Prologue

I’d like to think that my forte is fiction writing. Hence, this sort of pensive non-fictional writing may come off a little forced.

Most people turn to digital media to express the wanderings of their souls. As a tragically ungifted visual artist, I can only serve as an audience to beauty created by other beings. I can, however, convey these fascinations in a decent fashion through the written word. I’ve been meaning to document every thought I’ve ever had about pop culture, list every one of my favourite movies, and maintain tear-stained retellings of popular Harry Potter fan-fiction. Likewise, I want to record every meaningful aspect of my life, my thoughts and philosophies, truths about the present era that both enrage and salve the wounds in my soul.

For whom, though? I can store these thoughts away, the little titbits of ideas that I have, but who’s going to enjoy them? Ideally, the whole world will, marvelling at my great taste in film and music. Maybe when future species come digging around for our remains they’ll find a little piece of me and believe how fascinating this moment and place are. Most importantly, the future will have a record of a little girl who was born in Bangalore, brought up in Chennai and Abu Dhabi, who made her way across the Atlantic to tackle climate change and experience autumn for the first time in Ann Arbor. I want to be seen, I want to be heard, I want time to remember my existence.

I imagine myself going through life with a couple of dogs and an intellectually intriguing human partner to share a couch and expensive wine with. I am, however, starting to see the appeal of furthering the human race; if I ever had kids of my own, I’d be able to leave behind a legacy, although not necessarily my name, given societal norms. Procreation is a basic human desire, because we’d like to have miniatures of ourselves strutting about, preaching our philosophies and carrying secrets about the chinks in our armours, all the while watching them run the world like we never could.

For the foreseeable future, I do not visualize any tiny cocktails of my genetic materials walking beside me, so this is it. This is my meagre, invisible addition to the thought universe of the human race, available for viewing, to be ridiculed and possibly accepted.

I live, I breathe, I yearn, I aspire, I crumble, I err, I love, I hope, I dream, I am a speck of dust within this snowglobe of existence, and before long I will vanish just as simply as I came to be. And if by happenstance another soul comes across this string of ones and zeros, singing tales of a place not too far away in a time not too long ago, I believe I will have lived.