You're Nothing Like Me

You're fat. Your flabby little not so little actually, stomach rolls over your sari's petticoat. Pathetic. 

You're ugly. Your eye bags are stripping away your youthful happy-go-lucky femininity which was an era long gone as your stretch marks remind you.  

You're naive. Your hands are shedding their skin, bruised and burned because the kitchen is now engraved into your body. It's these hands with which you sign your children's papers so they can go on field trips and become people of their own, hands with which I once used to forge my own parent's signatures because I wanted to control my "destiny"—always written by someone else.  

You're unwanted. I believed in Bollywood movies. I believed in a romanticized future, where a language barrier in a foreign country would mean they would laugh at my cute accent. Instead, they just laugh at you. They insult you and you can't even understand them. Your mannerisms aren't quirky, they're dirty. Nobody pities you, nobody notices you from far away. Nobody cares about your story because you're just another hopeless, helpless case. You talk too much. 

You're dumb. You don't even understand how tax brackets work because that's your husband's job. You don't understand when to speak up because that's your husband's job. Your teenage daughter working at a fast-food restuarant knows how to take an interview better than you. She learned from her father, because she'll never learn anything from you. Otherwise she would be just like you. Dependent. I never asked questions to my mother either, because I never wanted to be like her. I wanted to be rich like my father, go out for drinks like my father, control people like my father, be free like my father. But somehow, I became someone else. 

I don't know who you are anymore.