Tiger Lilies, 2020
Moving back to my hometown when the pandemic hit was a reaffirmation of the loneliness that dysfunctional homes can breed. But living in isolation made me notice the pots of red tiger lilies outside my window blooming for the third year in a row, for the first time.
Image: Black-out poetry on an old typewritten poem from 2015 against a pressed tiger-lily from home.
My mother has had the most eventful childhood of all the people I know – never in one place but always within reaching distance from a tree. We have grown up on her memories of living in homes at the edge of forests and nursing tiger cubs. My favourite story to tell about her is when I called her from a strange new city to describe an unfamiliar flower and the name rolled off her tongue like blooming is her vernacular.
She is the kind of woman who, at one point in time, had a pile of diaries with the daily ‘hisaab’, but limited her poetry to only the edge of each page. So naturally, when my father covered our little garden in concrete, she potted more plants around the house – learning young what it means to uproot oneself and still reassure familiarity.
The general inconvenience of survival has brought me back to the city I long ago stopped giving second chances to. This is the first time I’ve noticed the pots of red tiger lilies outside my window blooming for the third year in a row. There is something so gravely wretched in only being reminded of love after having lost.
I’ve read that the size of your heart is approximately the same as when you close your fingers tightly into your palm. The lilies in each pot on my window grow in pairs, larger than my two anxious fists.
But like a butterfly-cut of a giant heart, they boldly fold open to face away from each other – after all, tigers are creatures of isolation; they are known to roam solo.
I can’t help but spite these tiger lilies and their willingly secluded existence from each other. How can the source of one’s reassurance be the mockery of the other’s loneliness? Do they not know that longing is best measured in hindsight?
In this hisaab where love is greater than loss, loss greater than longing, and longing greater than remorse – I am too fearful to account for my heavy heart, lest the balance is thrown off.
When I say that I am no different from the lilies, I mean to say I have turned away from love – too proud to admit that solitude is just loneliness with the condition of choice. When I say that I am no different from the tiger, I mean to say I am blissfully alone — unaware that on tough mornings when you wake up aching for warm arms from a past life, you are only greeted by absence. But as I press against the glass window with the stickiness of my face, I notice that there is one fundamental difference between the flower, the tiger, and the idiot – only one of us ever stood a chance against this loneliness.