Navigating womanhood through montages in the city
One stands precariously at the edge of girlhood;
when everything seems potent and larger than life one minute,
and juvenile
and frivolous the next.
Grief is the same gloomy-weathered friend,
loss feels sandbag heavy in any form it shape-shifts into.
Your mother is growing older,
and there is nothing you can do about it.
You refuse to relegate your womanhood to one being akin to your mother’s;
but you are your mother,
you are everything like your mother.
You see in yourself the same jaded levelheadedness she has,
you see in yourself the same skill for navigating
the precipice between falling apart and falling together.
You see in her the wisdom you only wish you had listened to.
Growing up is the sinking realisation that
you spent so long hating your body,
only to realise it is also your mother’s body,
and the bodies of the mothers who came before her.
Growing older is realising how stupid it was
to presume you never wanted to be like your mother-
the truth is that you could never be like her.
And now, the fever stays
while travelling in empty coaches
on the train ride through the city,
the same city where you were kissed like a prayer
in one of its thousand minarets,
an adolescent secret hedged
between the pages of your old
seventeen-year-old notebook,
pervasive and easily perceptible,
like the smell of your mother’s old
ivory jewelry, and the phosphorescent burn
of the hills in the dead of the nights.
You start to have a knack for picking up
the time of day by noticing how the rays of sunlight look
on the face of the woman who sits adjacent to you.
They serve as a mirror,
you are your only constant companion.
You go everywhere in the city-
brimming with people and without them.
You give a name to every feeling you have;
you learn to store them like pennies in the
empty glass jars in
your house. Your temporary home.
You have started to realise home is two places at once;
and your body is not adept enough to reconcile between
the desire to stay
and the desire to flee constantly.
The city is lonely, all of it.
You start to see the synchronised movements of
everyone around you.
And all of these bodies make the same noise,
say the same thing,
talk about the loneliness fundamental to us all,
wretched species, bane of the earth,
selfish to the bone.
But there is a certain stillness that occurs amid motion,
a kind of lingering silence that you find sometimes
on the way to where you are going,
sitting outside on the balcony,
in the corner of the party where you stay for the rest of the night.
And you start to long for it,
to yearn for it.
To look for it.