these are some of my older works because the past is still part of you
It’s been over a year since I last gave him my words. There are no words to describe the pain I endured for the months after I saw him. Writing about him now doesn’t feel quite as tragic, but back then, every word was smudged with tears. Every thought spiraled his gestures, his tone, his words, his face into nothing real. It’s strange how healing works. It really just disappears one day and you don’t even notice it. After I moved to college, he became an idea. An explanation for my dealings with men. An excuse. But he was just immature. How could I have possibly expected him to be mature when I wasn’t either. When he messaged me on the 4th of July, I pondered his words for no more than 2 hours. And silently, he slipped away. The matching volleyball shirt we wore now sits in my drawer. And I gave it to my friend one day to wear to the gym. It wasn’t imbued with the same melancholy it used to be. How life changes. What I once thought was inescapable and forever, turned out to be temporary. It passed. He no longer stirs any emotion in my heart because it wasn’t meant to outlive my capacity. I loved him with everything I had in me; I gave him all the depths of my heart, but he never…
And how does the boy whose name is etched in every line of my poem just disappear after I saw him that night. How does he fade into normality and neither I nor him reach for each other. We’re done aren’t we?
You call me
Back
After getting drunk enough to forget
I stayed waiting
Watchful
For you
Only for you
To have forgotten the existence of me
And yet you
Call to tell me that you
Remember destroying my shelf and stealing my charger
And that I wanted you here by 9
You remember me
When we looked at the stars and you
Only had eyes for me
But it doesn’t take root in your
Mind, only in mine
As I wait
Count the hours
To be picked up and played with
Like the doll I am for you
Take off my glasses and clean them
Why don’t you
Please clean the tears
Off my eyes
Please
Because I dread the seconds without you
I don’t even want you
To come pick me up and hold me in the mirror
As we stare at us
Because we look so good
Together–even though
At this point,
I hate myself for getting attached to you
You’re only good because you
Clawed through women
So you know us,
Me
You
Won’t make the effort to come
I got this idea in my head
This scene that plays out
When you
Come over
But don’t let me envision it because it won’t happen
You
“I’ll text you tomorrow”
No you
Won’t
It's 8:36 and I need to stop thinking of you
Of your lies
I believed you would come
Stood by the door and begged god to let you come home to me
Hoping the hands that once carried me
Would remember I was alive
But you won’t
This lover girl has been shot in the head
Burned at the stake
Thrown into the garbage
Bruised in the heart and she
Bled all over her sleeve
Cut with insincerity inside her brain
Lies poisoned by delusion and self hatred
To believe in hope
To believe in love
To believe in you
Sleeves stiff with the blood
Of believing
The heart I used to wear so proudly is gone
You like my thoughts thighs
It was way too intimate for you
Way too intimate
As if intimacy and depth is too much
One night with you created something people live life in search of
I think about you
In the light
Even though I shouldn’t
Because you only think about me
At night
You destroyed something in me but I
Can’t give it up because you
Made me believe in an idea
The idea of hope
The idea of doom
But I suppose you are still my muse
You are only you because you know me
I trip on the street
Laughing at myself
I look up at the sky
I wish I could stop crying
Numbness never felt so
Desolate
Pain never felt so
Empty
Dreams I’ve had since youth
Crumble and fall
Never to be resurrected
Lover girl
Dead
And gone
They say she’ll come back
But I don’t know
Will she?
Obsessive by nature
But nature has been overworked
I’ve overproduced my destiny
Only for nature
To wrap me in her jade
And tell me
It’s enough
No more
No love for you
Closer to fate
So close I’ve gone past it
And lost something
Some hope
Some hope in love
In truth
In beauty
In hope
And I want it to stay gone
My love is with the world
I will not fall in love with anyone
No one is meant to love me
Intimacy of one
Will not
But intimacy of
Nature’s leaves
Nature’s breath
Nature’s ponds and lilies
Nature’s beauty
Will hold me tight
In jade.
I’m dizzy with laughter and youth. Under the not yet orange leaves of the fenway victory gardens, the ground squelches under my feet. My hands are enclosed in a man’s. We’re spinning around in circles together, and I’m genuinely laughing and smiling. He’s the only one I’ve really been seeing during the fall semester. We find adventure together and peace afterward. I can barely think. He asked me to dance in the victory gardens. I stood there and looked at him quizzically. He continued, asking if we could move so as to be under the moonlight. Maybe the girl I was a year ago would have been deeply struck by the romanticism of the moment. But as I started dancing with him, it took a few minutes for me to ask myself why I had no feeling of sentiment about the experience. After the summer and the past year, the way I saw men has drastically changed. From always being on my knees for them, to messing around with them, to asking them to buy me taco bell, to losing my virginity despite all my better judgement, they’ve been pushed off their once gleaming pedestal. And turn after turn, I swept the theater with the same play, and recast the same roles with different men.What is beauty when your heart has learned that beauty ends in ache? I lost the naivety to pretend moments mean more than they do because they’re pretty. And here I am writing about it, trying to make it seem like art and poetry when it wasn't. I always thought that if I make my pain beautiful, then maybe someone might notice and help me out of it. I’ve sat on the bleachers with a boy looking up at the stars, watched the sunset with a Dubai playboy, stayed in a lake house in new hampshire with one, gone to the aquarium, stood on a balcony over the boston commons, kissed a boy in Paris who knew that we would always have Paris, and watched ducks float by a river in Providence. No matter who they are, they treat me the same. All the pretty moments have been taken by men I’ll forget. Even the moments themselves are fading. Now I stand, dancing under the moonlight with a guy who treats me right, feeling absolutely, devastatingly, nothing.
I sit on a bench outside Target. Sipping slowly and intentionally, I taste the richness of blueberry, a hint of oat milk, and the bitterness of lavender. The cold ice refreshes my lips and the matcha makes me jolt upright ever so slightly. What does it mean to live on the edge of your eyes? You walk down the street and you see people with eyes that look as if there is 6 inches of space between what they see and who they are. I look down at the green milky foam. I sip. This sip has a stronger aftertaste of lavender, and more matcha. I sip again, experiencing only one of possibly thousands or even millions of different permutations of the ingredients. There are multitudes in just this one drink. Why is it that I never pay attention to the galaxy in each sip. I’ll only remember the way the drink tasted. But it’s only ever a construct and summation of all the separate sips, so how do I turn that into an experience? How is the sum of the parts greater than the whole?
