I watch the season gently drape light across my room, inch by inch more every morning. The first thing I see clearly after waking up is the dust orbiting inside the rays from my window. It’s the one time I ever allow myself to quietly marvel at something I usually frown at before sweeping it away.
My apparent distaste for dust is something I inherited from my mother. I am much more tolerant of it than she is since I’ve seen her battle with invisible particles every day and lose when they dance around her again after cleaning. She’s learned to look for it so often and intensely that I sometimes think she’ll never be able to “unsee” dust as her enemy.
I grieve in spring the way most people tend to clean - sometimes in small, sporadic doses and other times in one large, structured manner. It is fascinating to think about how no one teaches us how to grieve when it is a feeling that touches everyone and everything. Spring is a strange time to be grieving, I say to myself. The earth visibly sheds a layer of itself for us, but all I can think about is how the people I’ve lost, both living and dead, are unable to feel the warmth of the sun on their skin standing next to me, with me.
The combination of learning to grieve in my own way and grieving different types of loss is a task I am unprepared for but force myself to do regardless. Underneath the haptics of hot pressurized water, I lean against the shower tiles and replay memories of old friendships, broken relationships with my father and brother, and members of my family that passed too young, too soon. In this process, I find the most painful aspect of grief is not living in the past with them but slowly realizing the indelible stain of love they’ve left for me to hold alone in the present.
In previous years, I dealt with grief the way my mother dealt with dust. It always arrived when days were bright and life felt seemingly stable. I hated that I could see it disappear and fade into corners I could not reach. At times, it expanded further than I wanted it to and sometimes grew into something I could not recognize until it eventually clouded my vision and tainted my senses.
Now, I’ve accepted that dust is simply as innocent as it is a nuisance. It shouldn’t require too much attention. In some capacity, it will continue to follow surfaces I touch wherever I go. I choose to live with the guilt of not cleaning every corner or every layer because when the sun begins to shine again, I want to look up instead of down for once.
˚ · • . ° .
The Humdrum:
[a list of life updates I can recall and string words together for]
God is a DJ, life is the dance floor.
My boyfriend and I walked through South Philly and found a typewriter shop. Considering how passionate the owner/ typewriter engineer was, it was safe to assume shops like these across the country were rare. The owner asked if I was a writer and I hesitated to answer before enthusiastically saying, “yes, yes I am”. Outside of the store, there were two typewriters on display. Someone wrote, “god is a dj, life is the dancefloor” and I decided then that owning a ridiculously expensive typewriter is definitely on my list but not today.
This hot girl is walking.
Hey I know I’m embarrassingly late to this lifestyle-ish trend but I’ve decided that I will no longer be a slave to my desk from 9 am to 5 pm. The few times I get up to move from my desk, I’m doing the dishes or cooking myself a meal where I have the anxious urge to finish in under 10 min or else I will be pinged to join an impromptu meeting to discuss impromptu things.
I’m warming up to audiobooks.
Currently, I’m listening to The Art of Seduction during my hot girl walks. I sometimes switch from classic non-fiction works like this and erotic smut like A Priate’s Desire. There is no in-between - either I’m turning into a literary weapon or am blushing profusely in public, relieved yet excited by the fact that no one can hear what I’m hearing.
My parents never believed in dentists.
It’s ironic considering every strict Indian parent pushes their children toward the medical field. My siblings and I were fed this propaganda that dentists were only for American children who eat junk food and candy daily. Needless to say, after 25 years, I booked my first dentist appointment last week.
Teenagers in the wild are the ultimate performers.
My boyfriend and I sat somewhere on the third level for the Phillies game, close to the railings so we had a good view of the field. Surrounding us were groups of high-schoolers, a billboard poster of what a tik tok generation would look like if they were all white and blonde. I was half an edible in when the group of young boys on the other side of the steps started making eyes with the girlies seated in front of me. After an hour of slow and aggressive flirtation between the two groups, I observed that they all had no sense of self-awareness but loved to be perceived.
The boys with gold chains around their necks and the girls with digital cameras sticking up their middle fingers every five minutes were truly having the time of their lives that night with their friends. For the first time, I felt like my generation before me when a phrase crept unconsciously into my head: “Oh, to be young”.