By Anshu Pinnamaraju
There is this object in
my room,
looking at me with tired eyes.
Pink, red, and blue reflect through
its comely body,
radiating elegance—
the elegance I wish the reflection inside it had.
My childhood never revolved around it.
My heart today throbs because of it.
“Rosy pink heart,”
I told myself.
I believed it...
I thought I did.
Maybe it’s normal to be the grey talk
in someone else's rainbow dream.
“Shit! Stop it! Your eyes can’t swell up yet!”
After all, maybe it was just my face.
That rosy pink faded to a brownish red.
My white eyes turned gray.
Just meaningless words...
I did not care.
Being pretty was pointless, I guess...
That reflection, inside those four edges—
those four edges now broken into hundreds of pieces—
They zoomed in
on the grays and yellows,
the little scars and stretches.
Crooked teeth, transparent through my mouth.
Googly eyes, covered with glasses.
Extra-large baggy denims wrapping my thighs skin-tight...
A few hollow punctures
in my gut,
made with broken glass,
will not kill me...
Right?
“Confidence is key,” I told myself.
“Fake it till you make it?”
It's been four years.
The rain set in.
The rainbow passed.
Maybe one day,
my reflection
will simply be an image of me.