January: Happiness stands at my door. It follows me around the house, tapping my shoulder again, again. Name me. Then we are at sea, name me. We stand in a rip current, hands wound tight. Name me. I know what’s going to happen next before it does. & I wake up with the plains of my cheeks drowning in saltwater, as a knock on the door goes through my body.

February: I’m going around a room gifting my tongue to blurry faces, and I preface each ceremony chanting: I’m tired of holding my tongue back. I’m tired of holding my tongue back. I’m tired of holding my tongue back.

March: There is a small bowl filled with water in a room bare of mirrors. On one side of the bowl sits my great-grandmother and I feel like on the other side I’m sitting but then I’m also omniscient and watching this from a bird’s view so I’m not sure. Great-grandmother and me-but-maybe-not-me-and-someone-else stare at the bowl like we’re trying to see something there, predict something. The staring is so intense, my eyes burn, it’s like if we just blink, we’ll miss something in the water. & then I’m crying, not so sure that the bowl was filled with water.

April: Forgetfulness is key to being human, my Nani used to say. I could swear I had a dream & I was writing something really important in it but I couldn’t really say for sure if it was a dream or I’d pretended my reality had become a dream. & what was so important that I was writing?

May: I breathe in a country that does not turn, is killed and birthed again and again, and births trauma for just being a woman. & there are so many women, it’s raining.

June: Birthday month & no dreams. Oh well.

July: I wear chameli, nargis, and gendas in my hair, on my hands, and as anklets. I try running, as if flowers can make the sounds of home.

August: Mother clenches a plate of pity mangoes, an early funeral gift from relatives. A woman is whispering she used to be a teacher, oh poor her, poor her, poor—and then she bites her tongue. Another woman bites her tongue and in response, I bite my tongue. We rub rain on our bruises, dyeing the hurt.

September: I am moving but I’m not sure if I’m in a car. On the roadside stand mourners like boulders among the scant shrubs & I want to touch them but I’m too scared. As if mourning is contagious. So many mountains too. Like someone drew a pattern one too many times and forgot to erase the ugly ones.

October: I’ve slit the soles of my feet to root out the vagrancy but these women I don’t know keep stitching my feet back up using their own dreams as sutures/madness.

November: We are digging a land I don’t know & the entire time I’m expecting sunflowers to show their face even though I know flowers emerge above the surface. & we keep digging, there’s a camaraderie even though I don’t know who is we here. & now I’m in my Dadi’s storage digging inside her jaggery jars to find the coins I hid, saving for god knows what.

December: There is a fire siren going off and I wake up cursing whoever’s caused it, only to walk out in the corridor and find that all the bins sitting outside my room, filled to the brim with winter clothes, have gone missing.