Laughter and Exhaust and Newness and Fumes by Jennifer Co

Aug 18, 2021 — Smoke from CA wildfires brings ominous, orange skies to Bay Area amid 'critical' fire conditions.

-ABC7news

June, 2006 — Cathay Pacific airplane touches down in Ninoy Aquino International Airport from San Francisco, California. Eight cousins meet for the first time.

for Louie and Clark

And I would tell you how I like this kind of sky but that it makes me kind of sad. It burns like camp fire youth and Manila crosswalks, times where home was still bumping shoulders, something shy and something introduced. It is hazy enough to opaque the sky like fog, enough for me to lock eyes with the sun, red and glinting and rolling itself back. It is dusty and porous, like fading memory thickening relentlessly into sticky nostalgia, and I would show you how it coats my throat and tell you what I want to believe, that home never bargains and that surely, nothing can truly be lost. And maybe it is so, that nothing can be, yet here it is instead; clogging up the sky like misplaced wishes, like soured yearning, like dust and shame and like us all, like us all. I would tell you about lungs and greed, how mine have seen the darkened skies and claimed trust, insisted on it. And I would cough enough out to tell you it was worth it. That I remember us making bets and trading dares in the backseats of cars, pummeling towards graying skies, laughter and exhaust and newness and fumes. I'd say how I like the fog because sometimes I mistake it for our polluted horizon, the way cigarette smoke wafts in like airport revolving doors, like the first you and me, saying hello with certainty and newness and not an ounce of greed. I'd say I was young then. I'd say I was full of something that could decay into nostalgia. And I'd ask if you could blame me, red and glowering that you are, for having something worth that, for thinking lungs a fair trade for another glimpse of home, if not to say hello, then to give it one more chance, to meet me. 

Today I would tell you that the world is on fire, as in, I am burning. And I thought of you. 

Jennifer Co (she/her) is a Chinese Filipina writer and sensitive eldest daughter from Brisbane, California. She recently graduated from UC Berkeley’s Chemistry and Creative Writing departments, where she found and was found by {m}aganda magazine and served as literary editor for two years. In her creative practice, Jen aims to center sensitivity, engage precarity, and always, write towards possibility. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Chemical Biology, and is continuing to try to find the words. She can be found @jen_anne_co. Cover art by Alice Mao can be found in THE VISUAL.