Everywhere is home and nowhere is a place I hope to visit

I find strands of Misty’s hair in everything. In the bowl of soup I make for dinner, in the shower, wispy stalactites underneath the medicine cabinet, in the back of my throat, in my ear canal, in the bus I take to work in the morning, hiding between leaves of cash in the CanDland register. I’ll be right back, I say to a customer when they come to purchase knock off Swedish fish. In the store room I pull down my pants and reach into my vagina, making pincers out of my fingers so I can draw out the single strand of her hair lodged in my walls.

I know it’s Misty’s hair because of the color, and because the strand doesn’t split when I tug on it. I could floss my teeth with her hair if I wanted to.

Before she moved out, before all that stuff with Buck happened, we smoked a joint in our unusually large bathroom and dyed her hair highlighter yellow. I remember discarding the gloves midway and using my hands instead. I remember thinking oh, this is what it is like to feel someone’s skull.

Misty couldn’t stop laughing at our reflection in the mirror. She would pause for a bit, then start again, as if she was rediscovering the joke for the first time.

I remember her asking me if I preferred turkey or chicken. We were using the silicone basting brush we used to butter Thanksgiving turkey as a dye applicator.

I remember responding, Chicken, but isn’t turkey just a big chicken?

Misty shrugged at that. We’re not poultry experts, she said.

I remember the shadows of her face, half sunlight, half moon.

I remember because this was before I learned that a world of difference could constitute one small thing.

* 

Misty was my manager at CanDland.

She was two years younger than me, which toppled the hierarchy that kept us under Corporate Control and let us establish a quasi-casual friendship.

Like, on Tuesday’s we locked up early and walked across the street to Mystic Mahal, the only restaurant near us that made food spicy enough for a Filipino-Indian palate.

Mystic’s interior was the lovechild of India and the boonies. You sat cross legged on the floor to eat, but there was always cutlery. The placemats were low-resolution prints of kalamkari art. All the lights were vigil candles.

Misty remarked that dining here felt like dining inside the brain of someone who had never met an Indian person before. I laughed at that, though secretly I thought this was what Indian restaurants looked like everywhere.

Mystic was one of those places that put me simultaneously at ease and on edge. I was wary around people who looked like me. When I could sense their lofty expectations of my character. When my past became something for them to pick at. But there were also days when I was grateful for company and understanding. Days when eating the food my body recognized felt like a gift. Days I was moved to tears by the staff at Mystic letting us dine in after the kitchen was closed.

I was afforded an immense kindness here that I couldn’t reciprocate. I wished I knew how to turn it down. 

*  

CanDland was something of a town relic—popular with tourists and conspiracy theorists.

The day I dropped my resume off, Misty had been chatting to a customer about things to do in the area. She listed a series of attractions I’d never heard of before. A rock shaped like the liberty bell, psychic turbulence in the ley quadrangle—allegedly due to the auras of dead gods beneath hills, the exact country road a motorist had spotted a flaming orb fall into the woods.

I noticed the way her hair cut across her chin. The slight lisp in her voice when she pronounced the word “auras”. I imagined the sounds she made in bed.

I hadn’t realized I was staring until she called on me. By that point, it was too late to pretend I was uninterested.

Hi, she said. I’m Misty. I’m the manager at CanDland.

I’m dropping off my resume, I said.

You sure about that?

I glanced up at her. Says outside that you’re hiring.

We are. You just seem interested in something else.

I let out a sound, a cross between disbelief and surprise.

Oh my god, I’m kidding, Misty laughed.

Her laugh startled me. It was louder than I was expecting. A cornhole thwack.

Despite its popularity, CanDland was famous in local circles for being careless with background checks. Employees were mostly immigrant workers or shift scavengers. With no day-to-day interference from upper management, it was easy to forget the place was being monitored at all. 

I heard you can get paid in cash here, I said.

Misty shrugged. If that’s what you want

I waited for follow-up questions, but she had none.

On my way out, I caught her gaze and held it. I felt a heat trapped inside me. Something warm and aureate.

I saw our lives together in a snatch of clairvoyance. Her head in my lap, our legs intertwined, something unpatriotic playing on the speakers. I knew it before she showed me, the shape of her body underneath her sweater, the litter of moles across her back, the streak of meanness she had in her—little things you could only know about a person when you’ve spent a great deal of time with them in close proximity.

I had the urge to skip to the end, to find out if we made it, but the moment had passed.

* 

Misty was in charge of my training, which seemed to involve smoke breaks and gossip more than anything else.

Week one I found out about Sheila, the CanDland employee I’d been hired to replace. She used to steal from the register. Week two I found out about CanDland’s parent company filing for bankruptcy. Week three I found out about Misty’s policy of licking rude customers’ candy before bagging it up.

