It is 1:43am, and I am reading about entropy again, and the universe is supposedly expanding in every direction at once. Yet, I have spent the better part of three years standing perfectly still, and the dying stars are scattering themselves across impossible distances, and I WANT TO ESCAPE MYSELF.
The asteroid does not ask permission of the vacuum. The photon does not grieve the sun that birthed it. Somewhere beyond the reach of ordinary sight, a black hole is swallowing entire histories, and I cannot even seem to swallow a single memory, and this is not how consciousness is supposed to feel, is it? IS IT?
I sat cross-legged beneath the window, watching Orion drag itself across the sky like an old prophecy. I think about the Ship of Theseus. I think about every cell that has died and every thought that has vanished and every version of me that should have disappeared with them. I have replaced every part. I have replaced every part. And thus spoke the comet: I SHOULD HAVE CHANGED BY NOW.
You know the rest. You know how the paradox goes. The self survives and survives and survives until survival itself becomes the prison. I keep waiting for some great rearrangement. I wait for the universe to make a clerical error and wake me up as someone lighter. Even light bends under sufficient pressure, and I have carried enough pressure to split worlds.
There is something achingly beautiful about this. The universe expands, stars die, light bends, and yet somehow the most difficult distance to travel can be the one between who we are and who we desperately wish to become.
But perhaps change is not always the great rearrangement we wait for. Perhaps sometimes it happens so quietly that we cannot see it while we are living through it. The person who can look inward with this much honesty, who can feel this deeply and turn it into words this beautiful, may already have travelled much farther than she realizes.
And for what it is worth Gargi, I hope you never escape yourself entirely. Some parts of you are far too precious to lose. ❤️
this was so beautifully written, you capture the ache so deeply, that I feel it in me too