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Their pain feels different, like I’m not enough to handle it.
We might make things that make the world easier to live in, but people like you create a world that’s better for us to live in.
I lie awake some nights thinking about things you say and I’m afraid of what could happen if someone found out that you can think like that, in ways that could destroy the world it’s taken them millennia to build and keep in their control.
How can something as transient as money define our equality? Our opportunities, yes. Our possessions definitely, but certainly not how equal we are in any sense that is human. How can there be equality and inequality between things that are one and the same?
“The only thing I can tell you for sure is that I’m not doing it only for the story.”
Krish is obviously adopted and estranged from his Indian roots. I bet one of the two women corresponding in letters is his mom.
I’m looking right now at that Darwin book you left me. It’s interesting enough. The man seems to understand the world in a way the world needs to be understood.
What must it have been like to see the world this way? Every stroke is restless, all those tiny splotches of color coming together in a tidal wave of chaos and beauty. I’m rooted and shaken. I never want to look away. It’s how my lips burned, how my hair flew in the wind. It’s how I felt when I found the ring, how the rough pavement scraped the skin of my palms. An experience that traps my body and squeezes my heart, takes up all of me. I am the swirling blue sky, the steady yet nebulous flames of foliage, the bleeding glow of the stars and moon. For a moment, I am every painful experience
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Even after everything, I do believe that our families who separated us did want us to be happy. They just couldn’t define happiness as anything outside of what they were taught to define as normal.
All through my childhood I learned not to show my discomfort when I didn’t fit. Because I’ve never fit. Not until now. For the first time in my life, I fit. I fit in my skin, in this world, in my own discomfort. I’m not a stranger when you’re with me, Mira. And I’ve been a stranger to myself all my life.”
“Because my definition of a good life has changed.”
I don’t know why it matters that Druv and Krish are already that. Druv, who’s also a son, son-in-law, surgeon, husband, and someday a father. Krish, who’s also a writer, a son, a man in love with me. Why does it matter that their being themselves is not in competition with all the other things they want to be? But it does matter. I want me to be me first too. I want to not have to say “But being a mother comes first,” the way I’ve heard all the aunties say over the years. Over and over again. I might still put others first sometimes, but I want to have a choice, a real choice. Not one that
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Our bodies press so close there isn’t an inch left untouched, not a speck of me left unchanged.
