I have a laugh like a well-fed pelican.

I have a razor thin addiction to idiosyncrasies.

My favorite sound is the icy “tink” that follows cold air from the cooler door, after I take a glass bottle out of a well-stocked row and the weight from behind fills up the empty space I’m creating with a buck and some change at the register.

My favorite whim is an unadulterated dose of dizzying poetic expression; unacknowledged and tantalizingly fluttering between my ears.

I want a government which will stand at the edge of an unclaimed diamond shaft, casually reach in for a chunk of crumbling black coal, and eloquently graffiti the anecdotes that color streets on the banal white spaces of revered buildings and monuments with it. Then they would proceed to lounge in admiration, throw back a cold one and thank god that bold writing material is so abundant.

Ripe pulsation throbs into every mango’s spot-colored dream, deep and creamy in its lifelike density; dripping flavor and leaving deep paint stains on its emerald bedsheets.

Millions of right-clicks pierce millions of desktops as we speak. A photograph called “home” quaintly opts itself as a desktop background:

As though hardened by dried rosewater, and plumped by shrimp pigment, the cushiony walls of home and their protective embrace of his blue square window reminded Hanthala of a swimming pool amidst a field of thorny rosebushes. He painted that window himself, taking pride in steadily applying the thick layers, like a miraculous tide rushing to drown emaciated brown staccato; controlling the white, mist shrouded vanguard—the paintbrush bristles—a chilling crest, rolling over the ocean floor and capping enormous water explosions.

Leaning on the wall with the homegrown reliability only his father’s calloused hands could orchestrate, the spice rack held thyme bundles, aromatic lilacs drying in the sun and several vines full of the grape leaves swallowing its lower levels and crawling around that side of the house, voraciously gobbling up a meandering wooden fence in the process.

He was even glad to see his mother’s red firework bursts with prickly green smoke trails growing from a pot.

This was his milieu. He was home at last.