Cherry brandy yellow warmth under a dark blue sky. Fire, ardour, the fusion of skin; they are the three ends of a trapeze. The fourth end is uncertain and intangible. You can stretch and tease and make it yours. It is a trapeze act; unpredictable, bizarre and oddly entertaining.

I write these letters to you from a swinging trapeze. We are but one here; you have to hook your leg into mine to save your life. Bruises are a habit and letting go is a routine. We gain momentum by swaying uncertainty around like a pendulum in a child's hand. Time is a monarch and we are but peasant puppets. Art in mid-air becomes an installation, a living.

So we go on everyday; a trapeze act over a field of discovery. You swing and I catch you; you impregnate the field as you pass by; pollens of thought involuntarily dropped onto fertile flowers to ensure that life everywhere continues undisrupted. You plant life into my wooden arms and coax me to see a net where there is none. Your illusions have a solidity to them that is simply transitional. And in this state of transition, we pass decades.

Jump and fall, the flying trapeze is safer than you think. The danger rests in a slip of mind and you already possess mine. You complete the fourth end and the trapeze is nothing more than a mere instrument. Play it at your will and break the ends, the fire will not stop till it has consumed everything in its way.

Fire, ardour, the fusion of skin and you.

I must be mother and child in your light.

Nearly a thousand years ago, one man painted the holy picture differently. He escaped the glass pieces and painted mother and child in one light. He painted them as they would look, just like you and me. It must take a certain amount of pain to seep back into the mould, I presume, just like it would take to break away. I wonder if he tossed and turned in his bed, wondering how he could have such impure thoughts of painting a normal picture of Virgin Mary and the Christ child.

I wonder if he stood in front of the canvas for days, staring at the white, wondering how best to pollute it. You asked me to let go the other day. I imagined a naked Giotto flinging his arms at his canvas, pure dyes shooting from his veins as he painted something from life after two hundred years. It hurts to let go. It must be just like childbirth. Union and severance together.

Of course I must let go. I am but the mother who understands that beyond being a family, everyone dear is but an individual. You wanted some space to breathe, still wet and warm from tearing away. So I gave you space. And somewhere inside that space, I became a hurting infant. My hands hurt from not talking to you, my ears rang of silence. I picked the phone and called you irrespective. I became an infant. And you kissed me into this world.

You make me mother and child in your light. Giotto’s pain of being normal lasted for several hundred years before they discovered geometry again. You must be him. You reformed me with the single stroke of a brush. And here I sit, perspiring the excess of you to keep you in.

Throw your colours onto me now, I long to be buried under your adolescence.

Once upon a time, I started telling you stories. Brief ones with a predictable ending, elaborate grand ones with meek endings, love stories masked beneath animals and fairies, stories of you and me. I narrated the epics; remember the grasshopper and the bumble bee that finally made it through? Remember their happily-ever-after?

These happily-ever-afters' worry me. It is a three word cluster. All three word clusters worry me. They contain just enough space to shake and uproot permanence. They contain just enough syllables to alter our biological compositions. They bury themselves in spaces between blankets and throw the wind out to disturb the layers of dust we wait under. These three word clusters; they make me shudder.

This June was a fugue of stories. The little ones still sigh in my palm, the grand ones flutter around in their conceit. I keep trying to tether them down, wondering if they will gasp in your voice when I squeeze them between my fingers. Inside these thoughts, inside this June of stories, I burn.

On the eve of July, I wonder if June will come back; if she will run back to us like a child with open arms. I wonder if she will sit on each of our arms and tell us our stories again. What if she offers the grand ones to you, all held together by a single string? Would you keep them? Or would you smile and slip them into my hands? The stories are but children themselves, and they want three word clusters for dessert. I grow old by the hour, and my layer of dust seems to be withering. I cannot hide anymore.

You keep asking me where I often wander away. I never find the courage to tell you that I wander into you, straight deep down into your nerve endings, following your lost impulses into your blood stream, hoping to revive them. I can never wander away; I simply wander further into you. This June of stories holds our three word cluster and she is dying of hunger and silence.

Where are you wandering now?