The sunlight was hitting my back. Warm and full of life. 

The child inside me was happy, skipping and smiling along the path. 

The cherry blossoms had fallen on the pavement– very few remained on the tree.

I dreamt of sweeping up each petal back in its place.

Soon, I fell into the hallway of my home, stumbling around

in the dark. I was warm and full of life. 

1

Humans are probably built to be all or nothing, he’d said. Something meant to be comforting. In the dead of night, when I was hyperventilating on the floor, what made this statement so perfect was that it was true; this reminder that we are all breakable.

When he said that, it felt like I was looking through glass. I always had an eye for beautiful things, and I can admit to using it as a crutch, growing up, to escape. Responsibility and teenage angst seemed to come in a parcel, and everyone dealt with it differently. My way involved keeping my pointer finger holding down on the dots delineated by family, friends, and even peculiar strangers. Whether this made maturing easy or not, I am still unsure, but I know it was effective in keeping the curious flame in me that kept probing, insisting upon itself, as well as that same question (– my mom always said I had a restless spirit–) alive:

The original. The original. Where is the original?

2

When I was seventeen, I made up a mental list of the most impressionable people I had ever met. On that list was my sixth grade French teacher who made me feel special by making me the only student of hers who she’d given a birthday present to (You’re such an interesting kid!). This was right before the pandemic; before I would experience a year of, more or less, isolation, as I did online school in India. A flicker of warmth before a time where I had to learn how to operate in the dark.

Next, I thought of the first boy I ever liked. A year older, I had known him since elementary school. Seeing him again years later, I first thought: he looks so different. Perhaps disengaged, but he had very kind eyes. The tectonic plates of my mental landscape shifted then again, as I began to understand that if I could feel attraction towards another so strongly, then I was no longer alone, and that shift from alone to not was not something I felt affirmed in. I ended up writing him a letter before he graduated high school, wondering why I was the only one who felt so susceptible to change in that period. When I was in my feelings, I never stopped to ask myself, Why is it shameful that he never started? Why isn’t it shameful that you never stopped?

Around that same time, I made two friends who, more or less, constitute the standard of this list. One of them had something to say about the boy, and about my letter; that taking the effort to write someone a letter so full of depth in this day and age says a lot about either the subject of the letter, or about the person writing it. (She said, in my case, it was definitely the latter! I think she may have just hated him). Her wry, and awfully humourless stare wrung me dry completely. To this day, she remains her own muse, which is an unrecognized trouble in its own right.

The other, instead, made me all too self-aware of my childishness. He’d poke at my unwilling tendencies to change, my need to convert observations and opinions into expressions and deepening human connection– as well as my heavy reliance on said connections. Our family dynamics happened to mirror each other’s. At this time, I was still processing the fact that I was the oldest daughter, and that there was a tiny presence relying on me, living alongside me; in that way, he’d brought me back down to my roots. In one conversation, right around when I was graduating high school, he’d spoken like the star student he is: It is good to develop the mindset where you’re okay with missing the moon.

That meant, no ones and zeroes. There is no all or nothing here. What he meant was, To land on the moon, you have to be comfortable operating in the dark. In the whole of my adolescence, this felt like a final line. A last straw meant to bend, snap, and propel me into a certain direction. So now, I find myself waiting once again, for the palpations to stop, and for that wave of reassurance to hit me.

3

In the haze of my childhood, the world exuded a litany of colours. There, I was allowed to be selfish. I was allowed to be an untainted, uncompromised human being whose only purpose was figuring myself out. You are too creative, was the remark; that was my original self, and before I attempted treading down avenues I was never exposed to, this had never been a problem.

For four years, I carefully constructed a bottleneck of the world around me, filling it with my greatest fears and weaknesses. It was the only way to prove wrong the ones who said I was too creative, to cure myself of what I thought to be my greatest impediments. It is better than living the easy life, I told myself, where the bottleneck of my life would solely contain the things in my window of tolerance, which made me look like an expert. Sylvia Plath’s fig tree metaphor is off, though, and towards the end of those four years, it took many long, sleepless nights for me to see that I can really only grow by accepting all of the things about me; an all-incompassing circle that codes for what I am and what I will be.