I have never felt the urge to disappear in my life. It was always about standing out and being different and being noticed. But dealing with men like this. They just all make me want to disappear and be forgotten about. Why do I want to disappear? Yet equally well be seen for who I am. I want to disappear from the men who have never seen me as anything interesting. I will never be the girl anyone buys flowers for. When I pass by, I make eye contact and it is always lust I see in their eyes. When Roberto told me he forgot about his first kiss, I knew I wanted him to forget me too– which was oddly why I was ok losing my virginity to him. I will never be the girl who has eyes full of romantic love. There will never be a person who wants to love me. I stopped caring about making them remember me, I haven’t even consciously thought of trying to make myself memorable to a guy. Rohan was the cruel way that the universe wanted to show me that I could never be enough for anyone. Everyone’s got their life and their pain, and I am not allowed to be part of it. I can only bang on the glass from the outside. Try as I might, the glass will never shatter. These hands that touch my body have stolen enough from me. Maybe I’ve reached the point of being so jaded that I push away anything real. And now it seems like, at every turn, every man I interact with is not interested in me because they already have someone. Here I am. Pushed aside, and miffed, at every chance I try to seize. I sit here alone. Doomed to know that I will only ever experience love for the world, never love for someone. I want to let go of hope, let go of belief, let go of puzzling my way through the universe. I’ll never feel anything if a guy twirls me around in star market. It’ll just be another first, stolen by someone who I’ll never remember. I wish no one had touched me in the first place. I won’t find a relationship in my life–the one and only chance I had was Dao, and I screwed that up. I know I was only 15, but the pain I caused her outlives the excuse of my youth. I feel like every second I am one second away from plunging off a cliff into the void within me. He was right wasn’t he? There is a huge void in me, and I don’t even know how to deal with it. Every moment I am on the verge of bursting into tears. There's only so much love you can give yourself before it becomes boring.
I go on side quests, and make friends with adults. An “old soul” is what Nancy calls me. Nancy is my friend, a mid-aged dean at my college. I befriended Raven’s parents, so much so, that before I left, her stepdad told me I was really well spoken and should continue on my path. I provided a “really thoughtful insight” about the world to my mother’s friend Yvonne over lunch together. My physics teacher once told me that the letter of recommendation she wrote for me was the best one she wrote that entire year. My English teacher still talks about the dedication I put in for her class, and I haven’t been in her class for over 2 years. I make a mark on these adults, but I struggle more with people my age. Adults respect me for my thoughts, and those thoughts go over my peer’s heads. They don’t find that part of me captivating, yet, that’s the part adults gravitate towards. I’ve always had good relationships with those who are my mentors. Perhaps it’s an instinct in me to please. They see me as raw and authentic about who I am. Even though I may be a bit precocious, they don’t see it that way. They've all been so open minded about the knowledge I have to share. They don’t put me down for being a young kid, or invalidate my experiences because they number far fewer than theirs. It’s just always worked for me, and the ones I feel like I have real connections with are the adults. But what do I do when I am the adult? When my soul matches my actual age? Then what.
I always prided myself on being a girl who never really needed anything. I didn’t need flowers to feel special, makeup to feel pretty, or a man to feel loveable. I thought that by being someone who consumed nothing yet provided everything I would gain the hearts of everyone. I mean who doesn’t want a person to boss around and answer your every call? I could be that; I could put my needs subservient to others. I always told myself that whenever I got into a relationship, I wouldn't be one of those girls that demands her boyfriend do everything, be bitchy and ask for a lot. I would just love my man with my whole heart. Maybe that comes from my need to please my father. A+ here and A- there. I thought to keep and maintain a man, I would have to entirely devote myself, become a receptacle to be dunked in a fountain of love to be poured into his mouth to quench his thirst. I thought that’s how love worked. You showed him through repeated calling that you cared about him and were willing to look after him. But once I got to college, I got a slap on the face. Turns out you couldn’t make a man love you by getting on your knees to suck him off in the first 24 hours. I thought that being useful was my route to love. What I did in service for another would earn me the right to be loved. And then they would love me and fill my receptacle as a natural consequence. And I wouldn’t let myself be loved, I wouldn’t let them show they cared about me, I didn’t want them to have to deal with all that effort. And maybe that is an insecurity problem: I don’t feel worthy of the effort it is to be loved. So I sit and accept breadcrumbs while my heart yearns for more.
And that’s changing now. I’ve gotten better at asking people for things, and accepting them when they do. I’ve put my heart and story out for a man to read and he read it and walked away. But it’s just a misalignment. And I get to experience the moments, and then leave them be as moments. I still feel like I have to prove and earn my right to love. Which is why it’s surprising when I feel like I do nothing yet still attract interest anyways. When I had sex the first time, I just didn’t have to do anything and he exacted pleasure from me. I didn’t do anything and it still made him feel good. Something about that feels wrong to me. I feel like I should have to earn his pleasure through my skill and talent, not lay down for him to take it from my body. It’s weird because I never wanted to value myself monetarily. I am worth x amount of flowers a week. I don’t want my value to be bought and paid for because I’m scared to see how others see my worth.
