport saris or shorts – in summertime the walking costumes generally diversify and have so of late. They speed walk and regular walk, but don’t run. SUVs are the vehicle of choice here. There was a petition by some homeowners last year to stop the building of sidewalks because it would increase the amount of the annual homeowners fee. During any time of day, the new houses and gardens are built and tended by Mexican and Central and South Americans, and taco trucks are a frequent smell, Roc en Espanol a frequent sound, immigrant skin a frequent sight.

I click the tiny button on the black remote; the gates creak open and I’m in. The monstrosity of it hits me instantly – 3 model homes are blazing, 2 already razed to the ground, all three abutting a man-made lake and a gazebo strategically placed for daytime relaxation and nighttime lusty trysts. The one still standing is what likely gave shape to the mutating frame I saw earlier. The wooden grid is exposed now and fire trucks are parked awkwardly while firepeople shoot streams of water into the mess.

A police officer runs over to me. He is coming over to me in the way police officers do. Shouting commences.

“What are you doing here!”
“I live here.”
“Well, you gotta get out of here!”
“I just need to go to my house.”
“You need to get out or I’m going to give you a ticket…!”
“Why can’t I just go to my house?”
“You can park your car near the gate and walk! Move or you’ll get a ticket!”
“Are you serious?” I was serious.
“You better move or else you’ll get a ticket!”

I had no choice, I had to move. I squeezed my car between the two police cars I had scurried through just 5 minutes earlier. I reversed and left, my sister’s house only five minutes away. I call her, asking for a place to sleep.