Desaturation.

a piece by our staff writer, Tanisha Ahuja

This city used to have colour. Not colours like the ones you could point at and name, but thicker.Something that’d soak into everything. It lived in the way I would walk fast, and now in thatnoise I’d make just to prove I’m still here. Those nights, however, they wouldn’t make it easy. They weren’t just empty, but also endless.

Now it feels like someone turned down the saturation and they don’t want to turn it back up.

I stand at the edges of streets, ones far away from home, holding a cigarette burning between my fingers, the ash drops onto the pavement as if evidence, and I move away, not wanting to be seen. The neon sign across the street flickers, struggling and trying its best to stay alive. I watch it longer than I should, almost like I’m thinking of how we relate together.

People talk about grief like it has rules. Like it’s a straight line. Like how its counterpart, healing, is linear. They tell me it will soften and shrink, and that one day I will wake up and it will not sit so heavily in my chest. They say this like it is comforting. Like forgetting is the goal.

But forgetting feels like betrayal.

I carry my grief in small ways, inconvenient even. Like they’re habits I can’t break. Places I still avoid.

The nights, they blur together. Bars, streets, clubs, rooms, events that look the same once you put them under low light. People brush past me, some stay, some eager to leave. Then when they leave, and it’s quiet, there’s a calming sense to it. It’s like an annoying aching warmth buried deep under the grey.

In loving memory, I think of the version of me that existed before I learned how permanent loss can feel.

I crush the cigarette under my shoe and keep walking, leaving the evidence behind. The

streetlights ahead of me are pale and indifferent, but they are still on. And for now, that’s all that matters to me