ON MOVING OUT, AND LIFE BEING LONG
You peel the stickers you got at pride off your bathroom mirror. No one buys your bedframe from you off Facebook Marketplace so your childhood friends carry it out of the apartment for you. You say life is long as you hold a lover in their bed during a bittersweet moment because goodbye seems too permanent a motion to trust. You return your friend’s book of short stories at Center City so you don’t forget. You take the hooks off your walls and give your unused toiletries to friends who sit on your bed and talk about Italy, and summer, and next year. And then you leave, early in the morning, with someone else’s suitcase stowed overhead because you forgot yours at your aunt’s. You cry the entire sixteen hour flight. Life is long, you insist. We will meet again.
The ground opens up to swallow me whole but not before I send in my bio for work
I think the soy milk has gone bad.
My breakfast tasted bitter and now my stomach hurts.
The monsoon has arrived but the dust hasn’t settled and
I am grasping at straws
to convince myself to be happy.
I blame myself
for jinxing the job I wanted. It’s my own fault,
somehow, and
I need a doctor to diagnose me
with something disgusting
like self-sabotage, or burnout.
The pulmonologist says my lungs won’t heal,
at least not any time soon.
He prescribes me my medications and places his stethoscope on my chest.
I am lightheaded by the time he stops
asking me to breathe deep.
He says this is permanent.
There was a July day we went into the city to get a roll of film developed and the man at the
store asked us if we were childhood friends, or sisters.
It seemed to him that we had known each other
for ever, for life.
I think my friends are better at love than I am.
At knowing how to feel good, and how to leave.
How to stay, and how to be loved forever.
Everything is either a joke or a poem to me.
I keep asking questions no one else asks
and then I am bent over at my desk worried about their answers.
Does my medicine save my life or does it merely protect me from discomfort?
I wonder if the pulmonologist will ask for a lung x-ray.
Will I joke about it?
When they scan my chest, will they see a broken heart?
Will they call me pathetic for never mending it?
I think my friends are better at love than I am.
They would not need years for this.
Perhaps the aftertaste of it all is bitter anyway,
and it’s my own fault,
somehow.
When the rheumatologist looks at my bones, will she call me weak?
Would that be prophecy or comedy? Will she laugh?
I would not blame her. I know now what the pulmonologist won’t say out loud;
that there is no for life, for ever.
My lungs are momentary, and the bitter truth is
that our childhoods never touched.
Mekhala is an actor, artist and writer from Mumbai. They spend their spare time baking, reading, or watching movies. They hope to someday earn the title of ‘storyteller.’ Mekhala can be found on Instagram at @meksnosense.