Things I am No Longer Walking Briskly Past To someone who spends an awful amount of time only thinking and feeling Thought is almost always a verb- things are changing, boarding flights, Moving cities, becoming unidentifiable. And it’s self-evident, but not in the way you can verify being seen, read- My parents do not understand texting anxiety- Do we allow ourselves to feel things only after coining words for them? Curling inside vague placeholders of foreign languages for warmth. I hold out my hand, palms outstretched, taut and visible- An open invitation glued with intent, slowly shrinking into a yawn of plausible deniability- there are many benefits of reading the law- As ornate defences collapse into my lap: Habitual ambiguity, casual disinterest/intellectual dispassion- Indeterminacy and contingency of texts, of punctuations, spaces/safe spaces. I endow, construct, denude and deny meanings Sleep over them, weep over them clinging to a blanket of unfamiliar wrinkles in the tenses- Returning to poetry, thinking of why I left, Twisting the doorknob with muscle memory Homecoming is a verb, and I have allowed myself to feel it.
Anupriya is reading law at NLUD and laments that emotion, like everything else that you cannot footnote with authority, is often dismissed in legal writing. She shares her work on the intersections of creativity, art and feminism with the law here.
Alaka Ravi is an independent artist exploring new media through portraits and places.
Follow her work here.