The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

Those cotton pants always hit her ankles perfectly.

yellow chamomile flowers

stoically

tea steeper

At once, Sara and Rahil looked up to me with expectant smiles. That moment was filled with such joy that it pushed against my chest and made me want to inexplicably crumble to my knees and sob with gratitude. Some moments can do that to you.

gird

happy urban complacency.

brain-damage hot,

When you’re stupidly living life on expectations, insecurity will raise its head every chance it gets.

lass

didactic

I wouldn’t talk about my time at the farm, and he wouldn’t talk about Amma. You know you have the same DNA running through your veins when promises like this can be made without uttering a word.

He was staring into space, lulled by the morning sun.

inordinately

On cue my head began to thud again.

The mistake we have collectively made is to listen to only one language.” She looked maniacal when she said it.

“That’s true” was all I could muster back. She looked at me and shook her head. It was beyond my understanding and that was okay by Sara. I could feel her recognizing my ignorance without judging it, and it made me uncomfortable.

underhanded

because with Sara, you had to wait for a spiritual pause to ask her something intimate.

By the time I was wiggling my jeans up my hips again,

propped

I told Sara it wasn’t about Rahil, but I stumbled through my sentences, my words running into one another.

Humans are truly fucking stupid—we are happy to follow as long as someone else is doing it. We follow no matter how bizarre we might think of the same action independently.

the side of my face patterned by a pillow.

Her white kurta had come together against her spine, almost outlining the curve of her back.

shook his head in mock annoyance.

her proposals were always voted in with embarrassing ease,

chicken scratch,

as her body reflected the breadth of her feeling, the range of her opinions.

three-bedroom capitalism.

Or at the very most involved organizing?

What’s the metric by which one can measure real purpose, a sound consciousness, deep perception, via the usual channels of mundane banter?

Friendship of mutual expansion. I think it sounds like what we seek in a lover, but that’s the potency of it, the fact that a true friendship must be much more; it must make us all lovers, when exponentially re-created, be able to Band-Aid the entire world and start anew.

I played with my silver earring, pretended it came off, and spent that minute trying to screw the post back in again with focused diligence.

goaded

It let me weep in the afternoons, weeping provoked by the most random of things: the attendant giving me a glass of juice, reading a funny line in a book, looking at my empty bed when I finally moved to my new house.

Had the words clinical depression empowered me? I couldn’t remember.

cop-out answer.

The jerky movement of the auto-rickshaw as it weaved around buses and cars was calming.

I too have grown to love the banality of the everyday, the security of a day job, and the landmarks on my commute to school. I’ve come to enjoy the smell of faint detergent on my bedsheets. We all must acclimatize to our world sooner or later, or else we’ll end up wearing pants much larger than our frames.

You also forget how much more you want to know about her.

I felt something sacredly sad: the knowledge that this was the pinnacle of my joy, never to be experienced again.

pedantic

My face tilted, urging her to go on.

Rabidly upset,

Increasingly disorienting timelines help keep me from exposing the truth.

traipsing

To the café we were far more banal, a married couple, two friends from work, anything but what we were.

euphemism,

overbearing