When my grandmother left, she took my belief in the gods she worshipped with her. I wondered if the hours spent on the marble floor in front of her temple weren’t out of devotion but rather out of her desire to be with her husband.
I read an article about how one can die of a broken heart and figured I was important enough to be so loved by her that I killed her by not giving enough love back, by not putting in the effort to keep our breaths in sync.
I believe there’s narcissism in self-hatred, in obsessively finding ways to plead guilty as the murderer of the victim of a collapsed lung, lamenting over oneself.
One day being a body with a mind hurt so much that I realized I feared immortality more than my parents’ death.
Ragini Gupta
Seattle, Washington