February 2019

Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, echoed the sentiment of all of us when she said, “Personally, I love a good love story.” Ali McGraw melted our hearts when she told us, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” James Joyce had us utterly confused when he explained, “Love loves to love love.”

The moment I realized I was in love for the first time floats into my memory more often than I’d like it to. It was summer in a small hometown with a boy. But more than that, there was me, frozen with overwhelming self-awareness and recognition of feeling. I had read every teen romance novel and seen every romantic comedy the world had to offer and lived with idyllic impressions of love circling my brain for years. Standing there, with the conscious thought of “you are in love” in my mind, I felt mainly discomfort.

When I tell people I’m never getting married, their faces usually look something like this:

The equation is seemingly simple: woman = desire to get married = one day married. Their brains are running around in confusion trying to figure out why in the world a woman wouldn’t want to put on a white dress and say “I do.”

I love weddings, but I didn’t always. 

When I was younger, they left me sitting with my hands over my ears in family photos. I hated the loud music, the pulsing rhythms of dholak beats and voices which seemed to leave all the bones in my body with a slight tremor. I hated the mad crush of people, crammed wall-to-wall in old family houses which are no longer in the family, having been sold or rented or abandoned to America.

1.     Does the thought of Valentine’s Day make you wanna:

a.     Gag.

b.     Call up some girls and drink wine and talk about how you hate l*ve.

c.     “Boooo” at couples who show PDA on the street.

For the most part I have good judgement when it comes to people. I have surrounded myself with a group of strong women who bring fulfilment to my life and build me up and support me just as much as I like to support them. These relationships are mutually beneficial, and I am happy that I can rely on these people in any difficult circumstance. Where my people judgment tends to falter, however, is when it comes to my taste in men.

There is a website I used to frequent called “Who’s Dated Who." Its purpose is exactly what it sounds like: to inform us mortals about the love lives of the rich and famous. In the murky depths of this website I have discovered Cher once dated Tom Cruise, Zac Efron once had an “encounter” with Lindsay Lohan, and that learning about celebrity love lives is an easy and addictive way to avoid the complexities of your own.

My dad is sitting across from me eating Eggos. He doesn’t eat them gracefully. They are stuffed into his mouth, loudly chewed, sugars clinging onto fat as they enter his bloodstream. I imagine my dad’s body is made of all the unhealthy things: corn syrup, GMO’s, candy bars. He’s had cancer already, but it’s no fault of ambiguous FDA regulations or the orange soda he sips casually as he watches Fox & Friends. “It’s inevitable,” he says.

Let me capture

Your likeness forever.

Look at me and

Hide your sad.

Don’t look so ugly and angry.

You will regret this.

Her veil: blush, pearl-spotted.

Lashes: heavy (fake), coming undone.

The pale gap above her eye. Rani, half-past-nineteen.

It is a Tuesday, raining. I wait with her in a much-loved family minivan.

The heat slips down my neck and her baby sister’s

I completely suck at self-care. And not in a cutesy, humblebrag way or in a self-deprecating way. We just do not get along. It’s to the point where I hear someone exhort the importance of self-care along with suggestions of meditations or face masks, and I roll my eyes to the back of my skull so hard they may pop out from their sockets. My mom is probably forwarding a Tiny Buddha email to me right now, and I’m already moving it to my trash folder without reading it.