On our lunch breaks, we smoked.

Misty took a drag of her cigarette and passed it to me, lip gloss stains where her mouth had been.

When I turned to look at her, her eyes were closed. Her hair was purple in the evening light, a quilt of color against her brown skin.

I like your hair, I said.

I watched her smile, eyes still shut.

Have you ever dyed yours?

No.

She stretched her hand out to touch my braid, untampered, black, the length of six gummy worms.

I can tell, she said, anchoring a strand behind my ear. You’ve got the kind of hair people dream about.

Misty’s candor scared me. I was used to keeping my memories hazy, my private life untethered. I was an actor playing a person. But there was also a part of me that trusted her. I wasn’t sure what to do with the feeling, but I knew that if I let it surface everything I had ever swallowed would come rushing out of me like a spell.

I guess that was the trade off.

An eye for an eye. A truth for a truth.
 

*  

Mystic Tuesdays were when we unraveled each other. I learned that Misty used to be a go-go dancer at Sphynx. She learned that I was an illegal immigrant.

She didn’t pry, which was good because I had no answers. To make myself known I told her things I was afraid of. Dust storms, being sick with no one to bring me soup, any kind of matinee, self-checkout, Spiderman 3. She told me the name of every man who touched her at Sphynx.

Some nights Misty slept over at my apartment. She confessed secrets about her Lola, the sticky stars on the retirement home walls, the bills, the bills, the bills.

Let’s live together, I said.

Misty made a face. Convince me.

So I told her the story of two girls, brown like the husk of earth, each blessed with the strength of a warrior, merging into one celestial being that could fight evil. I summoned demons. I conjured gods. Mystic Mahal was our ancestral home.

Misty laughed.

I thought: Do you ever want to swallow a sound?

She answered my question by leaning over and laughing into my mouth.

Then, the next week, she moved in.

*  

Three months before joining CanDLand, two days after quitting my dish washing job, I found Buck89’s ad on Craigslist under near me > gigs > cash.

He wrote me back immediately with an address and a list of responsibilities.

1) Clean his entire apartment once a week on Saturdays.

2) Don’t look through the trash.

3) Always wear gloves.

I discovered early on in our arrangement that Buck wasn’t in the tax bracket that could afford a cleaning lady. His apartment was small, a few blocks from Mystic. He hoarded cans. He liked to supervise the cleaning as it took place.

Though it was unclear to me what he did for work, at the end of each session I received an envelope with cash and a time slot for next Saturday. 

It was easy money. I didn’t question it.
 

*  

Except that the staff at Mystic Mahal knew. On my way to Buck's I walked past them chatting and smoking in the parking lot. I mimed the universal signal for in-a-rush, but they flagged me down anyway. It’s you, they exclaimed. What joy!

Where are you off to?

Around.

Doing what?

Just stuff.

Their eyes would soften, the brown of my hand would end up in the brown of theirs.

Why don’t you eat first?

Protest floated above us like oil in water. I felt a freight train of guilt ram into me as I sat down in Misty’s usual spot. I imagined her at home, feet propped up on the coffee table, lemon wedges between her toes to keep her nail polish from smudging, pinoy rock blasting from her phone. I’m going on a run, I lied, and she waved me off with a kiss.

When the idli lodged itself in my throat causing a coughing fit, I was grateful for an excuse to cry.
 

*

Do you have any Toes of Satan left? a ten year old kid asks me.

I have to check, I say.

Inside the storeroom, I sink to the floor. My vision blurs. Rows of candy float in front of me like space trash. I wish they’d make a peppermint cane big enough to use as a crutch.

My first week at CanDland, Misty warned me that I might feel sick from time to time. The smell gets to all of us, she said. Crashes of nausea, dizziness, hallucination. I put it down in my notes, but I didn’t believe her until it happened to me. One minute I was shoveling edible scorpions into a goodie bag and the next I was waking up in the back of the storeroom with my head in Misty’s lap.

Hey sugar, she said. You wanna smoke?

This was a version of us I missed. Lunch breaks in the gazebo, taking turns poking each other under the register, judging people who came in to buy watermelon flavored anything. There was a sickly sweetness to routine. After Misty was gone, I craved it like candy.

Stepping out of the storeroom, I tell the kid that the FDA found an ingredient in Toes of Satan that causes gastrointestinal bleeding.

Oh, he says. Do you think they’ll ever bring it back?

Probably not. Sometimes you fuck up real bad and there’s not much you can do.

Oh, he says. Can I have watermelon jelly bears?

Pick something else.

He points at the nougat.

I bag it up for him, feeling Corporate drilling holes into the back of my head. Every place is a panopticon when you’re undocumented. Security cameras. Inventory controls. The transaction monitor installed to the cash register. I don’t notice it until Misty is gone.

