Art by Mohona Bhadra, words by Kimaya Kulkarni

You trust me. I am the ‘antiplato’,
twice away, twice close. But you know me.
Like a book cover. You know my name and the letters that appear on my face. My face is a picture you’ve learned to associate with the worlds inside me
that are now inside you. It’s blue
and all you can see is a child drowning. Well, he might be swimming. But there are black birds circling around him way above the water. So he must be swimming for his life.
The waters are black at the bottom, but they open up to the sky on the top, and they let the light plunge into them to reveal the child within.
You know me. You trust me
to tell you the truth as I believe to be the truth. I am the pond
that’s bigger on the inside, I’m an ‘ocean at the end of the lane’. And I would know you, I would. If only I was a river instead. Rivers are finite, getting a new life with every new rain, meeting their end in the rush to meet their end. They are more like you,
vital and learning and beginning. I’m a ceaseless end. An end that keeps ending more and more every time you pick up the book to read a page more, every time you place a pencil between the pages;
ending again and again as the book goes back to a corner, read,
half-read,
unread,
picked up again,
never to be picked up again. You know me
and you trust me. I am unjustified, untrue, a belief just the same, condemned to end, choosing to end

Art by Mohona Bhadra, words by Kimaya Kulkarni

Mohona is an artist and illustrator with a love for books, beer, and the sea. Her idea of the perfect life involves painting seascapes and travelling the world.

Kimaya Kulkarni wishes she were a fictitious time-travelling archaeologist arrested for a murder she never committed. She also loves being what she already is, though, which is a philosophy major and editor of a literary magazine and the best friend she could possibly imagine to all her best friends.