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Was it the way I entered this world, leaving my mother with waxy embroidery between her hips, secret smile under her belly fold. They say the microbiome is borne from the birthing canal, a rite of passage I could not afford. Maybe something in my childhood, my white-knuckled temper, or my red-cheeked shame. Too many ladoos, not enough purple foods. Was it the pressures of architecture school, glue-gummy fingers holding balsa wood together until the garbage trucks crowed at dawn. In JAMA I learn there is a gut-brain axis, read the word stress until it looks like gobbledygook. Is it the perfecting, pondering, prognosticating. Following the decision tree branches until the tippy-tips. Worrying, agonizing, dwelling, fixating, retracing, regretting, self-punishing. Tinnitus from a chorus of whys.
Preeti Talwai writes from the California coast, where she is also a researcher at Google. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Typehouse, The Dillydoun Review, Lighthouse Weekly, and Unbroken, among others. Her fiction has been acquired by the Rare Book Collection at UC Berkeley.