I called myself an atheist
until I sat at my desk and the words stopped flowing like they used to
until I misplaced the divinity within myself
put it somewhere I couldn’t quite find it, and I promise I looked everywhere
until the first boy who gifted me flowers ripped my heart out of the cage that sheltered it
until adulthood came knocking at my door without texting or calling first
yelled at me to be financially independent
in the form of an irate parent
until it was apparent
that I wasn’t a one-woman army
Now I look for God in
the night-lamp next to my bed that never goes out
nestled amidst the notes of Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor by Bach
in the effortful activation of my right cerebral hemisphere
the cup of chai I brew for myself as an evening ritual
self-help podcasts and freshly changed bedsheets
and sometimes, if I’m brave enough,
I look for God
In the mirror
Kimaya Natekar is a recent graduate from FLAME University, a liberal arts school in Pune, India, where she majored in psychology with a sociology minor. She enjoys academic writing, and her research articles have been published in TheGrayMatterNews and SentinelAssam. She strongly believes, however, that she is a poet at heart, and grabs every opportunity she gets to prove it to herself.