26 March, 2020: Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

Connecticut, USA


This morning I awake to birdsong outside my 6th-floor window and think about the springs of my childhood. On a run around my neighborhood, the trees are itching with pink and brown buds. Moss bursts in flurries of green and gray. I feel close to the colors of life. I feel close to these memories of insistent living, the birds with their oblivious music in the early morning. I text many of my friends, wishing them well, asking them to call. (I don’t know how to ask to be held, and it feels more inappropriate than ever.) As morning becomes noon, the cold sunlight of late March seems as good a greeting as any. How to dial a phone line through to life itself? How to send a voice memo to the sky? I start to make a list of things I’d like to share with someone on a walk someday in the future: an old, creaking house on Orange St. The open square the overflows with sunlight in midmorning. Some music: Modern Love, Come On Eileen, Daydreaming. I try to make do with dancing with the birds. 


Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is a third-year undergraduate studying Ethnicity, Race & Migration at Yale. My writing has appeared in Hyphen Mag, Paper Darts, the Indiana Review Online, and Pank, among other places.