Mayalu Press

I will be ready by the end of the month.

For now, I am getting my ducks in a row. Trying to decide what this year will mean. Already many terrible things have happened but if I set my intentions by the end of January, I will still have made it in time.

I felt good about this year at the turn of it, with unusual certainty. The last few hours of last year, an old family friend told my friend and I about life and painting and commitment and I felt like things were possible.

18 days in someone told me that we’re all cursed, shared the nightmarish month they’ve had, everyone nodding. Someone else says it’s the year of the snake – we’re shedding skin, it’s messy.

I tell them what my friend said about it being a Year One—new beginnings. They say yes, how painful. I am stressed that we understand this differently and worry about what’s coming. The snake had better hurry up and shed, someone said.

I remembered today that snake is not the year we are beginning but the year we are ending—horse is coming, on February 17th. That means we’re shedding the last of it. It also means I have until February 17th to prepare for the new year.

I know it’s silly to feel like anything will change in a new year or to be surprised when bad things happen in its first moments. I never thought that they wouldn’t happen. Maybe I am surprised how quickly other people give up on a year, or call it cursed. Maybe I just felt too rushed in the first week to set resolutions and don’t like stumbling into a new year half-dressed.

For someone who’s been having a hard time with hope lately, it’s strange to feel it most hearing my parents’ friends sing Auld Lang Syne. Nothing changes and the year gets started without me. But one night a year we all believe the same thing: things can be different. By the end of the month—or when horse takes over from snake, at the latest—I will be ready to make things better.

I am so annoyed and angry and exhausted with you all. I love you. Happy new year. Just let me finish putting my armour on.

–KMN

Let me put my arm around you

Soon it will be a new year in the old country.
Months after my neighbours bring down their
Reindeers from the roof where my kite is still stuck
between the chimney and a sandbag
too heavy now from dew and frost.

In the old country, Cimita polishes pictures
of Sauba and Kousin
But only the pictures where they’re smiling
as kids.
The more I’ve tried to be like one
The more like the other I’ve become instead.

Cimita only puts those pictures up when we know
No one will make it back home for the holiday
This spring.
I’ve tried to explain
To the neighbours that the kite means more

than a made thing bound by lokta and butcher’s twine.
In our calls, Cimita never admits it’s getting late
And there is work tomorrow
I hear the things she doesn’t say.
There is strength somewhere in withholding.
She waits for Kousin or Sauba to speak.
They don’t, but they still stay on the line.

I hear the horns over Bagmati blaring.
I wait for them to leave.
Cimita says this year she’ll have to waste
All the sesame, jaggery, molasses and just
Stay in bed and wait

until it’s a different day,
a different day, when we fly old kites
And I can feel the marks twine
left behind on the arm
you’ll bring around my waist.

~ཨེ་ཀོ་རོ་ཀན་ཆ་ཏ་མང་།