By: Divya Rosaline

Today, I will write. For myself. My words won’t weave themselves around people’s expectations of it. They won’t skirt around vulgarity and offense. They won’t refrain for the sake of opinions and criticism and judgment. They will breathe my life into pages and word documents that I will shelve for my tomorrows to see. They will sew my thoughts into palpable wholes for me to come back to when the time is right. Like a lover I can never leave. Like a lover who you belong to but who never belonged to you. My words are my offerings to the soiled histories of time. My reflection minus the make-up and right lighting. They stitch me, unstitch me and undress me to the bare minimum. I sing while they strum to my flamenco soul heartbeat in step with its pace. Sometimes I don’t recognize them, like a parent who can’t recognize an errant child and I beat myself up for it. What have I brought into this world? But they thrive, they grow and they spread their branches into vacant thoughts and idle musings, during hot afternoons when even smokes lose their charm. They’ll author your promises and break them too. They’ll furnish your troubles into neatly-stacked compartments of regret and disappointments. They’ll throw open the windows though, so that your soul will beam with relief. You will know the comfort of solitude but not the misery of loneliness because they will understand you when you can’t. They are the beams of light and the shadows of darkness that make up every tiny living atom within you. They’re your energy. An immortal, reverberating part of you.

So today, I will write.

I will write for myself, so that I can give to you the most honest, unapologetic part of me that there is for you to see.