The day is gorgeous. I stand in the sun, palms overturned, and melt in the warmth. I miss college today.
The grass is green, all of a sudden. I am slathered in malai. I will be a princess in this house for the next eight months, I will get random hugs and kisses from Ammi, tail maalishes from Papa. But I haven't seen Faiqa in days. I don't count a one a.m meeting over chicken patties and Pepsi and Dew in the kitchen two days ago.
I shield my eyes from the sun with my dupatta, and stand in the garden with arms outstretched, like a sombre messiah, like someone waiting for an embrace.

(There was so much more to write. Now I've lost my nerve.)

redefinition.

It's recent enough that I have faint mehndi stains on my palms and running along the backs of my index fingers, new enough that wearing articles of jewellery constantly causes pleasure and discomfort simultaneously. If I try hard enough I can feel hesitant fingertips around my ring, and smell tube roses in the corners in my room.

We perfected the Before Sunrise music room scene, bitten-down smiles and averted eyes.

It hardly took a minute and I am left neither here nor there.

Emmeline.

I drip into Faiqa's living space while mine is painted mango. Toothbrush, books, socks, contacts, music. Her elbows rest against my back as we sleep. We wake up to the radio, to Avril Lavigne. To promises of greatness, and to fucked up days.

We'll remember this one hurting like a bitch, she said later. She's got period cramps. I've got a headache and unwept tears. We find our way to London Book Co. and hover around the man and woman trying to sort out relationship politics, we look for books and then nestled between two looming shelves of books we open Wordsworth and crisps and ketchup and it's a miracle we read out loud to each other without our voices cracking, without tears, murmuring sometimes, racing through verse to get to the end and the essence and repeating the childhood the childhood, and sometimes we shut up at the end of a poem, speechless, in our own thoughts, and sometimes it's too much and we're quiet and we look at each other with sad sad smiles and we don't know whether to laugh or cry, and there's nowhere else to look. And it's so beautiful it aches instantly. Before, during, and after. And she says, as I finish one, that's us, Azka, that's us!

Each Scrabble match reduces one from the total we'll ever have. The finite-ness of everything is the elephant in the room. Still can't articulate two nightmares dovetailing into one, though words creep in lending tangibility to most of what we never stated.

I mistook my own reflection for her in a mirror in Saeed Book Bank once.

We'll remember this one hurting like a bitch.