Awning for an Unwritten Day

I stitched this with the same impatience that makes you check your phone at a red light—like if I paused too long, the shapes and colors would scatter on their own. These stripes, these tiles and laundry lines, they’re all borrowed from days I spent wandering markets in Jakarta and Mumbai, from Seoul sidewalks where the air tastes of steel and turmeric. Every scrap is a theft: price numbers I memorized at a corner stall, a checkered seat from a bus I almost missed, the shadow under my grandmother’s balcony. I stitched with sari ends and old work shirts, things too soft or too stained to sell, but too heavy with memory to throw away. The raised quilting? That’s me, trying to build architecture from what never holds still. There’s a kind of optimism in patching these things together—like assembling a place you can live in, even if it’s only on your wall. If you run your fingers across the seams, you’ll find my restlessness, the urge to make a city you can touch.