Lavanya Arora
When, after a breakup, each member of the polycule decides to leave me alone in “our” apartment
It’s been three months since I posted an ad on Instagram, looking for flatmates to replace love. I even clicked a selfie holding my tears back like a dam and flashed my yellow teeth for the gnomes in my phone. I wanted them to see me for who I am instead of the memories that haunt me out of shape. A hollowness eats me from within like the innermost layer of a Russian doll. My side-therapist sings & says it’s my hunger. I first tasted it at twenty-one & got hooked to it like my cousins on religion or the American Dream. There’s no in-between to this hunger. All it does is singe. For a decade it’s been shoveling heap after heap of dead love stories on my heart. Now my heart is buried deep in them like a worm-infested seed with all chance of germination hollowed out. No rooting-shooting hormones will help the vacuum of me. No fertilizers freshen up my endosperm-rid self. All I’ll ever have is a past and a promise. Nematodes will show up in a bit, I’m sure. Slime mold scavenging the floor for detritus will touch me and know a halted heaven. Even the hungry fingers of bacteria will grow tired of chewing me into smaller, insignificant molecules, then spit me out next to the roots of a dead tree. I’ll try diffusing close to it, getting sucked into it. But there will be no groundwater around its rotten roots. The lack of leaves on its branches will reflect my own lack. Until, the eventual talons of vultures. The three-headed crows.
At the grocery shop/video game parlour across the street
We’d save up our weekly allowance to buy blue chips, blue Pepsi, colour our hearts blue on Sunday afternoons in the heat of June before entering the aluminum-framed den that reeked of other kids’ defeat and sweat-stained blue mica of MDF-board consoles – their red joysticks electric in our palms. The four lozenge-buttons we smashed with all our adolescent digits whittled away faster than either of our grandparents’ knees. Our palms smacked all four together after a losing streak in Tekken, Streetfighter, Mortal Kombat against a child younger or shorter than us. Could’ve shoved ‘em in the coin slot. Waited for the shopkeeper to find their small body even smaller, swimming in the sea of metal coins like a miniature Scrooge McDuck. So small, inconsequential without his grandkids’ adventures. The shopkeeper didn’t let his own kids leave the house, play in the den with us, even though it was just a latch away. Maybe he cared only about profit, or knew the heat of defeat can bloody noses faster than the steadily incremental heat of the world. No wonder his children are well-settled now, with conventional jobs and caesarean kids already flaunting their fists’ first few achievements on Instagram, while we stare at our callused knuckles, still scribbling poems about video games.
Lavanya Arora (they/he) is an independent researcher based in Bengaluru, India. They’ve been longlisted and nominated for two awards each, and published in Thimble, Honey, ANMLY, and other magazines. They love cooking ugly delicious food and can be found chopping vegetables and words on Substack @lavaurora.
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