how old is old?

are you old when you run as fast as you can
fall down
slit open your eyebrow
and not
shed

a

tear?

i saw him fall. i didn’t see the tears. he’s my 8 year old baby. puri. Special.

he kicks the bottom of his desk in rhythmic loud pounds when i ask him to speak up in class.

he clings onto my wrist when I attend to the 35 other kids who are screaming, “Ms. Muna, Ms. Muna, Ms. Muna”--- all atthesametime.

he has an old soul, my puri.

i heard he cried when his twin came to see him in the nurse room, right before his parents grabbed him for some stitches.

his twin is a bright, outgoing, girl. he is the quietness.

sometimes, they remind me of Rahel and Estha, from The God of Small Things.

but these are the small things.

are you old when you know your stomach is knotting up because he’s wiping his blood as it trickles across his eyebrows and down to the knoll of his nose?

as though it itches him.

or are you old when you hold your tears and instead stomp around the basketball court downstairs, outside in the heat?

are you old when you mother is critically ill and…

“50 slash 50 chance of survival,” they say.

… and you buy a red-eye but ensure that you have graded all 36 test papers, all four sets (36 times 4). graded. stickered. encoded and uploaded on the computer?

….or are you older when on top of all that, you’ve managed to take down all the phone messages for your admin boss?

or is ms. panarin, my thai teacher, the oldest?

who was so worried she shook and spoke in a huge mixture of thai and english I couldn’t understand… how old do you think she has to be, to be able to continue to teach 35 more kids, who are mental at this point because it’s the end of the day, and still think about how much puri’s parents might ask her to pay for “not being attentive” to her son at school?

there goes that slash from her puny paycheck.

she wouldn’t be the first thai teacher to have to pay for something like that.

it was “Snack Time” when puri slit his eyebrow.

puri, with an old soul, who didn’t cry.