The Centre

by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi

You see, a kind of listlessness had been brewing in me for some time, the kind that threatened to tip over into despair, leaving me just sitting there, solitary and stuck, forever, in the middle of my living room.

But all these traits—style, hygiene, the ability to care for oneself and one’s home—are, in a man, considered exceptional, almost miraculous, whereas in women, they are the bare minimum.

There can be something quite devastating in feeling a comfort you can barely remember. It can make you grieve, if I’m honest, for something that you’d always felt a vague sense of loss over but never known for certain you were missing.

We contemplated together what it truly meant to be in touch with the body—with the flesh and blood and muscle and tendon and fascia of it all—and with that other, more ephemeral substance that flowed through all things. The body, I started to see, was a memory keeper. It knew everything. It made me sad that I had lived at such a remove from this fountain of knowledge, that this communication with my own self had been so badly severed.