WRITE THE WORLD REVIEW ARCHIVE

Today, nature is fit in an open, square bus window with Mama obstructing the moving, alfresco greenery. Not so much of an everyday scene: the fire trees bloom yellow and red—green leaves outnumbered—and breathe with the wind as I snatch glimpses from my fellow passengers’ windows, careful not to be caught looking. Eventually, I give up, neck straining from trying to look at a view that’s not mine. I look ahead to the front glass of the bus, where an air freshener the shape of a pine tree hangs loyally in the rims of the dashcam. Somehow, it has a more generous sight.

We drive further to what felt like a nostalgic longueur and one-way infinity. From outside, we must be a fusillade of yellow, but from here, they’re a salvo of green and whitewashed stratus clouds—and many, many other things. They are rufous and pink lotuses boated by their deep purple leaves in the sun-gleamed ripples of a pond. They are treehouses up a mango tree with ladder steps nailed at the bark. They are green from the rice fields and the bent bamboos, the silvery superficiality of the gable tin roofs of Trinidad’s neighborhoods. All is freeing and moving and a flurry, as if not daring to be known nor remembered. Yet the smell of leather and Mama’s eucalyptus shampoo might make this one a memory. Maybe like many others. I look out the window again—Mama’s this time—reacquainting myself of the film-like progression of the geography there. I think I know just where we are.