Polychrome

I made my first kite out of white paper scraps; on my 16th birthday, it came to me that they needed a pop of color. I put five of the finest highlighters I owned between each finger and dragged the nibs aimlessly, tangling and untangling the swirls over and over again. Matted strands of hair slipped past my shoulders to fall over them, and the colors peddled back to whichever corner they could find, though some scurried closer and closer. The blues and whites crashed into each other at the ends of my hair, the pinks and reds fused into the afternoon sky, the browns seeped in under my nails. I held the kite up as high as my hands would reach, and saw bits of turquoise peeking out from the center. A tinge of silver tapped away at the corner of my eyes, its glint stewing in solitude at my parched lips. I saw them push and pull, pirouetting in an uncannily human routine.

In unison, they whispered verses into my ears in a language both alien and intimate. Pokémon card sets I had bought with my lunch money, the warbly Rabindra Sangeet from my mother's old cassette tapes that used to lull me to sleep after school; stacks of Barbie CDs collecting dust beside my card sets; bootlegged Jane Austen paperbacks from the quaint bookshop near my school; a Deviser 4040 I never quite learned to strum—each syllable exploded into an erratic saffron alpona. Basalt braided through the curls falling upon my kameez—curls I once wished could have been sleek, satiny and of charcoal. Moonstones swayed in circles around unruly eyebrows, dotting the spot on my forehead where they melted into each other's embrace. The kite broke into pieces, some tearing into my corneas with their jagged edges as some glided up my bare skin with the caress of porcelain; then it all binded back together into a polychrome mosaic.

The whispers froze, but I took solace in the fact that they are for me, and only me, to hear. Only I can decipher their language. Only I can press onto my palms the dewdrops they leave behind. Those edges can only taste my blood: rotten, blued or maroon. The copper on my tongue is borne of my own veins, the crescendos of magenta hum on my own vocal chords. The ghastly lime greens are mine, as much as the midnight blues are.

They are my prison, and my home.

Atiqa Tanjeem occasionally writes for Star Books and Literature.