In my milk and butter bread days, I was taught to spread my palms wide enough to know how much I could hold. I knew then my heart carries a basket of words. Each year, I learned to collect metaphors from vineyards, orchid gardens, and withered succulents on stranger’s windowsills— all the while filling up another basket to squeeze into the narrow corners of my heart. But these words aren’t always familiar to me: Usually they belong to someone else’s mouth, some beggar’s story, some lover’s dream, some farmer’s silent cry, some orphan’s wishful lullaby. There are vocabularies inside my heart: most of which are throbbing peculiarities always waiting for the baskets to unweave themselves into separate Rattan strands. When they are freed—if they will ever be—my hands are readily open to catch them as they fall.
— Valerie T.
Art by PedroTapa