Emulation

This new life is new, but I am daring. There’s a wildness in me, a certain excitement that comes to me in a dream, claiming that it is ready for great things. But I think I’m not a day dreamer.

Every morning I shower with a highlighter shade four times femininer than my skin, and take a breakfast of cheap lipsticks of different ribbons of a love-rainbow. I read the fashion page of the newspaper that is thrown at me through the window every morning, licking at new skirts with slits that reach your hip bones and dresses made for people who don’t have hip bones. The rest of the newspaper I tear in rectangles and squares to make bird origami of, later.

Why do I have hip bones?

At the magazine office, I am asked to make coffee instead of calls, and whenever the sugar is too much or too little, I have to stand in a corner chewing away at my love-rainbow shade of lipstick.

The lipstick tastes like chocolate and wax. And the coffee I’ve taken a sip of before serving. It does not taste like rainbows. Or love.

In the evenings, I write long letters to a man in Italy, recounting myself as a design of beauty, and in return he sends me sketches and half-done paintings of his interpretations of myself. They are nothing more than a few drunk lines and eyelash-like curves. There are no hip bones, no hips. There are no bones at all, except the ones sticking out of cheeks and collars.

Why do I have bones?

I also write short articles on new clothing trends that the models follow like a diet, but they’re never read by anyone except the boxer I am dating.

Nights pass by like film in a stolen camera—strangers riding bikes and strange bike riding, strange boxing and strangers killing each other. Strange strangers stranging.

In parking lots as empty as my mind, I stand in a corner chewing on my love-rainbow shade of lipstick and sucking on sticks of celery, while the boxer tries to kill the other boxer.

He always wins.

When everyone has died into a sleep, and after the boxer has killed me once (while himself dying thrice), I walk to a small drain that runs by the building, and fling the origami birds over the drain.

They drop and float away.

They don’t sink, though.

Then I go back to sleep beside the boxer, and dream of a new life, a newer life.

***

Yashi A. Bisht is an 18 year old student who loves the idea of writing, more than she loves writing. She’s currently living in a desperate, hell-hole of a city in India. She likes all things orange.