Where one chapter ends, another begins. I’m not sure which character from sex and the city I am now. But I am not who I used to be. Right as I was leaving for Florida, I got insanely horny. More so than I ever have been in a long time. I was desperate for male validation. I went on snapchat and started everyone. I would send pictures of me looking very slutty, boobs all pushed up. No nudes. Now I’ve sent snaps of my face to strangers before, and I got used to the attractive men unadding me. But not tonight. I sent every guy a very attractive boob picture. And they all just flooded me with validation. I was told by every guy that they thought I was hot and attractive. And I felt desired. I didn’t feel that same trodden path of sexualization, this time I felt empowered. I was drunk off my power, sending so many pictures to so many guys who won’t even remember my name. Every guy, every picture, validation from all of it. I even went on my snap story and added some very slutty pictures, then I had hundreds of guys trying to add me, I got my pick of the litter. I was in control, I had the power because I was desirable. Never in my life have I ever experienced anything like that. And also, one guy who seemed interested in getting to know me later on asked for more pics, and I told him no. I set the boundary. I am learning to set boundaries with men, and I think it is because I have finally taken them off their pedestal. And through my snap escapades, I found this one guy, Rohan. He seems. Well, obsessed with me. And oddly, I’m interested too. I sat on the beach in Florida looking up at the stars, but really I was looking down at our conversation. Because I don’t feel like I have to bang on the glass to prove myself to him. I can be exactly who I am. He made it very clear that he wants to take me out on dates, he doesn’t do hookups, and he was the first guy who asked if he could call me. It’s always been me asking if I could call guys and now he’s flipped the script. He calls himself my husband. He’s not overpromising, not talking about being in a relationship, but saying very clearly that he finds me attractive in many aspects. I’m not sure if he is chasing connection or just the feeling he gets from being with me, and whether or not he asks me a lot of questions and pays attention to the details and remembers will prove that. In some ways, his personality reminds me of Yash. Very fast and fluid and excited and puppy dog. But I do want that dominant and charismatic man too. It actually feels like it could be real. In a way that I’ve never experienced before. I can see myself with him, and it all feels possible. I don’t see a date that will be over before it begins. He gives me the interest that I think is strong and will last. But I’m worried it’ll fade like Leo. You know the whole summer I was like should I get a blender, but I didn’t. And Rohan likes smoothies and he has a blender. He is trying to fight for me, to find ways to call me, the way that I used to fight when I had less discernment. I want to have him tattooed in me. Well, he said he liked beads, and I bought him a beaded bracelet from the store. And in a cruel reminder of my fate, I woke up this morning to a text from him that says he doesn’t want a relationship. The shoe finally dropped. It hurts, and it’s been a while since I let a man hurt me. And it was with the guy who was the worst of them all because he led me on; he told me he’d take me to his place in Jersey, he told me he’d let me steal his hoodies, he even told me he wanted to go to the south of France with me and joked about getting married. Yet just like that, all my fantasies got crushed by a few texts. Yes, he was a bit hesitant when I sent him the reel about a boyfriend playing build-a-bear in VS, but really that was the only early warning sign I picked up. I asked chatGPT so many times if I was overdoing it, if I was seeing things that weren’t there. I didn’t trust my judgement, and I leaned on it to provide caution. Part of it felt too good to be true because I didn’t feel like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I thought to myself: people say it is supposed to be easy when they find the right person. And now it’s odd because I tear up talking about it, but I feel so indifferent about seeing him again because I would never let him into my life again. My heart is reeling, feeling the sting of disappointment. It’s like how I can still tear up over Yash. That pain is still there. I walked to the river one night, sobbing, desperately heaving and hurting, in this deep pain because no one will ever love me. I stood on the river until midnight, when I caught a glimpse of a duck swimming alone down the river, and for some reason, watching that duck slowed me down. I couldn’t cry anymore after that. I felt my pain, and it was over. So I took myself to get taquitos, and then I sat on the train and went home. I will never find someone to give that bracelet to. He’s here in Boston now. The shoe always drops. You will always just be waiting for it to be over. There will be no happy ending for you. Your happy ending is changing the world. That is the love that you are lucky enough to experience. But no deep romantic connection. I wonder what they will feel when they see me on top of the world. I wonder if they would regret losing me– how would that make me feel? So now I’ll wear that beaded bracelet, to remind myself to hope. From dust we came and to dust we will return. That really is a great way for me to end summer. You know, Dante is a good guy, and he doesn’t want to see girls with their ass hanging out and boobs everywhere. And maybe that’s how you win the game. But me, I can’t help it with my big boobs, I mean other than wearing baggy clothes everyday because they're obvious in everything. For me to exist is to be sexualized. And maybe that’s just me playing into it or giving up. The summer left me with a bad taste in my mouth for men. I’ve accepted my fate, my doom, my demise, call it what you want, but the lover girl is gone. Wrapped in jade, and disillusionment. I don’t really even think I want a relationship anymore. I want to experience what it’s like to be in love, but perhaps all I will get is the experience of being in love with life. I don’t think that love will find me because I wasn’t built for that. Fate, doom, demise, love. Love for the world, for earth, for my purpose and my career and my duty. Not for a person. I wasn’t built to be in love with anyone. The one chance I had with Dao, I shattered. And that was my one and only shot, and I guess I blew it.
It was an odd morning. I felt recognizably like a past version of me. I woke up at 1am and couldn’t fall back asleep, so I stayed up. And the classic culprits to occupy my mind cycled through. A spiral- uncomfortable but familiar to me now. And I couldn’t stop it until around 5am when I decided to watch the sunrise. I also contemplated getting out of bed and just going somewhere in Boston between the hours of 1 and 5, but I didn't. I went to the banks of the Charles and let the morning air fill my mouth. I spotted a small outdoor gym. This summer I had been trying to do a pull up. The equipment gleamed with uncertainty, and I, uncertainly, grabbed an elevated bar. I began to pull. I pulled up unthinkingly and breathtakingly fast until my chin went over the bar. I screamed. That was my first pull up. I looked around, a bit embarrassed by my private moment that I had just released into the public. Alas, at 5:30am in Boston, there was no one on the Charles to scrutinize my joy. Excitedly now, I did another one. Proud of myself, I looked at the colors swimming above me. Whoever painted my view of today’s sunrise was proud of me too. Once I had released the moment, I gathered my belongings and walked down Kenmore and Fenway to get to star market. I stopped in front of the Boston University sign to sniff the red flowers, I accidentally stumbled and snapped one off. Feeling a bit like I had insulted nature herself, I put the flower on a nearby tree branch. From earth you came and to earth you will return. I paused. The sun was rising right between some buildings on the horizon and they were perfectly placed to frame the Kenmore station. At 6am, the only people on the streets of Boston were either the homeless or self disciplined. I was neither. I uncomfortably skirted past men that appeared more comfortable staring at me than I do. Nonetheless, I had to pick up a few groceries, so I kept walking. The entrance to star market was a bit discombobulating, the fresh flowers were more vibrant than the sunrise. I walked past them all in search of lemons and potatoes. I passed a fridge and noticed a bottle that said Kombucha. Now I was a freshman in high school during the pandemic, so I knew what kombucha was. And my curiosity isn’t what I would consider disciplined. If you are curious about anything you have to be curious about everything. So I did a quick chatgpt query, and slid the cold bottle of GT synergy pomelo pink lemonade kombucha in my bag. After I paid, I stepped outside into the quiet street, and pulled open my bag. I stopped and stood. I cracked the bottle of kombucha open. It bubbled and fizzled and startled me. I burped about 3 times. Each one decreasing in wavelength. No one was there. Just me and my kombucha. And I crossed the street and went home.
