"Praying" • Kesha (by Arya Vishin)

He held up what looked like a picture of an empty cookie-cutter of a gingerbread man and asked me to point to it. Black outline on white paper. It looked like there was a hole in it. Tried to see it from a different perspective. Imagined it with light brown dough for skin, seventeen with a band-camp tan. Cried every night that November like a bad teen drama. Turned on a speaker to drown it out and I hate listening to music through speakers. Can’t listen to that Kesha album anymore. Bad at saying no to everything these days. Can’t turn down a date no matter who it’s with. Even girls—girls who know! Don’t know how that keeps happening. Don’t like saying I’m gay much these days. Still true but I don’t like saying it. Presented my English project at the end of that semester, a collection of elegies. Don’t remember how I introduced it. Wrote down don’t you ever wish you were the victim of a successful hate crime? Successful as in you don’t have to live afterwards. Deleted it. Too insensitive. A boyfriend said it felt like there was a third person in the room sometimes. Four years on and still can’t get a grip. Tried to see it from a different perspective and failed. Flinched when a guy reached for my throat and didn’t realize. Felt bad when he mentioned it after. Probably sounded crazy presenting that English project. Have you ever felt like a dead man walking? Listened to that Kesha song the other day and had to turn it off a minute in. Unsure whether the third person in the room is you or another me. Pointed at the empty gingerbread man. Asked not to press charges. There wasn’t any meaning in any of it. Tried to make good art out of it and failed. Tried to see something else in it and couldn’t.

Arya Vishin is a mixed Kashmiri-American & Jewish writer from the Bay Area. He likes 2000s pop girl music and medieval bhakti poetry, which are basically the same thing if you think about it. He is an incoming PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard. You can find him @ vishin.neocities.org.