All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

This is what my parents wanted for me, what everybody wanted. To be a dish laid out before a man’s hunger. To be taken, to be quiet. Disappear into hair and parts. Disappear, in time, into marriage and motherhood.

Some people find it harder to forgive you for not actually being wrong,

I think crying allows us to midwife our more intense, more complicated emotions, get them outside of our bodies, and then our body feels light and free again.

not like all my choices are mortgaged to the people who have made my life possible

I don’t have a car, I said softly to the old lady directing me, her hair so white it was almost blue, and she said, Oh honey, this city is not meant for the walkers among us.

The refrains of our lives are the moments we revolve around, maybe the moments that were stopped too soon, stopped before we were ready, and so we are frozen, pirouetting in time, always thinking on the possibility that might have been. If only. If only.