It took me three years to understand what a Möbius Strip was and by the time I figured it out, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. A twisted strip. One side. One edge. What would happen if you traveled it? Where did it end—where does it begin? I chase myself around the Möbius Strip, a never-ending loop of memories gripping my subconscious. I don’t know how much of my life is real and how much of it is made out of dreams—but we all meet at the nexus of the Strip, where the single side and the single edge ends, and a new reality blooms. What is on the other side of this connection? What world exists when worlds moving in opposite directions slip neatly into each other and begin to touch? I was born inside this momentary collapse of worlds; I was born into a body that had to choose between a world to possess and a world to desire. These two worlds are always shifting, sliding, collapsing, colliding, clashing, clashing, clashing…But always, always, always making sense of each other. I live in this world of Dreams. This world of Nightmares. I live in this ever-looping world that belongs to everyone except myself.
My mother is eating a blueberry muffin with a spoon while talking to her best friend from eighth grade over the phone. They live on opposite sides of the world, but their laughter echoes the same language. They talk about all the things they wish they did in life, and their words sprawl across the world to a schoolyard in Madurai. They describe the time they were giggling girls and accidentally, on purpose, raised the nation’s flag upside down and into the sun. “Talking to you is a dream,” I hear my mother’s friend say over the phone, “Time has not changed you! You’re still the same—even in the U.S.!” This morning I also talked to my best friend who also lives in on the other side of the world. We cried in the same language, and I promised I would buy him happiness before he fell asleep. I waited before hanging up because I wanted to hear him mumble that he’s tired of me repeating the same empty promise again and again and again. I knew he would say this because he does so every time. When he finally said my favorite phrase, I hung up the phone, and my mother asked me if I would like to eat a blueberry muffin. I said yes. It strikes me that I am her, manifested on the other side of the world. I ended up here, through her, on a Möbius Strip of Dreams.
For the last year, I have been telling people that I am in transit. I don’t know where my epicenter is because an earthquake never birthed me. I came into existence from winds that quietly crossed an ocean; they make sure I’m in constant motion so I can exist in more worlds than one. I am so entrenched in all of these worlds, that to say I can only belong to one lacks meaning. My only constant home is rooted in nostalgia, in the longing for places that don’t exist and for people who are long gone. It is nothing but nostalgia that reveals itself when you yank at the twist of my Möbius Strip. My mind darts from one end of the Strip to another; sometimes it rests in the tidepools of San Diego and other times it’s curled up in a cave at the end of Pazhani Hills. Yesterday I found myself drenched inside my best friend’s plastic cup filled to the brim with warm whiskey and hot water. Today I find myself buried in the seventh note of an unfamiliar prayer. I am nowhere! Because I have to be everywhere. I am a dream in transit. I am a Möbius Strip! All the worlds I belong to are dreams, and I am a nightmare in all of them. I pull both dreams and nightmares out of my heart and force them onto this page because I don’t know how else to explain the magic that still persists in the world.
They say that dreams are not supposed to show your reflection—but mine do. I see my reflection in the mirror, the one I always ignore in waking hours. Dull eyes catch my reflection’s gaze, and with them, I examine all the droops and sags, scars and harms my body carries that I neglect. I stare into the mirror until the neglect marries the room’s shadows, and, as they dance together, my body warps into their dark, tasteless musicality. Their dance makes me contort my own limbs. The reflection of my pathetic dancing turns into a sinister, mutilated thing. It erupts from inside me and exposes itself to the outside world as nothing more than the maddening loneliness of someone whose only home is in the subtle imagination of memory. I watch the mirror closely while my skin turns a disturbing grey color as it stretches to make room for the uncomfortable largeness of my new form. My teeth become daggers, and they tear through the molding old flesh of that large, new figure before me. I begin to burn in flames from a fire that seems to have sprung out of nowhere. The dance keeps going. My hair grows endlessly and uncontrollably, my nails grow too long. My body twists as it is tortured into pain—I feel myself becoming the monstrous demon I see in that mirror I always ignore. I am not dancing anymore. In fact, I had hardly moved at all. I just stand there, transfixed on the demonic god in the reflection before me. I worship this god because she is a God of Rage—a rage that forms out of the inability to protect what you hold dear; it is a binding, looping, twisting force that emerges from deep sadness. From loss.
I think about my childhood in Madurai so often because the seeds of rage had not planted themselves in me at that time. It was a time when my body was ripe with life, and I was not yet reduced to an ancient, forgotten story. An ancient, forgotten story that danced with hallucinations hiding behind mirrors in dirty bathrooms on the top floor of a decomposing house collapsing from the weight of my childhood. These were times when I could unplait waist-length braids and run through my father’s coconut farm drifting along in the wind like the tail of a peacock. I ran through a world—not a Strip—with eyes full of dreams, arms full of coconuts, pockets full of secrets. Madurai is as much rooted and limited to my childhood as it is to my dreams. I don’t even know if what I remember of it is real anymore. The curse of the Möbius Strip of Dreams is that the fullest parts of memory must always narrow; before I can even catch my dreams in a protective embrace, they vanish. I don’t know who took them from me.
When I was nine, I started experiencing sleep paralysis. Ancestors would come to visit me deep within the night, yelling hoarsely just like my mother would when she is on the phone with her best friend on the other side of the world. I remember when my grandmother visited me for the first time after leaving this world. She scolded me for not introducing her to my brother, who was born only a few months after her passing. She threatened to take him away from me as punishment, and I cried and I cried and I cried. I begged her not to take him from me, and I promised that I would name my firstborn after her if she left him alone. She reluctantly let him go, but before she left to join the Strip again, she parted with a story.
“Dreams, simply put, are nothing but a fabricated sequence of events; constellations and coordinates of space and time, distorted by an untrustworthy narrator,” my grandmother tells me, in a soft drawl of our shared mother-tongue. “They only carry meaning when one gives them meaning. Why should you trust that! It’s silly how you think you can reckon with the uncertainty of memory or even dissolving ancestors. How truly foolish you are, trying to make heroic epics out of your completely mundane, boring life! If anything—dreams are nightmares! How utterly strange it is that you are spying into the afterlife! What makes humans so curious about another’s deepest, darkest secrets? Why do you go out of your way to seek moral guidance from questionable heroes? Are you so afraid of your own mediocrity that you feel the need to hack into another? Leave these dreams and stories alone. Better yet—forget me altogether.” My eyes tug me back to sleep. She visits me in another dream almost fifteen years later, in the dancing form of the God of Rage. The Möbius Strip of Dreams always finds a way to continue on, even when I think it’s over.
The Strip does not tell anyone about where I’m from or where I’m not from—rather, it tells a story about where I wish to be. So where do I wish to be? Do I wish to be in Madurai? No. But yes; yes, I very much do. Do I wish to be in San Diego? Absolutely. But no, no, no; not at all. “Where do you wish to be?” is the question I want people to ask me, but I have no answer for it. I only have stories of places that may not actually exist, and of people who definitely do not exist. I can only offer vague explanations of memories through a Möbius Strip of Dreams. But because the Strip inevitably turns every place into a dream, I cannot make amends with any of the places I hold dear. The Strip creates homes that will always reject me because they are only real in my imagination. The Strip only reveals itself to me in secret, stolen moments when its single side and its single end draw to a close. The Strip only calls to me in the darkness of night, when the distinction between dreams and nightmares is blurred; when the difference between dreams and nightmares can only be articulated by the way the sun cannot rise for me unless it first sets in the land of my gods, my ancestors, and our memories.