Sharply, I breathe in. I already know how the train ride home will be. I can see it already. Feeling worthless is the only feeling I’ll ever get when I'm with him. Chasing the train to go see a man would sound desperate to anyone, but I’ve inured myself to the disappointment that comes after desperation, so I'll keep chasing the trains. I'll step on the tracks without looking both ways too. but only after I leave his place, never before. It doesn’t even matter which train I take because they're all the same. I'll sit on the train home feeling all the same. The train stutters or shakes and I can do little to stop my body from flopping around with it. He won’t walk me to the train stop. So before he leaves first, I’ll drag myself away– despite resentment burningly begging me not to. Rain or shine and I’ll have to go home. I’ll miss my stop because the train keeps running but what’s in me is all the same. You have to pick up and play with the doll to make her seem alive.
I push the toaster lever down.
How long?
What level of burn?
I don’t even have a timer for when this thing finishes
I hate the sound it makes when it pops back up
It’s not long before I walk
Away
The smell of burnt toast
Lingers in memory
The anticipation
chokes me
Overwhelmed by my own
Thoughts
My worry
My fear
I don’t want to be surprised by my toaster
I don't want it to startle me
When it jumps out
At me,
It’s never when I
Expect
If only it had a timer, a countdown, a sense of predictability
Then I would wait
But because I don’t
Know,
I walk away
I can’t face it
It’ll startle me otherwise
Run away
Before you touch the hot metal
And pull
The toast
Out
I used to believe that my actions would speak louder than words. And they do. To people I see consistently. But to those that I see maybe once or twice, I have to sell myself. When people don’t see what you are capable of, they don’t even consider you for an opportunity they might have. The time constraint means that their opinion of me rests on what I say, not what I do. They can’t see what I do because they don’t have the time for that. When I was in an interview for iGEM. I didn’t wait to prove that I knew women’s health, I rattled off the stats I can name in my sleep. And it worked. So there has to be a balance to be had. Because right now, with Raven and Ludo, other members of the iGEM team, I repeatedly feel like I have to keep proving myself to them because we work together. I also consciously feel this push to be, I guess, productive and to prove that I’m being productive and not slacking off. Thoughts of, “I need to look like I’m working” rather than, “I need to do my work” which is maybe why I should work alone. But I can show them through my actions instead, what I do not what I say. And in a way it feels like I'm trapped in a glass box of both my own and others expectations, and I keep banging on it to prove to the outside world who I am. I never used to tell people that I came from the #1 high school in America, and now I do so people will take me seriously for my intellect. And by that I mean, men who I see only once will. Because that’s wrapped in this too, I see men for one date maybe, and I have to sell who I am so that they want to see me again in the future. You can’t be playing the long game on every date number 1, you have to sell yourself to get the prize. And the prize for them is my body, the prize for me is a moment of intimacy. Someone to let me in. I need to consider when interacting with people, am I going to have time to show them who I am? I mean, long term, I’m still trying to prove myself, it’s just more drawn out so it feels like there is less pressure. Yeah. I like that. And, part of it comes from insecurity too. That’s why I make it such a point to assert that I am a sophomore when I am surrounded by freshmen. I want people to see me even on the streets for a fleeting second and give some sort of signal that I am superior.
You know how in detective movies the detective takes a cork board and connects pieces of evidence together with red string until it points to something big in the middle? I feel like my identity is that mess of red strings and evidence but without the something big in the middle. My string doesn’t lead anywhere. It doesn’t point to anything. It doesn’t consolidate. It doesn’t sum to anything that is greater than its parts. That's how I see myself. As pieces. Never as a whole. How can I be the book if I feel like the chapter?
It’s through strings that I am tied, chained, disconnected. It feels like every man I’m with, emotionally and physically, I become their marionette. They pull the strings and I do what they expect from me. And no one has a tighter grip on me than my father. While I was on the train to see someone, I pissed him off, and despite the fact that I live on the opposite side of the damn country, I felt those shackles pulling me off my train, switching trains, and going back to my dorm, so I could do his bidding. It’s like I was a kitten trying to escape from its litter, but I was scruffed by my neck, kicking and screaming, helpless to resist. Because every time my father gets angry, it’s on me to assuage it. My blood-born responsibility to fix it. His strings pull me most of all. And that’s why I am so complacent with men.
I am simply the daughter of an angry father, whose lashes will echo through my bones forever.
I am out of place in social situations. I watch others finesse their way through rooms and I spectate– helpless to do the same. I chase men for control. If I let them chase me, I know that they can stop at any moment. When I chase, I feel in control, I am the one who is seeking out, if they walk away, it was my fault and my responsibility. I did something wrong to chase them away, and that means that I can be the one to change and fix whatever was wrong. I shift the problem onto myself and I accept the blame instead of just accepting it when others don’t vibe with me. im so fucking tired of this, what do i need to change, what can i do that will make me worth staying for. It is very difficult for me to feel wanted, to feel that sense of belonging. It is also hard for me to accept when people make sacrifices for me. That has changed for me, it doesn’t feel quite so present anymore and I will let people do things for me. I no longer feel the intruder in my life anymore.
I do care what people think. I don’t want people to think I am a nerdy no-life. So I go out, I knowingly pose for pictures that aren’t mine. And then when the night is over, I stare at the pictures of me going out. And I don’t know if I am fulfilled. I like the way it looks. I like the idea of it. I don't know if that means I actually like it though. I suppose I am indifferent, I mean it is fun, but still. I care way more about the picture of the experience and talking about it and sharing details about it than actually being present. I don’t want people to think I am boring. But I want the wide appeal, I don’t want to be a rock that people stumble upon and realize is a diamond. I want to be the flashiest diamond in the room and I want everyone to know it too. But the thing is, it is fun. I enjoy the parties but only when they involve alcohol. It really is only tolerable drunk. Is who I am who I try to be? Even when I go out, I’m looking and waiting for a guy to approach me, to let me know that among all the pretty girls there, I too have value. That value may be entirely based on my looks, but a value nonetheless. I wanted to be the Allison, the Riti in the room. Parties really have a knack for making me feel lost.
