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I am writing this for the times it feels like the only possible collective future is one where things inevitably get a lot worse. We live in the age of one-in-a-lifetime crises occurring 1 every few months, when a handful of tyrants deciding to start wars, bomb schools, blockade trade routes affect grain prices in the global south and fuel prices across the world, and your ability to pay for…
a row of people ( homo sapiens ) cycle back home from work this friday eve a blackbird ( turdus merula ) sprints across the grass, urgently a thirsty pothos ( epipremnum aureum ) by the window asks to be watered M. ( homo sapiens ), also cycling past just now, noticing me ( homo sapiens ) at the window, waves the blackbird catches an earthworm ( lumbricus terrestris ) the pothos, watered now,…
Listen, I am just here to narrate what I am seeing. I claim no part or sides in this airborne scuffle I just witnessed, other than that of an inhabitant of the territory being fought over. It begins suddenly, and if you have your headphones on - your eyes glued to your phone screen as you usually do when you are waiting at the busstop each morning, you are sure to have missed it. It starts with…
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. Joan Didion, On Keeping A Notebook I've always felt predisposed to write. I don't know when this began for me, or if there was a beginning. I do, distinctly remember though, that my 5th grade English…
Hey, you. Yes - you, dear Reader who is most likely my dad (Hi dad!), my husband (Hi F.!), or some poor chap who has chanced upon this on Bear's Most Recent page: I have literally nothing today that hasn't already been said and over analyzed in popular culture before, so if you are looking for an insightful piece of writing, you can stop right here and carry on with your day. Are you still here?…
Content warning: Discussion of miscarriage and pregnancy loss. Please take care while reading. Last week I had a miscarriage. A missed miscarriage. Not only did the embryo stop growing inside me; my body apparently never got the eviction notice and continued to believe itself pregnant. I was given three equally shitty options for dealing with this diagnosis, and I chose the fastest, most painless,…
One week ago I found out, at around 9 weeks of gestation, that my pregnancy was no longer viable. Everything I had read about the first trimester had prepared me for this moment - there's a reason pregnancies are not announced until 12 weeks, I had read time and again that majority of first trimester losses are because of an embryo incompatible with life, and that as many as 25% of pregnancies…
Ewa was a good 40, maybe more, years older than i, and for the last year or so i was lucky to call her my friend. she was the first neighbour i really befriended - or rather, who befriended me, in my decade of living in this closed-off country. her presence made our neighbourhood feel like home. she made a community wherever she landed. within months of moving into our building, she knew most of…
I have never been particularly good at being calm in the face of uncertainty, unlike F. who tends to take the "if you can't change the outcome, there is no point in worrying" approach. In fact in the 10+ years I have known him, I have never seen him catastrophize. I attribute this to his parents who had him when they were in their late 30s - financially and emotionally stable - and had already…
As a child, I was always being told to mind my own business. I asked too many - and more importantly (as deemed by polite society) wrong - questions to people. I have always been curious - but I am specifically curious about people: what and who they love, how they live, what they like, what they hate, how they get by (financially, intellectually, spiritually, socially), why they make the choices…