He filed me in the drawer. The drawer for things technically correct and fundamentally wrong. He says the book treats my condition as beautiful.
He is correct that it is not beautiful.
He is wrong that it is a condition.
6 a.m. The alarm. The bus to the office. The code on the screen. The dal at lunch. The bus home. The alarm. The code. The dal. The bus. This is the life. The life is the ground.
At 6 a.m. the air shifts.
The deltoid. The left one. The ache begins where the muscle meets the bone — not injury, not strain. Memory. The muscle remembers a shape it has not held in this body. The shape is extension. The shape is width. The shoulders try to open past the width of a woman from Pune who writes code and eats dal and takes the bus and the shoulders cannot open that far and the trying is the ache and the ache is the thermals.
The air holds me.
Not the bus. Not the code. Not the dal. Not Dr. Patel. Not the DSM. The air. The air holds without asking and without conditions and without a lease and the air does not need me to produce code or eat dal or take the bus. The air needs me to extend.
I extend. Not physically. In the muscle. The muscle extends and the extending is the ache and the ache is the closest I come to being held and I will not let anyone file the closest I come to being held in a drawer for things that are fundamentally wrong.
The thermals are fundamentally right. The body knows.
6 p.m. The bus. The dal is cold. The code is saved. The shoulders have settled back to the width of a software developer. The ache has retreated to the place where the muscle meets the bone.
It will return at 6 a.m. The air will shift. The deltoid will remember. The shoulders will try.
Dr. Patel prescribes chai. The chai is warm. The chai is not the air. The warmth of chai is the warmth of a man who means well and files well and cannot feel the thermal because the thermal is not in the drawer. The thermal is in the body. The body is not a document. You cannot file a body.
You can only hold it.
— The Bird Woman
Pune. The window is open. The air is shifting.