What you're looking for is on the other side of fear.

Home is a feeling. Home is where love is.

When you're young, everything seems like the end of the world.

Maybe I'd spent way too long fighting for love, not realizing that all this while, I was fighting my fear of not wanting to lose someone I'd known forever.Maybe Zara and I too were always meant to be unfinished business.

You and I will always be unfinished business.

And in just ten seconds of giving our souls to each other, we knew, if not forever, at least tonight we would live as though it was the last day to love.

No one cares about your happiness, Udita. We’re just supposed to serve as wombs for patriarchy’s narcissistic desire for an endless line up of sons.

Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I always saw a morbidly obese reflection, while in truth I was achingly underweight. My obsession of looking good corresponded to wanting to look the way skinny models looked in television ads and fashion magazines, the personification of being attractive as described by the world around me.

I wanted to be normal again. I wanted to be genuinely happy again and not just pretend. I didn’t want distorted mirror images to destroy and define my life any longer. I wished to breathe in the customary air, instead of the suffocating one people like me had accustomed themselves to breathe. I just wanted to break through these metal rods that I’d been caged behind for the last two years of my life. I wanted to feel plain, simple, genuine contentment again. I wanted to; I needed to.

Everything was going perfectly well until Dr. Roy paused for a long minute to stare at me with utter shock and revelation. I knew I had messed up. I should have just worn my black, full-sleeved dress instead. But again, I thought that the scars had lightened to an unnoticeable extent. But I guess I was wrong. That was when I realized that scars never went away entirely. “Did you do that to yourself?” he asked.