Q

A girl who has not written for twenty years picks up her pen and writes her first word in two decades. The word was ‘I’. She is no longer a girl by now. There are breasts in the way – sometimes she pretends they are not hers, mostly she forgets they are; her hips carry weights, foreign and dull. These days she feels clunky, finds herself picking at a pimple that isn’t there.

On the day she writes for the first time in twenty years, she leaves behind her breasts and hips and phantom pimples.

First she writes an ‘I’, and then pauses. It blinks – innocuous, almost pleadingly – back at her. I in a sea of white, I stranded, I, vast and alone. A sudden sense of nakedness. The girl taps backspace and tries again:

She.