by Travis Cohen Acosta
These are fall days, as leaves begin to die off elsewhere. In my 27th year, in Miami, they remain evergreen. Do the fibrous trunks of palmettos make it difficult to decipher how many years have passed since they were saplings? An aging bull iguana, perched and dull orange in the sun, has amber for eyes. What has he seen behind all his armor? As palms continue to rattle and sway in the wind, as the iguana sunbathes, death has found another way in. The heat has not yet subsided, but in a half-lit condo in Pompano, just an hour up the highway, the blinds are drawn, and the breathing has stopped.
Fronds remain verdant
while my father, once so tan,
proceeds to grow pale
Death is life’s most effective teacher. Its lessons are engraved with such a finely sharpened point that even the opaquest ideas take on a crystalline quality of clarity. For instance: weight is relative. The dainty lightness of paper becomes leaden when laden down with the facts and figures of what’s left behind in the empty space once occupied by a parent, a husband, a brother, a son. And when the body of a man who once seemed taller than the trees is returned to the ash, his bones reduced to dust, collected in a plastic bag, the whole of him feels about as heavy in hand as a bundle of groceries.
Four years, two parents—
the arithmetic of loss
is simple and not
I feel I have learned as much as I can now in this place. The teacher will follow me, but there are too many memories to make sense of the teachings. These streets are too crowded with reminders, too many familiar intersections of the sounds and sceneries of a shared past that is now ended. The pastel façade of a six-screen theater we would walk to where the projectors have gone dark and the neon has ceased humming. A panaderia for pastelitos after school and a greengrocer selling matzoh brie for the holidays. A banyan tree whose dangling roots have grown thicker every year and a gumbo limbo who never seems to change. It is too hot to think. The air is thick with the dying gasps of a summer that refuses to let go and the echoes of raspy lungs gone still. It is time to leave.
~
When the world around you seems to stop, you would do well to remind yourself that it continues to move—to move about the days and nights, about the rote and the routine, about the effervescence of life and the tragedy of death. It is always moving and yet, everyone knows that my heart has broken, and everyone has become still and careful and the current seems to bend and flow around me, away from me to where I can barely see it. Along the shorelines of Surfside, at the edge of green water and trash-tangled sargasso, my feet sink into the sand. Sand and ash aren’t so different. Hollow seashells and vacant bodies become something less than what they once were. I am an island walking on an island. It is easy to forget in these moments that the world moves. It is important to remember.
We are all strangers
if we wander far enough
to lose sight of home
The funeral is over and my suit is hung, the obituary is written and the papers are signed. I have done all that needs to be done for others. Now I must do for myself. Everyone who knows my heart is broken has become still and careful. How do you handle a package marked fragile when the weak jingle of shattered glass is leaking through the seams with every breath? Nobody seems to know what to do with their hands. Nobody seems to know what to do with me. Once more I will go where no one knows me or my heart. Where I can be reminded.
To lose sight of home
is not to lose what we’ve seen
but to change our eyes
~
The narrow alleys of the Thamel capture all the failing light and hold it in dirt and clay that floats up from your feet and fills your nose. The air glows the color of rust, and between the wide lattice of the rooftops, beyond the buzz and the bustle, the Himalayan snow is pure. But I am not here for the peace of purity. I am here for the buzz of life and for the crackle of the funeral pyre. While I have brought my own death with me to Kathmandu, I have come knowing that I will find more.
Death is hidden away from the living in the West. We hide it in pine boxes and brass urns, behind black curtains and smiling pictures of the living dead. I remember how much my father had cooled by the time they came to take him, men unknown to me wearing coveralls and carting his body to a destination unknown to me. Strange how we depersonalize of the most deeply personal thing that can happen to a person. How do we explain distance we put between ourselves and the ones closest to us?
Why do we whisper
when time comes to say goodbye?
Why do we not scream?
~
Kathmandu, unique crossroads of nature’s grandeur, of ancient glory, of many gods and their many houses. Here, the roiling cauldron of human chaos seems to collide at all hours of the day. Scooters and tuktuks scramble through crowds, sometimes speeding, others puttering, nearly sending me tumbling over the unpaved roads in the shadows of the shrines under the eyes of the mountain range. There are remnants of the earthquake two years prior everywhere. Ruins of shrines are scattered across the city and long dead live wires hang limply, no less menacing than vipers. I am close to my pain here. I am where I need to be.
Early one morning, as I cut through the market toward the temple, a stranger asks:
Did you come for trekking?
No—I need to fix my spirit.
Then, you are trekking, friend
~
Pashupatinath is one of the five most sacred temples in Hinduism. It straddles a bend of the river on the eastern edge of the city. The three-mile walk takes an hour on a clear day, where the chill carries over from the morning into the afternoon, and a briskness offers up a reprieve from the unburdened sun and the hills that my Miami legs remain ever unaccustomed to. On one side of the steep riverbank lie the sprawling mausoleums and shrines, ancient trees that hang sidelong, roaming gangs of monkeys and half-naked ascetics who stare behind curtains of fog that curl from their wooden pipes. On the other is the temple and the pyres.
Fire and water meet
where gods dwell in the currents
and men watch the smoke
Open air cremation is a Hindu tradition. It might seem unthinkable in many, if not all the fifty states, but it is carried out every day here in Nepal with the normalcy of a hearse gliding through traffic on I-95. There are six platforms of stone on the western bank of the river. Temple attendants pile wood for the burning and tend to the fires with sticks and brooms and fans. The opposing bank forms a functional amphitheater for anyone and everyone to watch a family endure one of the most vulnerable moments they will ever experience. The river is wide enough that the wind and the water carry away the sweet nothings and heart-rending reminiscences, but still narrow enough to see the faces of those deciding who will hold the torch.
Bagmati river—
brothers bathe wearing white gowns,
tears and marigolds
~
At first, watching children burn their parents, freshly washed in the waters of the sacred river where little boys use magnets to fish for trinkets and totems downstream, feels perverse, voyeuristic. But there is no judgement on the other side of the Bagmati and nothing lurid in the eyes of those lingering around me. Instead, all I see is life’s universal transience on display. Or perhaps it is something else. Perhaps what I see in the faces around me, not avaricious, not overwrought, is a quiet coalescing of understanding.
Trekking to the grave,
we have a choice: hide death or
remind the living
SLAG GLASS CITY · Volume 12 · February 2026
Header image by Petr Meissner
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