what girls want

There are rules for a good story, and so let us begin with a setting, a character. A sentence to establish the tone and structure of our tale. Inside of a room, there is a girl, and her back is hurting against a peeling wall. The lights are dim, and the shadows under her eyes darken with the passing of time. We are in a memory box, and her half-written diary entry in increasingly incoherent writing has trailed into an angry stab into the paper. There’s blood where the tip punctured skin and her skin itches. Old wounds seldom close fully, easy to break open, easy to bleed. Music is blasting at bpm barely higher than her heart, thudding inside of her ribs. Old records, and no player she owns. The half broken-tip of a piece of charcoal on her fingers, scent of ink and regret and shitty nostalgia. It is easy to look into life from above, where it is all less vicious, less real. Where you can write a tale about a girl in her room and her stupid, crushing dreams.

They’re paradoxical, these dreams, the burden of them a responsibility I can’t put down, while it breaks my back. I have been setting my alarm to the early mornings, or wake up till all is quiet. I carry my headphones around my neck, almost an extension of myself. The pages of my dairy has faded and the scent is almost as familiar as the back of my hand. Turning twenty, living on my own. A kitchen to cook and a couch to read. Several things I dreamt, like all girls do, of this freedom so open– almost wild in its inhibition. It drives me a little mad, I know the cost of being free is to know that the lines between loneliness and routine blur themselves. This dream of running away from the first place you ever call home, you take your first steps there and your laughter echoes in those walls but soon you will want to run away very very far from the place that grew you. Girls are held in fists, tight and precious, and I’m told that it is because gold is locked in safes, that jewels are meant to be protected. Girls find that home becomes a safe and they become a commodity and so I say, bless the daughter. Bless the daughter, but she will run. She will look into the skies and have shining stars inside her iris, and she will close her palm inside her yet tender heart and she will chase this freedom.

Time jades me. I can still barely cook, spilling hot milk on a dirty floor and the cloth has to be washed before the rot of spoil becomes undone.There is the matter of managing money, understanding the world will not be very kind– the choice to choosing it anyways will be splitting, will be catharsis. I drink coffee first thing in the morning, watching from the steps, the birds flying and singing. Time jades me, it twists itself, it is fast and slow. A girl is many things, and what she wants is to be everything. It is maddening that there aren’t enough hours in a day and the sleep is terrible and you have at least one shameful habit you fail to quit. There is the matter of wanting love where it can’t exist, there is the matter of trying not to look too deep into the periods of insomnia and hypersomnia, eating and not eating. A girl is a contradiction, what she wants is intangible. She will miss a home she doesn’t want to return to.

A lot of youth feels surreal– finding the orange I forgot decaying on the table, I swear I’d meant to put it in the fridge, and the fridge is half-empty, half-rotten. It seems very natural to skip meals because I am doing work, all this work because later on life will become something and I will be Someone. Right now is the time to think about the time later, and later you think about now. The moment I want to live in will be somewhere in the future and then at that time I will live this moment. Time works in a strange dimension and so does space– my mother’s old saree still has the shimmer of a cerulean sea, and in that old photograph she looks happy. Daughters will always weep at the before photos of their mothers, and create an alternate timeline where the choice of family and dream was not so large. Where they were both woman and mother, where this sacrificial lamb doesn’t pass down generations. I wore that sari and I wondered if I have her eyes. Her nose is hooked and her smile is whole, and I am looking at the mirror and the only semblance I see is that there is a mole growing on our faces. Her mouth is made of all the things she will never say, mine made of bitter lines with all the lies I said to run away

What girls want is to be more than what they get, what girls have is the audacity to demand of life more than they are given. There are certain rules: about honour, it supposedly lying with my purity and about love, with lines with who to love, how much to love. There are so many rules to being a girl in a small-town, what to wear and who to talk to and how to talk to. How to smile and how to look, and how to be everything you already are. In summers, the ripe yellow mangoes look like the sun inside my stained lips and my larger than life family is laughing without abandon– everyone knows the other and they’d never leave this shitty town that will never change but I almost get it. Sweet summers, empty roads to cycle in a sweltering sultry heat. It is not a bad way to live, mediocre and happy and bury that dream inside old attics and make them a memory to laugh at in your 50s. It’s a shame that girls want to be everything and everywhere. It’s a shame that girls will run and shout and break a few hearts.