People always say that the pen is mightier than the sword, and I’m tempted to agree. I was never one for violence or physical strength, so I suppose that’s why I found solace in the written word. As I started high school, I realized the value of writing not just for academics but also as an expression of identity. Thus began my journey to hone my writing ability. Yet it wasn’t until I joined speech that I began to see the power of not only my words, but others’ as well. Words and stories brought me to tears. Fellow speeches compelled me to emotion. They could do it, so why couldn’t I? And I did, I wrote and wrote. I wrote until my speech coach told me I had the most important message that year. I wrote until I made myself cry with my words. I wrote until others told me how much my words mattered to them. I wrote until I made a teacher cry. I wrote until I could construct my own narrative. And I keep writing the word ‘until’, but the truth is, there isn’t an end. I haven’t stopped. People warn you about the power that comes from the sword, but nobody tells you how the power of the pen can corrupt. The pen can lead you down a path of manipulation. Letters, messages, thank you cards, texts. Anything can be manipulated if you use the right words. And it is so unbelievably easy too. One word can change anything. I could message someone ‘you make me feel horrible’ or I could message someone ‘you make me feel safe’ and it completely changes the meaning. Just a few letters and I can misconstrue their reality. Yet that also leads me to being unsure of my own because if I say something, it has to be true right? I wouldn’t admit something that was false. No, but I would admit half-truths because I would not be comfortable with the real truth. My words scare me too. My journal is my life, but it also is my biggest enemy. It reflects who I am but I worry that the reflection is turning more into a fun house mirror. I worry my image of myself has been so deluded by my words that I cannot see fault nor can I accept it’s responsibility. No one else can force you to admit dishonesty if you delude yourself. And the worst part is, I know how powerful my words are, and I am willing to abuse my words for a reward. I was told that manipulation is just a way of twisting things to get your needs met but that is what I do. I manipulate. This power has corrupted me and I’m not sure I want to get rid of it, or even how to. I like having that effect on people, even if it is false. Or maybe parts of it are true and parts aren’t, but at this point, I think the water has been muddied so much I cannot even tell what’s real. It seems that throughout my life, different mottos and traits become more apparent. Right now I keep repeating that there are things more important than happiness and comfort. And that penetrates my writing I think. It’s hard for an artist to judge their own work objectively It’s odd too. In some ways I feel like I want to prove to myself how powerfully capable I am with words. Perhaps that’s why under the moonlight on a river in Rhode Island I told a man about how much I’ve been sexualized and then, in essence, asked if he would sexualize me too. And indeed he did.
When you’re a kid, the concepts of religion, race, gender and sexuality are pretty foreign. All you can really think about is ‘how can I get up to the most trouble’. Now for most of my childhood, I was what is considered a daddy’s girl. I hung out with my father all the time which is why it’s no surprise that I was kind of a tomboy. I prided myself on never caring what I wore, never trying makeup, and never being what the world calls ‘feminine’. I, who prided myself on my intelligence, would never engage in traditionally feminine activities because I saw them as unintelligent, vapid, and shallow. I liked feeling different and special. I went to the gun range, I did martial arts, I played violent video games, I decided to hate shopping; I was proud of being not like other girls. I occasionally thought I might be gender fluid because I identified more solidly with masculine characteristics. I even rolled my eyes whenever someone brought up feminism. Yeah, I was a misogynistic little brat. Looking back, I kind of was always a girl’s girl, but I just hid it. When I was in 7th grade, I snuck into my mother’s bathroom and would put on her makeup; I’d just pretend I was making fun of it, but secretly, I really liked how I felt with it on. Later on, inspired by the two fantasy series of my generation, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, I wrote a story where I called the magical species of my protagonist, womEn. Yeah, they were magical because they were womEn. It’s funny how much I struggled with my femininity considering who I am now. It’s also funny that my birthday is the first day of women’s history month. But anyways, one day in 7th grade, I decided to watch Legally Blonde. Why I decided to, I have no idea, perhaps to make fun of the dumb blonde girl, but I will always be eternally grateful for past me’s choice to watch it. The first watch through, I really didn’t get it. But maybe the first run through stuck something in me that made me want to watch it again a few months later. And then again. And again. Maybe it was a guilty pleasure for me, indulging in the pink glittery scenes that I was determined to not like. I was so persistently unfeminine that I wore a suit to my sophomore homecoming, but somewhere between homecoming and prom, I started to be ok with being feminine. At that point I really didn’t own much that was overtly girly, but I no longer felt the guilt for feminine urges. There's not one moment that I can point to where I accepted my femininity, but rather, a long chain of events that led up to a gradual change. At some point, I internalized the fact that like Elle Woods, I could be girly and intelligent.
