Edited By: Aahana Banerjee
The Meninges
Skull, Skeletal System
Homo Sapiens
1020222489
Asscrack of dawn, 2023
Dear Brain,
Why?
Do we actually just have two brain cells? Can we destroy our two brain cells? Communism and Confucianism are two different things.
Do we need a college education? Do we need to go to one and half hour sessions where they keep telling us how gullible we are? Why do they keep asking us to think critically? If we started thinking critically, you would have committed seppuku by bashing yourself against the walls of your bony cage.
Why do we forget? Do we have the right to forgetting?
Be glad you’re not Legs. Do you know how much this body runs? Do you know how long we’ve been running? What are we running away from?
We have been guzzling down caffeine. I don’t think we’ve ever felt this buzzed. Who knows how long we’ve been here? Are we sorry for something? What are we here for? To feel sorry? To eat uncooked rice while staring at big black letters requesting us not to waste food?
We’ve been reading – hallucinating while staring at a piece of a dead tree, as per Pinterest. Yeah, we have fifty different pinboards open in that app. Of what? Heh. Blood, tattoos, corsets – are we trying to be that kinda person or trying to love that kinda person?
Do you think all the caffeine will make Heart leap out of my chest? Will we stop feeling stuff then? But who’ll pump blood if Heart leaves? Becoming a vampire is one solution.
Can we become a vampire? I think we already are. Mess food is unappealing and the sun burns our eyes. We barely get out of our room.
We should stop thinking.
Yet, we’re in college. The only thing we’re supposed to do is think. Italicizing words matters. A change in pronunciation matters. An e instead of an a matters. Why? They’re all just vowels. They’re all just words. Words we’ve taught ourselves to read and write. Words we’ve taught ourselves to creatively write in. Words, Shabd. Letters, Akshar. Words that carry a history…
We should stop thinking.
For what has thinking ever done for us? We’ve thought ourselves out of love. We’ve thought ourselves out of grief. We’ve thought ourselves out of confusion.
We’ve thought ourselves into being something. We’ve thought ourselves into being academic. We’ve thought ourselves into a form, considering meter and punctuation.
We should stop thinking.
We live in a world that has a Sun that may burn us to nothing someday. We live in a world that will make people fight to the death for drinking water someday. We have a world where we speak a language we are born in while speaking a language we are taught. What are we?
Postcolonial hybrid? Fast reader? Asshole?
We should stop thinking. We should stop consuming caffeine. We should probably go to sleep.
We should stop referring to ourselves as ‘we’.
Do we have a point? Why are we alive? Heh. Look at us philosophizing.
In our journalism class (we always play catch-up in that one), we were taught the six essential questions: who, what, why, when, where, and how. Do these questions apply to us and our being? Beingggggggggg – Literary theory is that one irritating pathogen that never quite exits your body and pops up as a sneeze at the most unconventional of times.
Sorry, we digress a lot. The six questions… let’s ask them. As if we don’t deal with unanswerable questions for a large part of our life.
Who is an English Literature Major? What is creative writing? When are we going to sleep? Where are we? Why are we writing this? How are we still awake?
These questions will remain unanswered. The point of life is to encounter these floaty questions and in the process of trying to answer them, become a floaty plastic bag that drifts in the wind.
We should wrap up this flaming mess of a letter. As every letter ends with fond words and advice, we should do the same. Though honestly, I’m not that fond of you right now.
We will become comfortable with discomfort. We will exist in reality. We will… will we?
I think the caffeine high is fading.
Hating the fact that we are what we are,
– S.