Plum Juice

by Inaayah Khan

You're on this stupid quest to discover you, reading poems off of Pinterest and sorting them into boards, your stacks of classics piled high on your nightstand, threatening to topple over as you sleep. You swear by sticky-notes and Pilot-G2 pens, so they sit there, too. It takes you three times as long to get through books if you annotate them, but you do it anyway, because you are searching.

You’ve been on this godforsaken quest as long as you can remember, determined that one of those coming-of-age novels you’re obsessed with is going to be written about you. You are going to know yourself, you're going to understand. You’ll come of age, whatever that means. You’re sure that some philosopher said that to understand yourself is to understand the world, or maybe you invented it. It’s all very optimistic, and this is an optimist’s quest.

You’re not an optimist. You don’t know if you’re your mother’s child or your father’s, but you know it’s such a disastrous combination that you’re left wondering why they had you at all. You have your mother’s anxiety and your father’s temper and you feel insane, most of the time, like both of them. You're all desperate for something to take that edge off, something strong, a crude American portrait of girl-mother-father, each hollow-eyed and hungry. Each searching.

Here’s what you do know: you hate the annotating, you love the books. You’re always stuck in doorways and thresholds, on the brink of something—greatness, you hope. Nirvana, maybe. Probably nothing at all. Cross the line and it’s a jump into the unknown, into someone you’ve never been before. The prospect of it thrills you, but you’re not used to being thrilled. It terrifies you.

You went to India a year ago, your first time as a teenager, freshly nineteen and stuck in what you call “God’s favorite situationship,” and you are alone. You’re in the middle seat on a long-ass flight, strangers on either side of you instead of your mother and sister. Airplane mode means you won’t see if he texted back. You spend the entire flight checking your phone anyways, hoping that whatever he’ll say is important enough to transcend the rules of WiFi and show up. It’s not.

You’re on your way to see your grandparents, who love you obsessively, but you’re not their favorite. You are too quiet to be anyone’s favorite, but that’s okay. You’re spending two weeks along the cracked pavement of the seaside city you were born in, its glowing bridges littered with broken-down cars, the streets outside your grandparents’ apartment as familiar to you as their voices, less tinny without your phone speakers’ distortion.

You know it’s cliched to claim that going to the motherland is life changing, but it’s true, isn’t it? This city is you. You walk along the beach only to stare at the thousands of residential buildings right off the coast, and you track sand into your bedroom only to watch it run down the drain as you shower, and each grain feels like a part of you gained and lost. Are you still searching?

For these two weeks, you are God’s favorite. Everything falls into place. You’re drunk on gallons of coconut water and dizzy from the food, the sweets, the thickness of the honey in your tea. The scent of jasmine ropes follows you like a shadow. The sky goes gray and you grin as you run through pouring rain, and your clothes are soaked through and you are going to freeze, probably, but this is what you’ve been searching for, isn’t it? Clarity, reality, the chill of wet bones? Open doorways and crossable thresholds? Yourself?

You get your nose pierced, you thread it with gold. You go to malls and markets and touch textiles reverently, and you try your best not to fall apart in front of a fruit stand as you taste a plum before you buy it. It bursts on your tongue, explosive, juice dripping onto the ground. You don’t join it, but you’re close. You watch as the flies gather, disperse. Take another bite. Gather again.

Listen, now, to the ocean outside the window of your grandparents’ living room. This is what you’ve been searching for. There’s a crow’s nest on the air conditioning unit, and you watch the chicks as they hatch, blind and hungry and desperate. Listen to them. They are you. This is what you've been searching for.

BIO: Inaayah Khan is a poet and writer based in London. She's currently studying politics and international relations in university while writing about literally everything else. Find her on Substack @inaayah and on X/Twitter @inaayahk_