In high school, I was a character. I wasn’t necessarily the teacher’s pet, or the class clown, I was more of the kid that would distract the teacher by going off on tangents that were never entirely related to the topic at hand. One of my favorite rabbit holes I led us down was perhaps one in my senior capstone, Roman Comedy. The class was a snooze primarily because Roman Comedy is not particularly funny. So I did my best to distract the teacher with questions, and one day I asked a question about humor and how it can be affected by culture. 30 minutes later we were talking about pools exploding. So it’s no surprise that in the middle of my linear algebra class, I got a teacher, who was particularly inclined to get distracted, talking about religion, whereafter I proceeded to explain to everyone sitting in that room my personal take on religion. And I do my best to explain it to you the way that I did to my classmates in 2024. Growing up, I was never put in the crux of religion’s hold. My father is Hindu and my mother is Jewish, yet I was never taken to temple, never instructed to read the Torah, and never forced to be engaged in prayer. So religion had pervaded my life for a long time and I grew up pretty unaware of it. That is, until I got old enough to start learning about the Crusades and the religious motivation for Columbus. I was shown how religion had been used as a weapon to enslave and oppress people who did not deserve it. I was afraid of what religion did to people and how corrupt it could be. At that point, I had decided, this religion thing is BS, I am going to be firmly atheist and choose not to believe in any sort of god. I had also been firmly a science girly, a firm believer in scientific experimentation for truth, rather than religion’s view of the world. And I had been content with that, separating science and religion, seeing them as opposites, one or the other, and I had chosen science. But then, my junior year of high school, I took AP Physics 2. If you don’t know what AP Physics 2 is, it’s a class where you learn about fundamentals of the world excluding gravity. You learn electromagnetism, optics, and how light can be both a particle and a wave among many other things. AP Physics 2 is a class that forces you to question the physical world you have grown accustomed to. It shows you some fundamental fabrics of the universe and the pretty weird results of them. Now I had always had a need for answers (read: Puzzles), so in that class, I asked deeper and deeper questions about why things were the way they were. Why electricity obeys the rules it does. Why the mass of a proton IS the number that it is. And at some point, my teacher, fed up, explained to me that physics is a model of the real world. It’s not what the world IS, it’s just a model of what we perceive. And as a result, there are things we just don’t know, and we can’t know. We just don’t have the answers. And this happened throughout the whole year, I kept asking different questions as we meandered through the curriculum but they all led to the same answer. There isn’t one. And obviously, I was pretty unhappy with that answer. The dissatisfaction kept me up at night. Around that time, I stumbled across this thing called Pascal’s wager. And I am aware of the flaws of Pascal’s wager, but it still appealed to me. If you don’t know what Pascal’s wager is, [insert explanation]. Now again, I was still firmly a science, ration and reason girly, but this was a relatively rational take on religion, and so it stuck with me for a while. It kept gnawing at my conscious, the possibility of ‘what if’, until eventually I asked myself a question I will never be able to go back from. What if there is a god? This was the first time in years I had allowed myself to ponder the potential of god. And for a while I was in a confused space, I didn’t want to abandon my atheism, but I needed answers. I needed that dissatisfaction to be quelled. Now at that point I was like, ok I have a couple of options here, Hinduism, Judaism, or some combination of the two. Now organized religion still didn’t really appeal to me. I had seen what faith turned violent was capable of, and I was afraid that if I joined a religion, I would be susceptible to corruption, and that made me nervous. Now what I am about to tell you is not an attempt to convert you to my belief, I simply mean to share my view on God. My thought process went like this: If god is kind of made up, then can’t I make him up, my way? So, I decided I would come up with my own concept of religion. Fundamentally, I need the answers, so I decided that God to me, was someone who has all the answers. I created my perception of God to fit my psyche and my psychological needs. To me, God is someone who knows everything and has every possible answer in existence. That’s it, nothing else, no weird Bible stories, he’s just a guy with the answers. Now I, as a human being, do have some answers, but I have a lot more questions, so I imagine my relationship with him as one where we are playing catch. We are mutually sharing. I throw god a ball (the question) and he throws it back (the answer). But sometimes, he throws me a question, and I throw an answer back, sometimes I throw him an answer and he throws me a question. Sometimes I throw him a question and he takes the ball and we just sit together. My perception of god is deeply personal and made specifically to fit what I need. In this way, god is who I choose him to be. The comfort of knowing that there is someone out there who does have the answers allows me to sleep at night, so when I ask those questions in physics class, and inevitably my teacher says ‘we just don't know’ I think to myself, ‘yes, but god does’ and I am no longer unsatisfied. In this way, the comfort of religion will not allow me to become violent, the only thing I have to fear is giving up too quickly. But I will do my very best to dig to the very root of knowledge before turning to god. I believe that religion turned inwards has its virtues; it is when religion is turned outward that it can be dangerous.
I live in this weird pocket. And by that, I mean my neighborhood is a small pocket in the middle of empty land. The exit to my neighborhood contains a road that bifurcates. Turning right will bring me to the town I grew up in. Turning left will bring me to school. For about 6 years, my parents would have to drive me to school, but in my sophomore year of high school, I got my license and ever since, I’ve driven everywhere on my own. Now obviously once I started driving, I was overwhelmed with keeping my speed constant, checking the mirrors, paying attention to the cars in front of me, and driving ‘defensively’ as they say. But as I got more practice, it became easier to tune out while still cruising safely. The task of driving turned boring. And boredom is where my mind likes to turn. So the 25 minute, twice a day, drive to school became a place for my thoughts to pool. Now as referenced in ‘Puzzles’, I ended up thinking about men a lot on that road, but that road was also a place for me to think on all manner of questions and topics. A common topic I turned over in my mind during junior year was my informative speech. In total, I spent about 7 months writing and performing that speech. Now because my speech was about masturbation, I couldn’t really practice in my house, so most of my practice sessions were in the car. As the dirt road passed me by, I would practice the inflection of my voice, carefully sculpt out pauses in dramatic moments, and hone my voice. That road became breeding ground zero for my ideas for that speech. Many, many, MANY times I pulled over on the side of the road to jot down some phrase or sentence I had said in the heat of the moment so I wouldn’t forget it. The best performance of that speech also occurred on that road. What made it the best? I was happy the whole day. I was smiling, laughing, and dancing around that day. Just in bliss and joy. And when I got in my car to perform, I had the best performance of that speech in my life. Shame that no one was there to see it because it was honestly incredible. That bare, empty road was the backdrop for creating the best thing in my life.
What if I got it all wrong?
I think that all these pieces of identity are mine, but what if they’re not?
What if what I see isn’t what the world sees?
What if I’m not who I think I am?
I’ve spent so much time trying to discover who I am, but should I trust my own judgment?
I mean, that’s a silly question; I spend more time with me than anyone else.
If there is anyone who knows who I am it should be me.
Right?
But what if I’m deluding myself into seeing what I want to see?
I see a girl forged by her duality, strength, passion, questioning, and independence.
But how could I trust that?
I could say anything about myself.
I could interpret my life story in a different way than Truth would have it.
But what if I lose it?
What if I can’t keep up this act anymore?
What if I stop deluding myself?
Will my duality fade?
Will my strength fade?
Will my passion fade?
Will my question fade?
Will my independence fade?
Will I be
Lost?
But can’t I be found?
I found myself the first time, so can’t I do it again?
I look at the pieces of who I am now, and I think they’re beautiful.
I get to find more pieces of myself for the rest of my life.
I love me.
But what if those future pieces of me aren’t quite as pretty as the present pieces?
What if the pieces turn truly ugly, but my self-love deludes them into appearing beautiful?
What if future me becomes someone that present me would be ashamed of?
What if it’s already happened?
