Pink, Pray, Peeling

3 months is how long i thought it would take for me to forget you. but it's 2 days past that deadline i so ambitiously set for myself and i am reminded of you in every flutter of my sheer curtain, every clink of my bangles,  every bite of fruit i consume.  i so badly wanted to share with you the bundle of lychees my grandma bought for me. so badly wanted you to feel on your rough fingertips the soft outer skin of a lychee, so similar in texture to my freshly shaven legs, prickly yet smooth. tomorrow i will eat a bowlful of this fruit i love dearly and i will picture you while i peel its red shell, unravel it from the top of its plump body to its bottom. i will grieve your sweet words, sweet almost as the fresh, translucent fruit i bite into. i will watch as the sickly, sticky juice runs down the side of my hand and i will feel it dripping from my chin. i will swipe my tongue over the thin coat of lychee-infused nectar on my lips and i will remember. i will remember you

Food Review #1 Thin strands of hair punctuate my sentences as I talk of my friends to my mother while our knees touch inside the rickshaw. Momentarily, we are speechless as the sweet, pure scent of chafa, clutched by a street vendor, interrupts the perpetual odour of sewage. It is only destiny, then, that the café we were headed to would also be called Chafa Café and Studio. Hunger swirled manically inside of me, drawing into its current all sense of judgement and leaving an "I can order literally anything right now and still like it enough to devour it" feeling as residue. My willful hunger gnawed at my insides as I flipped through the impossibly vast menu. Initial decisions of ordering chic salads and soup dissolved entirely as rationality took over. We landed on Mixed Vegetarian Risotto with Sun-dried Tomato and Vegetarian Vietnamese Rolls, accompanied by orange and watermelon cold-presses.  The raw carrot, tofu, and another unrecognisable leafy vegetable did disappointing...

Musings from 31-03-25 Breakfast - a half-eaten apple and chocolate-dipped biscuits Spring cleaning after breakfast Dust and hairballs unite, swirl and swirl. I read a new book under the early afternoon sun on my balcony. The kind, towering clothesline shades me, frays of worn towels flapping in the intermittent breeze. The oak chair I sit on is stained white-green by dried bird poop and my burgundy hair spills around it. Damn. My legs stretch out and hook themselves onto the low glass.  I finish a chapter. A few stories below in the building opposite mine, I see two ladies dressed in morning gowns. I wonder how they are related to each other. I land on mother and daughter-in-law. I get called for lunch, and that's that. Late afternoon, I watch a movie about cannibalism, and I am both disgusted and in awe.  Then coffee, dinner, and rest.

On double-scoop servings and crying at my optometrist's  It had been months since I sat in a rickshaw beside my mother earphones-less, absorbing the sounds of the metropolitan city I still hesitated to call home, without music loud enough to deafen a man being forced into my poor, unsuspecting eardrums. I wouldn't be deafened though, contrary to my mother's belief, the source of which being Unqualified Men on Instagram Posing as Doctors in Scrubs to Bait Indian Mothers.  For lunch, I dragged my germaphobe mother to a semi-street food place, with alternating red and green plastic chairs and a power outage delaying the college kids' pizza order. She was not one bit the food-poisoning-phobic lady she is now in her prime time, she explained to me. Then, for her and her friends, roadside snacks were a religion to be worshipped day and night. Her preferred argument now is, "Times have changed." I urged my mother to pick out her ice cream order quickly, power outage ...