Haotian Pan

I remember the sloshing of blood in my ear, ticking alongside each minute,
the tranches of hours sealed beneath those vast, unrelenting ceilings.

There were drumbeats and fogged-up windows and jokes I only half-understood.
There were so, so many lives between us.
There was light, even.
It glanced off our tearstained pupils
and hurtled its jagged teeth into the soft tissue of our human, human flesh.
I swear, it would have reached every corner of the earth
if we hadn’t slammed the door shut.
I remember: I wore myself in layers,
was fed droplets of who I might have been
like the first, furtive taste of rainwater in the dog days.
My tongue was parched from the wait.
That, and everything else,
was its own flavour of loss—
and, I think,
almost a kind of writhing.

Haotian Pan is a writer from Singapore and an incoming undergraduate at Harvard University.