For every ailment you can think of, there is a herbal tincture in a dark glass bottle that promises to cure it.
Out by the beaten pavement there are men under fluttering tents who will look at your palms for a few hundred rupees and tell you the story of your life. I don't believe in that anyway. I believe in other things, like counting my steps and shortcomings, counting backwards to fall asleep. I fall asleep. I dream of being a snake who sheds her skin in the grass, over and over again. Morning comes by anyway. Same old skin. The water boils over with a wail. I gather ginger root, dried orange rinds and half a cinnamon stick. And yes, I know this too is some type of faith. Changing my sheets every Sunday, watching the slow white rain. I plant spinach seeds inside a half-cut plastic bottle. I buy sunscreen. I get my blood drawn. Why is it so difficult to find your vein? The nurse asks me sharply. Sorry. I say. Sorry. Outside the clinic, a hot blue sky beats down on broken tar. Construction dust in my mouth. Smoke in my hair. Something in my throat. I walk home, down the old road where everything is changing. I delete apps off my phone. I take a small, gelatinous vitamin. I pack my bags and travel down south to meet you. Salt-skin. A need to be held by water, by boundlessness. Looking over the sultry blue rim of the country, I have a vision of a woman who walks over the fine sand and straight into the open roar of the sea. She disappears. I walk back to you. We eat french fries in the hotel room bed and fall asleep. When I wake up, you are still sleeping. It is early. Bird-sounds. Distant sea. Speckled-eggshell light pouring out from the sky. I toss between the sheets. I know I shouldn’t reach for my phone in the mornings, but I do it anyway. That's just how it is these days. I wake and my hands long for something to hold on to, anything at all.
I wrote this piece sometime late-pandemic. I was in a rather covid-ish headspace at the time, grappling with some degree of burnout, my usual, unrelenting perfectionism and the fact that I had newly graduated from a Masters program into an upturned world (and an unforgiving job market!) The cultural moment around me was fixated on wellness, re-invention and cults of selfhood, all tempting distractions from the collective disarray and loss. Having gone along with some of these fixations, I was interested in what happens in that suspended space between rituals and routines, when the imperfect self bubbles up. When the uncertainty of the world is undeniable.
Anyway, if you liked this poem, let me know down below! And if you were to write a poem about some of your rituals, which ones would they be? Talk to me in the comments!
I’ll be back with more writing next week. Until then, take care.
Love, Anagha
Lovely, Anagha - the end, especially.
So evocative. Thank you