Till the age of 11, she was adorable. This much is obvious. Perhaps it all went downhill when she began wearing glasses. She began twitching her nose, to adjust the constantly slipping spectacles. Or maybe puberty did a bad job.
She thumbs through her childhood photographs. Those eyes! Piercing through the space, staring back. But in later years, she notices how she looks away from the camera. Her skirts are at that strange midway length. They hang around her calves. Flapping, ungraceful. Not the smart knee length. Or the comforting ankle kissing fall. Stopping midway. The word Awkward grips her mind.
Everything is lumpy and shapeless. Without the glow of pre-pubescence. It makes her want to rip apart every photograph from those years. From 11 to 16, each time, blinking away, wanting to vanish. Wanting to disappear. And now, many years later, she smudges the edges of the photographs, struggling to love herself in those awkward years.
—-
nehamaami 
Very crisply written….i love stories where the interpretation is left to the readers imagination. 🙂
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Vara, vara your writing has gone to a thani higher level…
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Sad. Your fiction, perhaps, but truth for many girls.
Well-written, as always.
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Aisa hi hota hai. Which is why many girls were rarely photographed those few years.
Beautifully written, as usual:)
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You need to write that novel, I think. These fiction fragments are overlapping with the poems and the landscape is getting blurred and boggy. Your last few poems left me dissatisfied and unhappy; not because they weren’t good, they were, they were also incomplete and that is my grouse.
Travel safe, Neha.
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Sigh!
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i am her:)
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