For eighteen months sequestered in the Elm, a suburb of the city of Milpitas, its dorm, Old Beige, life screening walls, I can, if I look, still see a type of beauty in not the place, but the people’s hearts of opal kindness, auras of blue’s hues. I can also see a growing mix of opal’s light and blues love in my own heart.

For twenty-seven years I was raised in Boca Ratan, Florida’s jewel where nothing is beige or bland or ugly. It was a place of facade and fone, a place of manufactured oceanic opals and even in a hurricane the skies are as bright and blue as the waters off of Aruba’s coast.

For eighteen months, from July 31, 2020 to October 1, 2021, I reside in San Jose, with a blessing of loving beige walls, in a home of hope and peace dissimilar to the great escape of Elm or the fone or Boca. I get to live with love, as warming as the opal waters of the Gulf and hope so kind my heart never sings the blues. I am free.

Rahul Athavale
Elmwood Complex
DYT 259
1900 3790
701 S. Abel St.
Milpitas CA 95053