The shelves were cramped, and scattered
with cans and tins of striking colors and
ambiguously labeled jars that stung
my unfamiliar mind. I begged for spice,
for my soul had needed heat for some
time, an exotic catalyst to fuel my journey
to a home I had always known but never seen.
I saw the curries, too similar to the next,
but only to my unlearned eyes, and I
prayed that their pungency would
punch through me, and cleave my
severely structured world. The tiny
chilis, puckered with the heat
and wrinkled by the smile of the sun,
flourished green and red redolent. I
lied to myself, because I needed a foreign
muse, and said that I knew how to cook
them. Like those shelves, I myself was
cramped in those days, and begging for
a big expansion into somewhere new and bold.
Like we are like to do, I looked farther afield
than where the answer truly laid. It was never
the strange alphabet dotted across the cans
that really made me learn. It was the grass
that I sat in after my thrown-together meal,
feeling proud and not just the least bit
underachieved, that curled around my legs
and whispered true the words that led me
to flight: you are home when the newness
is found in the old, and the yellowed pages
of too-thumbed books and the weeds you
have always trampled begin to trust you well
enough to tell the secrets they have hidden
from their surfaces. It is when you sit
and see that the world is standing. And when
you cast a glare into a new store and worry
little about the pangs of “that’s not me,” and
let your newfound feet dance toward the
underbrush that has tangled you before,
but only to slow your watching to the immediacy
of this moment and all it has begotten.