All This Could Be Different

by Sarah Thankam Mathews

It’s distressing, how many people elect to be boring when they have the option not to be.

grief for the ways their lives had been compost for my own.

I did not know how to reconcile my love for Tig, the shimmering regard and gratitude I held for her, with the frank slime of want. I feared these two women could unearth something ugly in me. As their friend I was my better self: dry and laughing, spiky but kind, trying to peel the world like an orange, eat it by the segment. I wanted to keep it that way.

Sardines deep-fried in a coating of earth-red masala, fresh hot rice with butter-colored moru, glistening achinga sautéed with onions cooked down until they turned the same hue as our skin.

My mother reddened with pleasure. Actually, my best dish, she said simply, is non-veg. Take beef and fry it in a small bit of coconut oil, in a very tasty masala with onions, curry leaves, big fat chunks of coconut. The meat becomes very, very tender. With this I serve ladiesfinger and my homemade parathas, which are very flaky, very soft with ghee.

My primary opinion on polyamory was that it seemed like a lot of fun for logistics fetishists.

This is my tragedy and my great good fortune, to be the recipient of this bond, to be kept alive under its crushing warmth and weight, to be given it so freely, so much more than I have ever deserved.