BY UMANG KALRA
Golden Hour
Paris was blue – tired, sleepy dawn mushed into
slow sunset folded over a city that is laying itself open yet
hiding every part of it under bricks and light. The light was
never gold, never white, never sweet pink or purple like all
of the photographs tell you to expect. It was always
almost, always shaking, always slightly shivering, enough
to tell you that it is days and years from sleep, yet, enough
to tell you that all of the people who are breathing and
sleeping and going to bed in it everyday are not through
with it. Always blue – I start sentences with "I remember"
and I swallow them up before they are finished because
nothing I remember is enough. It was blue like shaking
hands, and hearts that did not know they were hearts –
hearts that thought they could feel and feel and feel and
that if they felt enough they would burst open. It was
somewhere shadows and somewhere shade, always sounds
of surety and certainty wrapped up in moments of
breathlessness that snuck in whenever we paid attention
long enough to notice that the light was real and all of our
corners and edges were resting against the air that had
slept in the lungs of all the rest of them. There is an
enormity to Paris, a tumbling expanse of overwhelming
life that feels too real to be true, if there is such a thing,
and Paris told me that there is. There is a forever waiting
for us to find the right words for the brush of Paris against
us, for the ache of feeling a whole city hold you up and
simultaneously forget that you are breathing, the
hollowness of knowing that we can watch the sun change
colour from the tops of our buildings and the corners of
our oceans and that the city will carry on into darkness
and never notice that we need more stars to find our way
home. We are home, and it is shaded in choked sentences
strung together like little windows that do not look out
onto the streets, but into the golden of table lamps and
bookshelves and photo frames and all the rest of it that
reeks of triviality in the face of the blue outside. We are
home, and it is the colour of light falling onto closed eyes
in the morning, it is the colour of a city becoming every
single day and unbecoming every night to the sound of soft
breathing and laughter that curls in on itself like smoke
and whispers and little words caught in throats, with all of
history watching and all of eternity patient enough not to
swallow it whole just yet. We are home, and it is blue, and
it is Paris.
RELATED: Letters To Paris: Two Writers Talk Creative Accountability & Feminine Power
Like this work? Donate to Umang Kalra.
Umang Kalra is an Indian poet and a student of History at Trinity College, Dublin. Her work has appeared in Tn2 Magazine, Coldnoon, The Rising Phoenix Review, Porridge Magazine, VAYAVYA, and others. She has previously worked with Inklette Magazine, and is currently involved in a year long mentorship programme for women of colour in Ireland, under the bilingual poet Doireann Ni Ghriofa.