In between those sleepless nights, my mother had once told me that I was the type of person to tie a knot, and pull on it so tightly that it fell apart in my hands. I could persist until failure, but I would forget the other avenues I was already familiar with. I purged all the paths, forgetting that I had other methods. You make your own life harder for yourself.

In the haze of my childhood, there exists a point that defines me perfectly, but I will never recognize it. There is no conclusive end for a person like that, right? It seems the soul becomes gray, even as we try to clear it.

4

The development of morality over human greed was never a part of collective consciousness. That is to say, there is no evil lurking today that has ever been absent in the stretch of our existence. So, perhaps that term, which has pronounced letters in my head, ‘evil’, needs reframing; there is no enemy to eradicate, and no change to be incited through the erasure of something that has always festered. That means I have to continue to carry the frail, sickly parts of me that hide away from the daylight with one hand, and accept the atrocities of all I may come to despise in the other. These are not chains. They are interlinked to each other, a possible cure for the cloud of loneliness that seems to be everywhere, hung over in desolation.

I still write you letters. Whether you deserve them or not is irrelevant. For whatever reason, they are addressed to you, and I am left to sit in wonder at the life you have brought out of me when I thought I had none. I think that maybe I would like to kiss you a hundred times, only to fear that even that wouldn’t be enough to convey my adoration, nor all the gratitude I have for all you’ve done for me.

This adoration was not created out of nothing, it was roused from within me. Even when the day comes that I have no one around me and nothing holding me up except for my own two feet, I will look for you with x-ray vision behind some shaded curtains, or wherever you may have gone. My eyes will light up with mirth and I will leap for joy when I find you, in the dark, where I am unable to see you. And if the day comes where I see you again, I know I will have truly gone nowhere, and have only managed to walk in a full circle.

In the dim lighting of my imagination and memories, however, you exist more beautifully than you, or I, or anyone in this world has ever felt. The beauty of that is that you don’t have to be happy to dream of such things. The spark is induced in you and, like an infant, you must try and learn how to breathe it in.

On that note, after years of restless dreaming, I am stricken with the thought that maybe all this time, I did not love you, per se– it must have been nearing the threshold of admiration. Something closer to worship. I worshipped you more than I could be able to love you, in the way that a devotee returns to throw coins in a holy fountain. It is an unfamiliar feeling I returned to whenever I felt incapable of holding myself up. My ability to recognize that doesn’t in itself exempt me from my old ways, and that is probably because I have always dreamed of loving fully and wholly, to the point that I cannot feel any of the anguish of a soul, barren. May my dreams be the map to a life that is my own, exempt from the fatality of a love that will not be found in the light of day. Even though I am hungry, and I’ve been hungry, it will take me a while to learn how to eat.

More in: Prose

“Oh, would you look at that! Isn’t that the girl

who would crack under the pressure of her own resolve,

forgot how to use her mouth, hands, and the like,

who had not a shred of kindness to her,

only niceness, or– go figure, how

to write happy stories, who

desperately soaked up all words of affirmation

meant for her, and who one day

reached out her hands only to feel

etchings of neuralgic blessings so that her bones

started to stiffen, who no doubt had

a propensity towards her own ruination

‘till she became a dried plum

in her ripe adolescence?”

“Oh! Look at her now!

Grief and hopelessness, grief and hopelessness,

dozens– no, hundreds of her reflections revealed as swirls on paper

under the honest moonlight that led that child to circle back to a home

that welcomes children too afraid to step into the world,

visualising God, and love, and justice, the sort of things that led them to

swallow their fears and absolve

themselves of the guilt of those deadweights, only to

throw it all back up.”

throw it all back up.”