What if past me would be ashamed of who I am now
Whose judgment should I trust?
Who even am I?
“I Just Called To Say I Love You” a song by Stevie Wonder. A classic 80s hit that makes this 2006 girl bemoan over being born in the wrong decade. The first time I heard it, I was glazed over, waiting in the car that was slipping past street lights. My father clapped his hands together when the radio played the first note, letting it ring out against the whooshing of the AC and yanking me out of my haze. The car swerved, anticipating the show about to begin. My father closed his eyes and gestured wildly like an oblivious pianist. I sat bewildered. He explained to me that Stevie Wonder was blind and the gestures were to make fun of how he thought Wonder would play the piano without being able to see it. I started to laugh with him and do the piano gestures too. Eventually, I learned the lyrics and my father’s dance moves to match. Every time that song came on, we sang along to it together, me in my squeaky voice, and my father in his put-on, pitchy, falsetto one, clearly trying to make me laugh. And make me laugh he did. Every. Time. And when I got old enough to have a phone, he’d call me out of the blue and start singing the song, telling me how much he loved me and how he meant it from the bottom of his heart. And I’d do it back every time because I was too young to understand what love is. Why it meant so much to the world. Why poetry and songs are written about it. Because one day when I was 14, he left. He, alone, made the choice to leave our family. “You’ll still call every day, right?” I asked him. And he said he would, he’d call to say how much he cares. As days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years, he stopped calling as much as he said he would. Radio silence sometimes. Gone were the days of poking fun at Wonder’s blindness. He let silence and solitude play its song in the car instead. But I guess that’s just how life is. I’m 17 now and next year I guess I will become an adult. But when you are missing one of the most important adults of your life, you’re forced to grow up quicker. So in reality, I took on the mantle of an 18 year old at 14. Because it turns out that sometimes people stop calling. And sometimes they stop loving you too. But you have to keep going and learn to live with it because what else can you do? My mother tried to fill the gap, but our relationship is too fragile to force into what me and my father had. So after he left, she stopped trying. I didn’t have him to hold my hand while I cried anymore. I had to learn how to hold my own hand. She no longer attended my swimming tournaments to cheer me on. I became my own cheerleader. He wasn’t there when I got my first paycheck, so I celebrated with my friends. She didn’t take me dress shopping for my junior prom. I had to call myself beautiful in the dressing room. Nobody showed up for me on my senior night in volleyball. So when I, alone, drove home, the only whispered words in the car were mine, “I love you and I’m proud of you”. He stopped caring. She stopped caring. So I had to learn to care, learn to build myself up, and be there for me when no one else was there for me. And self love is great and all, but is it ever really enough? Because when you call someone, that means you love them enough to share a moment of togetherness. But when the last words on the last call before it all goes wrong are “love you”, who can you ever trust with your love again? Who can I ever call anymore?
Splash, splash, splash. I’m at the community center floating around the swimming pool on a hot, lazy summer day. I hazily run my arms through the water, gazing up at the puffs in the sky. A cute lifeguard yells at some stupid kids to stop running. All is peaceful. Until I look down at the water. Red is shooting through the liquid that envelops me. Blood. My blood. I climbed out of the pool in horror, the sizzling hot concrete burning my feet as I ran inside to the locker rooms, ignoring the lifeguard yelling after me. I peeled my bathing suit off to find blood. Down there. I wasn’t uncomfortable per say because menstruation is one of the most natural things a human can do, I was just caught off guard. It wasn’t my first period, but I just hadn’t been expecting it today. To be honest, it’s never been regular, and I’ve dealt with that, but this time, my period had ruined my favorite bathing suit, had bloodied the water in a communal pool, and left bloody stains on the concrete. What was a girl to do? This was the last straw; I went home, and did some furious googling on irregular periods. Google told me that I was either dead or pregnant; extremely helpful, thank you google. No but seriously, I was left with no answers about my body. No explanation, no reason, not even a hopeful jumping off point I could share with my doctor. But that wasn’t gonna stop me, so I did more googling and found a book called Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage and ordered it. When the book arrived, I sat down and started reading. Every single fiber of my existence became focused on the words on the page. It’s a nonfiction book that describes each individual female sexual organ, the history, the science and the broader state of research on it. That book took all the googling I had done and solidified it into one answer. The most important answer of my life. The world just doesn’t know. The world doesn’t understand the female body, not because it’s too complicated, but because for the longest time, science has been propelled by men, and turns out, white, privileged men are not very interested in the specifics of the female body. My body. I identify as a woman, and like every other person who identifies as a woman on this planet, I bear the burden of not knowing anything about the way my body works. Frustrated, I, over the next few months, started reading all sorts of different research on women’s sexual health, yet my mind kept going back to that book. Before that book, I had known I wanted my career to be something in STEM, but for the next few months as I was reading and researching, I felt this slow pull, this crescendo of a calling, this sense of duty. Piece by piece that haze over STEM disappeared. In its place was clarity and purpose. I would do Biomedical-engineering. I would engineer female oriented technology, engineer female sexual tissues and anything to help women; I would work to fight the systemic problems in health. Not just for me and my irregular period, but for my mother. She has struggled with severe blood loss and cramping from her uterus, and her doctors were at a complete loss of what to do. If she wanted to live, she had to get a hysterectomy and forgo all potential fertility she could have had. That book showed me why she had no other choices, why in 2023, we know more about the surface of Mars than the female body. The book showed me why I will have no options left. So I must change the world. It isn’t an option anymore.
