Mandala

words by Anh Tim Phan, art by Jason Chen

Walking your ghost to the center of the world, bringing you back to where you came from. 

First, we pass through planetary rings of every color, ropes tied around your waist anchoring you down. Untying knots, you apologize to the girl you loved in high school and then the girl you love now.  Colors turning from string into fiber into tints that merge and mix, contact lenses fixing your vision onto the rest of the world.  Seeing things like this, I remind myself to do the same once I’m back.

Holding my hand, you go step by step until the colors fade, and all that’s left in your bones isn’t marrow but a sweet and custardy filling.  Seeing you walk so far, I feel inspired to cross into the dream too.  It doesn’t work though, since you keep pinching my cheeks every time you see me.  I guess old habits die hard.  Sometimes when I lose my voice after a night out, from too much drinking yelling crying, I try to talk the next morning but all I can hear is you. Maybe that’s why I’m always talking to myself. 

The next step is to hold the lotuses up to your face and blow them away.  Breath by breath I feel something in me start to expand and contract, the pimples on my face flaring up all at once and then fading away, in sync with the floating of lotus petals.  The flowers I potted started drooping but now  they’re held up by circular trusses, the same way you showed me to.  I will always be here for you, we say to each other, knowing it’s a lie.

Now, to the candles.  I placed one in the center of our mats, stone-gray and waiting for you to light up the path.  I was too cold earlier but now I’m too hot, something in me churning again as I see you bite your tongue and keep moving forward.  I remember when you bought a heater for me, my first year in college, and ever since then I spend my nights slightly sweaty in a familiar warmth.  Melting into the temperatures inside my body, they merge into one, and I use the energy of everything swirling together to propel myself forward. 

Finally, we reach the center, where you can return to how it was in the beginning.  Birth and death, you tell me, are too similar to not be the same thing.  Flesh coming in and out, air doing the same.  Walking closer to the center I hear your voice start to get younger, and now you’re a baby sucking your thumb, sitting in the middle of everything.  I remember now, the last part of the ritual is to write down your name and leave it here with you.  The ink in my pen starts to fade as I write your middle name, which is mine as well.  It’s okay though, this step is arbitrary.  I never called you by your name anyways.

Handing you the slip of paper, I watch you fiddle around and finally put it in your mouth.  The hair on your head no longer gray, I take your fingertips into mine and show you how to weave patterns into palm and feel the breeze on your skin.  As everything gets digested in the pitch-white center of the world, we look at each other and sit in silence, like we always have.

And now in this hazy sun state, as the colors come back to life, we are not father and son but something else, and you are neither dead nor alive but the real thing in between.