Reimagining You
Illustration by Lea.
When I was a little girl, I was surrounded by the most magical of women. There was my mother, who could make the most delicious puff pastry in the entire world, my aunt, who claimed she had a million stories tucked away in every crease in her brain, and my grandmother, who could love so, so much. At grandma's house, I went to bed with my stomach filled to the brim with pastry, a goodnight kiss, and tales of pea-pod princesses swimming around in my head. The pea-pod princess—Amya, my aunt had named her—was my first-ever role model. Every night would bring a completely different ending to her story. One night, she ended up in an entirely different kingdom, with only a tiny dragon for a friend. Another night, she ran away to the city to design bathroom mats. Silly as they seem now, there was always one thing that flowed through all these stories: change, and how she was so ready to accept whatever came her way. She would open her eyes to a new day and decide she could be anything she wanted.
About ninety of these stories later, when the pool was drained, and summer was almost over, it was time to go home. I would be devastated. I would have to go back to school, fall back into my tedious routine, to a ceiling that didn’t have glow-in-the-dark stars like my aunt’s. And this would devastate me, every year. One especially devastating night, after everybody had gone to sleep, I cried my eyes out because I really, really couldn’t bear spending another year alone. There I was, curled up on the floor, between the itchy rug and the cold, hard marble. And there she was, hovering over my head, small eyes peering at my frail little body.
“Get up,” she said.
I jumped to my feet and wiped my nose with the back of my arm, startled and a little embarrassed.
“You are the pea-pod princess,” my aunt said kindly, smiling, and led me to her mattress for one last story.
And with that, I dreamt up my first perception of a writer: a small woman sharing a mattress with her niece, searching every corner of her brain for a tale to tell. This, I knew I had to have. I decided there and then, that cold night with the air still and my aunt’s fingers gently combing my hair: I had to be a storyteller, and nothing else would do
As I grew older though, and stepped out of my pod, the magic disappeared without a trace. There was nobody left that my sweet grandmother could remember, my mother fell sick and then sicker, my aunt moved across the world, and everything was just stale. I now exclusively read mean poets who couldn’t think up any reason to smile. My view of writers now was this: an old unshaven man, drunk at 10 am, lying on a beaten couch in a lazily furnished studio apartment. And I still wanted it. I wanted that life of romanticized sadness and unmendable relationships. I’d been dealt a bad hand. I’d been the one left clinging to wind, and I'd been the one forced to stare into the depths of my dirty, disfigured soul. If anybody deserved to be angry and intolerant and contemptuous, it was me. The air around me hung heavy with bitterness. I stopped taking care of myself. One, no breakfast. Two, no lunch. Three, a half-eaten dinner and half a dozen mugs of coffee.
And then one night, I was staring up at my ceiling, dark, without a star, feeling rather small. And I remembered how my English teacher once mentioned how soft and beautiful the letter ‘m’ sounded. I looked at myself in the mirror, meem, meem, meem.
My very own name, the true reflection of my Self, gentle and soft and beautiful. And right at that moment, something quite magical happened. The streetlight right outside my window, that hadn’t worked in more than a decade, turned on and shone down on my face. My self in the mirror was illuminated. And I decided this was the kind of writer I would be. An opalescent being full of all things divine.
Life had technically not changed, still populated with days—sometimes months—where I could not bring myself to be the writer I wanted to be. But that one incident, coincidence or not, gave me enough hope to last me seven lifetimes.
You have to wait quite a bit. And yet it comes, riding in on a single moonbeam, and settles on a lark atop a withered branch. She sings epics of someone’s God, and you would do it again, a thousand times. ◆
Manal is a 17-year-old self-proclaimed storyteller from Pakistan. You can find her doodling quirky cartoons in the margin of her notebook, or on Instagram.