✨ it's time for renovation; it's time for us to make a change.

• friendships are work, honour the flowers that have decorated your path and don't be reclusive.
• however, being alone is simultaneously essential: carve out pockets of unabashed loneliness, yearning, and self-reflexive intimacy.
• write with less mythological standards. your favourite authors wrote drafts, pages and pages of nothing. no one emerges like a phoenix.
• persistence and self conviction are how revolutionary girls go public, spaces of uncertainty and lapses of effort are how revolutionary girls become real & effective. do both.
• use the good silver every day because every day is all there is.
• maintain your own standards of success and never trust rich people/the police/men in authority.
• do not imagine that revolutionary ideals make you above the hu$tle: money is ***** but imagining leftism will absolve you from labour is even dirtier.
• don't stay in your lane and play by the SJW's rules. it is better to actively engage in discourse and say the wrong thing than not say anything at all. the paranoid ego will destroy activism.
• live in the impure spaces, grip hold to contradiction, language is always performative and alienated, no one "means" what they "say".
• feel the fear and do it anyway; do it wrong; do it with rigor & recklessness.
• you will never be bored because you will always have books to read. • the past never leaves: there is no time in the unconscious: everything that has ever happened is always still happening, and so don't judge yourself for still being in pain about things that happened a long time ago: "a long time ago" doesn't really mean ****.
• never apologize for crying; never apologize for not wanting to have ***.
• remember girls own the impossible, the void, the image, and when this system falls apart, we rise. we rise anyway.

white rooms and white coats and white lies. white pages of journals i haven't filled as often as prescriptions. white ashes from burning things with self proclaimed good intentions. white skin under white light. white bones that can never sit tight. self care. eat right. sleep well. goodnight.

i am from the west coast of california and the east coast of maharastra,
from the suburban houses of tracy and the village bungalows of jandu singha, from golden gate drive and marine drive.

i am from the united states public education system and the indian caste system. i am from the land of opportunities and the byproduct of two different american dreams.

i am from places i didn't choose and places i will never completely be able to leave. i am from the coordinates tattooed on my right arm, the hills with the prettiest sunsets in the whole world, from the love of a man with rigid principles and a woman who broke all the rules. i am from a culture that says i shouldn't but a mindset that says i will.

it's a college party
even though i never finished and the rest of y'all are spending money you don't have on the ingredients necessary for homemade sangria so you can drink the crippling anxiety of not knowing how to pay off your student loans away

there's a man living in a tent in the backyard, and i'm pretty sure we put one too many pieces of scrap wood in that very-hard-to-maintain bonfire. that has to be a metaphor for the state of most of our lives. stop throwing things i'm unprepared for in what already feels like a situation that is going to **** me.

is this a literal housewarming

i'm drunk, and sitting on the deck, counting the christmas lights. i smell ****, and there are white people dancing and singing to blink 182 inside.

i paint my name on a drywall with a brush and canisters i find on my way to the living room, where i'm asked to referee a game of beer pong. i lose interest quickly.

i scroll through my phone, sober enough not to text you but drunk enough to desperately want to. someone sits down next to me because i've apparently become that person at the party.

i talk about rent with a guy who really wants to connect on the fact that we're both middle eastern, even though i'm not middle eastern. he smells like PBR and completely believes what he's saying. he says he's proud of me for following my dreams of coming to new york and that he likes my "crazy hair" and that he wants to **** me.

i raise my eyebrows, more in disgust than interest, but he then takes his perceived cue to shamelessly ask me if i have a ******. i don't, and i leave before he brainstorms any alternatives i am just as aversive to.

ironically, i find a ****** dispenser attached to a tree on the walk to the subway. considering the amount of catcalling i experienced on the way to the station, my level of discomfort is amplified by the fact that the neighbourhood literally, physically implies, ******* is going to happen in the streets. it's 2am, and i just want to go home. and i'm sitting on the J train, recalling everyone who's told me it's shady and unreliable and makes you feel like you're going to die.

a few months later, i am nicknamed J train.

you're yelling at me to hurry up because we're going to miss our flight. i'm still standing in the shower at 7:08am, having locked you out of the hotel room we booked with the money we didn't spend on textbooks.

i'm staring out the window as people depart from the terminal. my hair is dripping wet. i focus on the sound of the drops hitting the carpet rather than watching you sit up in anticipation every time the woman on the intercom announces who's leaving and when and where to go.

i bet you wish someone had told you that about me. someone in a uniform with wings pinned to their blazer, assuring i will get where i'm going safely.  i can't tell if you're eager for this thing to get rid of me already, or making sure you know how to respond when it does. either way, it feels like you've decided i'm already more gone than not.

you didn't think about this when we were high school students on the field and in the bleachers. you didn't know that i intentionally didn't have a four-year plan. you didn't know that i didn't have one at all. i wasn't guaranteed the opportunity and burden to sit here as you panic in silence anymore than the next person. but i knew you were going to find new meanings for the words "departure" and "terminal".

the cabin air pressure gives me an excruciating ear ache, and my nose starts bleeding. while you were too busy freaking out, frantically pressing the attendant button,  i pulled a napkin out of my purse, looking away, more embarrassed by you than anything else. i make eye contact with a kid sitting in the middle aisle, and she starts crying. she tugs on her mother's sleeve, yelling, "mommy, she's bleeding! that lady's bleeding!"

her mother glances back at me with an apologetic smile, and eventually calms her daughter down, who seems more panicked about being on the plane with a dead person than my actual well being. i don't blame her. i have the empathetic capacity of a young child as well. being lightheaded and thousands of feet in the air doesn't allow much room for me to care or think about much else either.

a few minutes pass, and i've dozed off, but not so deeply that i don't hear the kid whisper, "is she gonna die?"

the attendant has made her round back to me, and asks me "miss, are you okay?" the tissues stuffed up my nostril are soaked in dark, red blood. i sigh.

"mommy, is she gonna die?" the kid repeats, tugging again.

i nod, more to the girl than the attendant and close my eyes again.