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Dear Anastasia (A letter of hope in the ...

Dear Anastasia (A letter of hope in the pandemic)

May 14, 2021

Dear Anastasia,

I always see you sitting in that quiet little café on Rue Caserne, sipping your iced tea by the window. You're wearing tortoise shell Lennon glasses, and a dress your ma made out of glazed cotton bedsheets. We never spoke, not directly, no, but I would often look at you through the window when I walked the streets in throes of hopeless love and youthful despair. Do you know there's a gelato shop on Bussy st. where the ice-cream man wears a turban? Maybe you could cycle there sometime.

To hope that this letter finds you well would be a stretch. You were the sad kind, and even in your precious little eyes the grey is unmistakable. You read with your lips pursed, as if it were some Russian tragedy tucked in your crimson book spines - I couldn't ever figure out the titles anyway. One evening, I saw you walk out of a Higginbotham's, and you had a paperback clutched in the pit of your left arm. You glanced at me idly, and then walked away somewhere under the Bougainvillea canopies.

Where do you now dredge your tiredness to, now that Rue Caserne is shut, and that their tangerine marmalade is rare? Have you read that paperback with stars on its spine? Where has your sorrow taken you - are you still staring into the discord, or have you grown into kindness and hope?

Out there the world, far from us, aches with the sores of a crisis - one much romanticized, one much in the highlights. A disease is a quiet affair - it intrudes your flesh without you knowing it, to rot it silently and intimately. You either succumb to it, or fall prey to its immaculate perfection: the miasma it gifts you. There is no victory over it, there is no cause for celebration even once the crisis drowns.

It is hard to reason why I remember you in my isolation: you were just a little girl on the streets of Pondicherry. But there was something intangibly beautiful about you sitting with your legs crossed by that café window. In your grey eyes that awaited their share of ennui and life, I saw resilience. Perhaps that's what we need more of amidst this wild fear that's killing us. You taught me that the tormentor isn't anybody else, as isn't the savior. All of us have your grey eyes Anastasia, even as our flesh turns putrid, and the insides of our mouths dry up.

Maybe that is what it is - maybe it's the Anastasia in me writing this letter to a sick writer who has turned numb in his tepid malady. And we shall be reborn into the horrors of life, shaken out of our vile apathy and mechanized expressions. Maybe we shall sit by that window in a tangerine haze some day, and sip our iced tea.

All my love,

A.

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