ranjalkarn

What Would Mari Say?

This morning I woke up with a bad feeling. The kind you get when you’ve barely opened your eyes, and you’re jolted into consciousness with a list of everything that’s wrong with your world. Usually, I have a ritual to take care of these mornings—I allow myself to lie in bed a little longer, IContinue reading “What Would Mari Say?”

Unlearning Patriarchal Tropes: The Power of Female Friendships

Even after all these years, the process of unlearning is continuous, and often times confusing, painful, and guilt-ridden. The process of writing this has been like trying to untangle a very twisted delicate necklace. Hope it gives you something to relate to, or at least think about.

Life in Rectangles: 2020

July 2020 was the beginning of one of the hardest periods of my life. 8000 miles away from home during a pandemic, I watched my family struggle through the effects of a virus that had barely been acknowledged months before. A year and a half later, I finally found enough strength to battle through the inevitable tears and write it down. This is one of my quiet (but not really) moments of resilience and my acknowledgement that I haven’t been the same since then, and I probably never will, and that’s okay. Hopefully, I’ve only changed for the better.

A Penne for My Thoughts

My mindless scrolling on Instagram last year was ironically motivated by two things, the need to feel connected, and the need to be still. Limited to the four walls of my home, and often my room, I was looking at stories of old friends, learning things about my new ones, and reading at least twentyContinue reading “A Penne for My Thoughts”

Manufactured Perfection

The moon rests lightly on the twelfth slat of my blinds — Bright, circular, slightly off-center. I slide up to see if that makes a difference, it does. The moon shifts, like water on a hollowed stem. No, too far right, I slide down again — Slowly, carefully, calculating the exact moment it pulls intoContinue reading “Manufactured Perfection”

The Mosaic of Moving Homes

There is something about walking alone through the streets of old cities — an odd sense of comforting familiarity that comes from the realization that the street holds stories of millions before me. They’ve seen heartbreak and celebration, prejudice and protest, and have had many footprints etched into them over time. New memories, like aContinue reading “The Mosaic of Moving Homes”

Hope: A Poem

I wrote this poem sometime during the summer of last year. I hadn’t really written a poem since I was sixteen, so during lockdown I decided to experiment (as we all did) with the form that made me fall in love with writing in the first place.

How Glennon Doyle Taught Me to Read

I unexpectedly read a book that changed the way I read books — a book review, but also not, of Untamed by Glennon Doyle.

I Don’t Know, Maybe

“Perhaps, even in normal life, every place a person believed they needed to be was a kind of hallucination, and that was its power.” – The New Yorker

The Mundanity of Time

This post is a little unconventional for me, and also wildly terrifying because of how personal it is — I promised myself that this space would not just be for the bright moments, but also the dull, gray ones so here it is: a little peek into the more shadowed parts of my soul. Also, I tried something new and if you scroll to the bottom, you can listen to me narrate it!