One friend. One conversation. 3 words. I asked “Do you masturbate?” And she answered simply, “Yes”. And just like that, my whole world changed. But let’s take it back. My parents never gave me The Talk, so the only thing I knew about sex was that I wasn’t supposed to talk about it. But of course through my peers and the internet, I found out all about sex and eternal sin. Something I didn’t learn about however, was female masturbation. Guys made jokes about masturbation but every single girl in my life was silent; masturbation isn’t socially accepted for girls the way it is for guys so even though I masturbated, I joined the deaf chorus of girls’ voices singing about masturbation. The world, my friends, and my parents proved that I shouldn’t talk about it, so I didn’t. Thinking I was the only one, I was in a state of insecurity and shame, embarrassed of my sexual desires, of my bodily demands. I was ashamed of what I was doing. I never had the confidence or self-empowerment to express myself outwardly because I could barely admit inwardly to masturbation. That silence bled into other parts of my life. I was silent in the classroom, I was silent in asking for help when I was struggling, I was silent and passive when I saw others getting hurt. Until one day me and my friend were having one of those intimate late-night bestie conversations when all of a sudden, in a burst of confidence, I asked her if she masturbated. She said yes, and it was like I was seeing the world clearly for the first time. When I heard another woman speaking about her masturbation in an unabashed, honest way, I realized that I, myself, had nothing to be ashamed of. In that one moment, I had taken a plunge, admitted my deepest secret, and she had not only accepted me for it, but reciprocated too. My shame was eradicated and soon enough so was the shy girl within me. Feeling at peace internally allowed me the freedom to start expressing myself externally. I started speaking up in classrooms, exploring different clubs, admitting to teachers I was struggling, and standing up for both myself and my friends to other classmates. I had found self empowerment and confidence by letting go of my guilt and my worry of what others thought of me because along with the interactions with others, I reconsidered my interaction with myself. I admitted to myself that I wasn’t the center of the universe. I admitted that I really didn’t know who I was, but now I had the self-empowerment to want to change that. I started asking myself the hard questions, like what flaws do I have as a person? How can I be better? Are the people currently in my life conducive to this process? What needs to change? I had been so afraid of admitting something shameful that I had allowed my life to stagnate into a mundanity that I wasn’t that happy with. But if that shame could change, couldn’t other parts of my life change too? I decided to take direction in my clubs and hobbies. I joined Academic Decathlon, realized I loved novelty so I left AcaDeca, gained the confidence to leave debate because I didn’t like arguing, joined speech, realized I liked public speaking, realized I wanted to spread my knowledge so I got a job teaching kids math, started volleyball, realized I like being active. In my personal life I started reading and exploring the lives of others, stopped playing video games, ended friendships, and started new ones. I gave my life a massive overhaul because I stopped being afraid of change. Change that was sparked by one friend, one conversation, and three words.
A hot summer day filled with splashes, sunscreen, and joyous screams. The community center pool, swimming around and around with my friends, breathing in the sunlight and chlorine. The smell of barbeque and sizzling hotdogs fills the atmosphere, a trademark of a hot Arizona summer. Everything is bright and captivating. Yet my time in the sun has fallen along with it, and as I watch the Arizona sky turn the vividest of colors, I understand that my time in the pool is over. I walk to the locker room. It's buzzing with the AC, and a draft of air blows continuously in the stalls. I touch the cold metal handle of the stall door and it swings open. I enter, and close the door behind me. The stall is no more than 5 feet by 5 feet, covered by bland blue tile. Slowly, I peel my bathing suit off. And I look at my body that is ripped apart by itself. My arms are a deep brown, my torso is a sickly white, and my legs are the same brown. I have tan lines. Everyone gets tan lines, but for me, tan lines are my body’s way of reminding me that I should not exist. That it is unnatural for the brown and the white to mix, that they fundamentally cannot mix. The division my body shows me is touchable, traceable. I follow the line on my hips where the white will not cross, and the brown will not cross either. My body is split; it cannot decide which race it is. It cannot make sense of how it should be. It’s disjointed but it’s unafraid to show just how unfathomably split it is.
I am biracial. My mother is Ukrainian and my father is Indian. I am white and brown. My cultures, my histories, my languages are split across entirely different continents. White and Asian. I’m lucky aren’t I? I get two cultures instead of just one! But despite the fact that my parents were born in their home countries and were raised in the breadth of their culture, by the time they had immigrated to America and had me, they both lost their traditions. So I never got to go to Diwali celebrations, never made Borscht, never went to Holi, never understood why sunflowers meant so much. When questions arise about my identity, I press the cold buttons on my keyboard to get answers from the glowing pixels of the internet because my parents can’t remember, can’t share. And that leaves me, the only biracial person in the house, alone to figure out where I belong.
I grew up white. My early childhood friends were all white girls. Some part of me wanted to BE them. Even now, I look at the rosy golden glow of a white girl's skin with envy. But the line that separated me from them was my hair. Being Indian means I am hairy. I have dark brown arm and leg hair. And for as long as I can remember I have wanted to get rid of it. It’s a constant reminder to me that I am not fully white. I'm not part of the club that I only have half a claim to. It’s weird too, knowing that a Ukrainian person would never recognize me based on looks alone as one of their own. It’s isolating
Am I the oppressed or am I the oppressor? Do I have the right to feel guilty for the crimes committed by my race or do I have the right to say that my people were taken advantage of? And especially now with the war in Ukraine. I’m technically labeled as white but the plight of my people compels the world to have compassion for me. Odd, considering how unusual it is for a white community to be getting sympathy nowadays. So am I really the oppressor? But I’m also a first generation American, so are the systemic crimes America has perpetuated really my crimes and my guilt to bear? And what about my biracial community? Any time there's a study about which race does what, I look for me, biracial, and often the pages drip with indifference as they tell me that no, I am, in fact, not there.
Do I exist?
Should I exist?
Will the world see me if I choose to exist?
Because when I'm sitting at a jewish restaurant in San Diego, and my mother looks at everyone at the table, me included, and says, “I'm the only jewish one here,” what am I supposed to do? Correct my own mother? For forgetting that I am her progeny?
When you ask WHO someone is, you expect a simple answer. The word ‘who’ implies simple. But when you ask a biracial person who they are, the word ‘who’ doesn't really fit. The word ‘what’ perhaps fits better because there are too many factors to be captured by any other word. What demands plurality. Which is what I am. Plurality.
I’ve never even seen my story represented in the media. The closest I got was former president Barack Obama. The first black president. Well, he’s only half black. But the media sensationalized him as black, so he portrayed himself as black. But he’s half white. As the president of the United States, he was the most powerful man in the world for a moment in time, and he had to erase half of his identity to make himself palatable to the public. If someone like him gets shut out, what about the rest of us biracial people? What hope do we have for being seen for the duality we are? Why does the world only choose to see us for one, why not both? Is 2 too much for the world to handle? Is there not enough complexity and nuance allowed in this world for me to exist? Do I have to choose between the halves that are supposed to make me whole?
Because I am both. I will not pick either of them. I am biracial but that does not give division the right to be sewn into my skin.