top of page
Shreya Gupta
three reasons Shreya Gupta is stuck in a time loop
1) the online report card is a murderer
—>it kills her to open it up like a new basket of ripe fruits. it shreds her self-making guts and gnashes them into a carcass to view passively. she kills herself daily when her fingers probe religiously, feverishly, habitually. they stretch refresh so long that even time cries mercy. why is it she can’t spell out the interactive in projected-fate-academic-failure misery. she wished the pixelated letter wouldn’t drain her like a valve and pour weighted tar down her throat. as it strangles her she is red-eyed & hiccuping sobs but the boxy font only stares back placidly through her shuddering weeps. she knows it is death, and belatedly hollows herself, leaping right into its inviting arms.
2) because google-calendar is supposed to be a record
of her existence but the last time she wrote down the date it was March 15th, 2020. she operates on hour-blocks & iced lattes & cluster-months & tutor-crams & pulled eyelids. between eleven PM and one AM she sometimes stops. the clock tower within disassociates. google always seems to miss the smoldering FOMO sprouting from her clownish-faux persona. some algorithm pressed her into an arch of pre-planned events for a college-favored, passionately moraled savior. so that’s why if anyone asked her who she was she would tell them to come back later, business hours are closed until two-years later.
3) is the reason she crosses her toes on school bus mornings breathing shallow air for thirty minutes to be trampled by the footprints of school spirit, clawing concrete walls only to get a faint mark in. the previous night she dreamt of gold & bulging CVs
& #bodygoals & someone who would hold her. she painted her nails black and trimmed her hair short to tell them she knew who she was. it wasn’t like she lived for the early action applications, but still spread herself thin into perfectly-scaled ouroboros, slippery and under-fed. her friends tell her she is wise but how can a ghost be a person of caliber? to be alive she needs notifications, to feel her spine she ravages a self-destructive academic bias. she is so greedy to be unforgettable that it seems there is no horizon past graduation’s closing ceremony; the high-hung fruit has shriveled, so now that she is thirsty
—
*D.C. stands for Da Capo, an Italian musical term that means "from the beginning"
D.C.—>
i clench my teeth when i
pull the covers over and wake up with a tense core then brush my bloody gums—mouth
blabbered japanese on returning school buses, jabbing my stomach ache with one hand—take
knives out of drawers recalling dreams of flipping handles & the taste of leg tendons—shrug my
shoulders in unwillingness to be vulnerable, to communicate (isn’t that what i’m best at?)—am
the petty one who spites gloss-painted girls but cries to be them anyways—say i will study and
study and study even though i am the only one falling inside cardboard boxes, eyes wide in
darkness—pluck jasmine petals thinking of it strung through my hair when i was red-dyed feet
and gazing upon the murthis in pati’s cabinet—beg for laced fingers, for shame today (ashamed
tomorrow), riding along rocky plateaus of sticky shame—snap cello strings and throw glass just
hard enough that it won’t break—know myself one day but refuse mirrors,
i drown myself only to breathe again at the bottom
Shreya Gupta is an Indian-American writer from the Chicago Metropolitan Area. She enjoys writing about experiences that resonate with her– catching momentary interactions and weaving them into webs of stories. When she's not thinking about the manga she's currently reading, she'll be on a long drive with no destination.
bottom of page