Without her, I’m just an alien counting candy.

*

I start collecting Misty’s hair in the wicker ottoman she left behind. In the beginning, it’s just a fist of yellow, the size of a pumice stone. Then it becomes yarn, then a bale of hay, then it’s too big for the ottoman storage and I have to snowball it into my bedroom. It sits in the corner, a shadowy lump that I forget about until I wake up from a nightmare and it takes on her slouched shoulders, the curve of her nose.

I’m sorry, I tell the lump. I don’t know what you want from me.

I get on my knees in front of it and cough up a hairball that burns my throat on its way out. The shape reminds me of murukku. Coils of black gram fried golden.

Misty was the one with big plans. She wanted to make money. Buy her Lola a house. Get out of town. Live near the water.

I remember driving past cornfields with her one summer. We parked the car and spent hours watching long stalks of green sway in the July wind. They seemed fragile from where we stood. Like a brisk wind might knock them out of the ground.

I turned to Misty and said: Big plans are for people with sturdy roots.

She responded, Don’t make me dig these fuckers up to prove a point.

*

I thought Buck might have been a grifter.

He looked like one, with his matted brown hair and dead hummingbird tattoos. He bore a passing resemblance to a man who sat next to me once on a bus from Virginia to Baltimore, hands grazing my leg every time I closed my eyes.

I wasn’t afraid of Buck, though in hindsight I probably should have been. I was trained in macro survival. I knew how to make myself small, slip into invisible cracks, make myself unnoticeable. I knew how to hide, keep moving so I didn’t track mud. I knew how to quit while I was ahead. So when Buck flashed his yellow teeth at me and handed me money that came out of nowhere, I knew not to question it. I thought silence acquitted me.

We argued about it at the restaurant, Misty and I, though she didn’t know then that I’d been talking about Buck.

I said, So much of ease lies in silence.

Ease of what?

Existing, surviving.

Misty set down her fork. Every morning after Sphynx I woke up with bruises on my ass. My body felt pummeled and no one said anything about it. There is no ease in silence.

I said, You left Sphynx though. Sometimes it’s about escape.

Sometimes it’s about making noise. 

okbutsomeofusdonthaveachoice.

Misty looked up at me.

Sugar, she said. You can call me an asshole for saying this, but what is the point of surviving if you can’t kick and scream?

*

Inevitably, when I tried to talk to Misty about my past I arrived at silence. My secrets were a jawbreaker lodged in my windpipe. I couldn’t get the words out. I was lonelier this way, but I was also protected. As long as I revealed to people what I wanted them to know, I’d never run into the trouble of disappointing them. I could call it the price of freedom. I could desist from vulnerability. I could write off love.

But I felt it when I read my book with my head in Misty’s lap, listened to her hum along to Barbra Streisand, felt it at Mystic Mahal when the servers addressed me in my native language, felt it when I bagged chocolate teardrops at CanDland and caught Misty miming tears behind the customer’s back. A small voice that followed me into the catacombs of my head, whispering Sugar, what is the point of freedom if you can’t kick and scream?

I knew it wasn’t always true. Freedom could be many things, including the liberty to kiss Misty in a crowded restaurant.

If I shrunk the world to fit the size of my palm maybe I’d find that this was enough.

*

Some days, without warning, I would smell the coastline of Madras. Salt. Sun. Deference. If I didn’t swallow the memory, it would bring me to my knees.

Misty’s strategy was to declare a moratorium on forgetting. She held court for my fractured nostalgia, though I was never really interested in attending. For some people remembering is easy. But maybe everything is easy when you are a North Star for goodness.

I let this comment slip during an argument, to which Misty responded with a simple fuck you. We’d been on edge around each other all winter, settling into an avoidant dance that masqueraded as consideration. Things at Buck’s had become impossible to ignore. The look in his eyes when he ordered me around, the ligature of girls scurrying in and out of his bedroom, the low electric thrum of his razor. He handled the stolen hair, but I was always sweeping up flyaways. I knew he was sleeping with some of them. Girls with no last names who came from countries that no longer existed.

Buck hid nothing from me, sensing that I was incapable of protest. He was right. Every Saturday, I did my job, took my money, and left.

I paid for my silence in other ways. I withdrew into myself, spoke minimally, collected fluid in my underwear until Misty stepped in and scrubbed the cunt off it by hand.

When we did talk, it was in circles, a rehashing of the same grievances. My invulnerability, her openness, my obscurity, her naiveness.

There was no room for the truth.  

*

But Misty could tell something was wrong. Instead of talking about it we went dancing. We rolled up to the Juke in clothes that smelled like ash and cum. I let her grind her body into mine, slide her ass down the length of my thigh. I wanted to take her home. Kiss her cheek. Put her to bed. But I’d strayed too far from honesty for this to be anything other than selfish.

A man who recognized Misty from Sphynx offered to buy us drinks.

No thanks, asshole, I said.

Misty tightened her grip on my arm. We’ll have six shots of tequila.

Later, when she was hunched over the toilet, I clasped her hair in my hands like a prayer.

I have this vision of us, Misty whispered. We’re in love. We’re swimming in it. I call you Sugar and I tell you you’re mine.

Dried vomit clung to her shirt. I used my nails to scrape it off.

In this light, it was easy to mistake my shame for something softer. I wore drunkenness like a cloak. It wasn’t lost on me that even in my most vulnerable state I couldn’t be open with Misty. My faults were tectonic. I was home to violent movement.

If the earth swallowed me whole, I would still be the kind of person who was indigenous to nowhere.

*

Misty changed her hair color five times in the course of two years before going back to highlighter yellow. Mine stayed the same.

I was fond of stasis. The idea that things could remain in equilibrium if undisturbed. I knew there was no first prize for stillness, but I competed anyway. I turned passivity into a craft. I prided myself on it.

You think it’s easy for others, Misty said during one of our arguments. We seemed to have more of those when we discovered they didn’t need to result in breaking up.

It is easy for other people, I said.

Misty stroked the top of my cheek with her thumb.

We were softhearted debaters.

I know you’re afraid, she said. I wish you’d just talk to me.

*  

The lifecycle of sacrifice-coercion is a profitable one. I learned this when Buck tied me to a chair and ran a blade across my scalp. I offered no protest. I watched my hair collect on the floor in ribbons.

When he was done, he stepped back and stroked my head.

I had discovered some time ago that when I was in unbearable pain I could grasp at the outlines of a home. Dogs, laughter, prayer, oil, naphthalene. The scent of sambrani before dusk. Pain clarified the parts of me I kept hidden.

It was the same around Misty. Bruise myself while fucking her so I could activate memories of joy. Kiss her so hard my lip would split open. When Misty and I fucked, I always wound up crying. I’m fine, I said, and refused to elaborate.

I was like everyone else in the end. Believing I needed to suffer in order to pay my dues.

*  

I arrived groomed like a dog on Sunday.

I hadn’t stayed at Buck’s. He offered me no money for my hair and it seemed like our arrangement had run its course.

Going home wasn’t an option, so I walked. I did long loops around town, avoiding Mystic’s familiar pull. I wound up at CanDland, where I unlocked the door with a key hidden behind the security camera.

In my mind, I pictured a room full of faceless people. They watched me on the big screen as I crawled to the back of the shop, a small, bald thing. Who could blame me? This was the sweetest place on Earth. Many times it occurred to me that there might be no one watching. That I was a test subject to myself, a fool subjugating to nothing. But there was no way of knowing. And in the end, this uncertainty was my fate. 

When I entered the apartment the following morning, Misty watched me set my bag on the kitchen floor, gulp down water like I’d been in the desert for days. 

She didn’t say anything about my hair, though I could feel her eyes on me, taking in my shaved head.

After an eternity of quiet, she stood behind me on her tiptoes and whispered, You’re not gonna drag me down. I’ve got shit to do in this life.

Her heartbeat was a bird in a ribcage. When she wrapped her arms around me, I felt a storm wet my face.

I didn’t know how to say it. I didn’t know how to tell her I could withstand tremendous pain and feel nothing. I didn’t know how to tell her I’d been sweeping clumps of hair from underneath Buck’s dresser for months before it got to this point. I didn’t know how to tell her that before he lunged at me with scissors, I’d already accepted my conclusion.

What difference does it make, this small thing?  

*

When I think about Misty I think about summer. The summer of bliss. The summer of corn. The summer of rain.

It poured for days on end in August. Like the sky had grievances to air out. We made a grave of our cigarettes and promised each other we’d quit. We promised each other many things back then: build a swing, grow a garden, find reasons to live.

So much of my life felt impossible before I met her.

She envisioned abundance for us, and when it wasn’t deeply painful, I was stunned by the force of it. The ways in which it transformed me into someone different. Someone deserving of everything the world could offer me.

*

Six months after she’s gone, I drive to Mystic Mahal wearing a waist length highlighter yellow wig fashioned out of her hair. I haven’t been back there since she left.

The staff at Mystic recognize me. Come in, they say. The kitchen is closed, but we have samosas for you.

I feel an enormous weight dragging me down.

I can’t, I say. It’s too much.

Okay, they say. Then we will come to you.

There is a ravine between us of my own making, and when they get to me I pretend I am not muddy with fault. I let them huddle around me and brush their hands through my hair. Soft, rhythmic patterns that make me sleepy.

Today, I am a recipient of tenderness. Maybe tomorrow I will be a recipient of love.