menu                                                                                                                         Women and the act of vanishing. 
   Issue 1 complacent
Kaancho, 
March, 2026
   ©Malashree Suvedi
                   
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      1


I feel like for my entire life I have been in a waiting room, just anticipating for things to happen, for a life I want. Nothing that I have dreamed of has ever come true. I am too ambitious for my own good, I have always only focused on my desires, my goals in life…but yet, I like slow mornings and slow afternoons and getting beer with friends in the evenings. It’s a contradiction. I am selfish, I want things to go my way. I am inflexible, I am one of the first women in my family to be allowed this…this individualism… If I could choose, I would pick success over happiness any day, I wish I could be younger again so I could do it all over. You know, the rotting away, my emotional landscape that I hadn’t managed to suffocate yet. I am a hedonist. I like looking good, I like it when people like me. I am talkative, I am funny, I am confident. I am anxious, depressive. I am the human condition, i.e. the male protagonist of my own life, narcissistically so involved with my middle to upper-middle class problems, that I may as well fall into the lake and drown. I am a man, but I am not. Thankfully. 
        
        I am waiting now, in the waiting room. And while I wait for good things to happen to me, I have been thinking of women and escapism. Feminism, to me, isn’t just about the individual gain, not just about the capital or about usurping power from men while still upholding classist, capitalistic, casteist, gendered, racist structures. It’s more than that, I do not think we will ever achieve the full dismantling of oppressive systems such as the patriarchy, I definitely will not see it in my lifetime. And so, forgive me for being idealistic, but without the warmth and comfort of an imagined utopia, what would we even have? What would I even have? And so I think of escapism. In reality, this strong urge I have to run away, to escape myself, to become someone else, shed my skin over and over again, may seem contradictory to the feminist cause. After all, for us to dismantle a pervasive, insidious system that is centuries old, and that comes in hybrid forms with other institutional factors…well that just requires for us to stay with the trouble, as Haraway would put it. She wrote “We become with each other or not at all.” I have to stay in the game, constantly fight. But honestly, most days I am apathetic about even being here. I make art, I hate it. I am a character, I hate it. So I stay, but do not know how much fighting I do when on a normal day, the sadness latches on my already weak bones. 

        I can’t help myself, I want to escape. How ironic is it then that I want to be the manic pixie dream girl of my own life? A trope designed by and for the male gaze…Woman desires a better world. Woman desires a world where she isn’t just a woman, where woman isn’t just the woman she was born or thought of as. She wants to be a mother, she wants to be a single mother, she wants to be in a relationship with a man, she wants to be in a relationship with a woman, she wants to be polyamorous, she wants to be monogamous, she wants to be single forever, she wants to be a slut, she wants to be celibate. She wants to cut her hair and change her name, dress more butch now, be more femme tomorrow. She wants to drink herself to death, she wants to be sober forever. She never wants to be near a kid. She wants to talk to her mother everyday, “MA MA I LOVE YOU.” She resents her mother for staying. My mother was always a good packer, it wouldn’t have been that hard. It’s the woman gene, it’s in our DNA, to want to escape, to run away. Start a new life in this new town, I could be the quiet one for a change. Keep myself to myselves. 
    
        So to all the people who are now suddenly so concerned with the question “what is a woman?” This is the definitive answer: if you have this gene you are one. The woman gene. I discovered it in a lab, I made the lab myself, it took me two weeks to just create the beaker. 

        And what you have to know is that I am an unreliable narrator. Not much I have said is a flaccid truth, it’s up to you to parse, it’s up to you to take what you want. You will never even find out who I am. Just lay in bed all day, hand hurts from scrolling, bleeding through my underwear, haven’t brushed my teeth—just useless in all regards, change of plans, I’m not about to cook for you or myself, we can eat toast for dinner. Lamb of whatever heavenly parental figure be damned. I hate myself, I’m demonic, and we haven’t had this plant for too long but it already looks like it’s shrivelling up, babe. Love you, babe. Love you, do you love me, babe? I’m so fucking terrible, aren’t I, babe?

        There was this woman, you see, well she was just a character in a story I once wrote, she went missing…disappeared, slowly, bit by bit…until she was just a memory. 

The woman gene, makes you—

An artist, a vanishing act. Mmmm so good, all you wanna do is run away don’t you babe? 

Astronaut barbie, barista barbie, sad barbie, hermit barbie, in tears all the time barbie.

Come on now, smile for the camera…be personable, I love myself right? Woman love

yourself but not more than you love others. I’ve got that covered, I love the versions of

whom I could’ve been, of whom I could still be.

I know I’m going a bit off track here, but it’s hard to stay focused when you start thinking about the multiverse. Look at your reflection on a severely cracked mirror, all those clichéd tropes. 




The woman gene, makes you—

WOMAN. 




                   Parallel people, i couldve been you—Look through in the mirror, missing a gland—I wish

                   i were dead, i wish i were dead,,, Two friends frowning, at each other like CDs burnt with

                   one hit wonders—-If i were never born, i wouldve been so happy, 

                   I would sleep all the time, for all of it…I drift, then…off into deliberation.

                    look for something akin to my city, it would be different if I had never left

                    I wouldve been somewhere someone else, someone of other qualities, I can go back now,

                    you know, pretend im unshaped 

                    cut to another somewhere else




                                                                                          **

                  I cannot be anything

                  but the surreptitious break in the morning

                  or the why am I like this 

                  why am I like this

                  concertos in my head




But the waves rise even though I am landlocked 

and the sun sets too




                                                                           **




Three or four people later, 

this becomes a mirror- 

        and I am someone else,




not a garment of clothes later, 

but rather after the teas and biscuits- 




I am someone who is slightly more free

warm at the heart, cold at the toes. 




                                                                                   **



Mama just you wait, one day this hunger is going to turn into something bright, one day I will be a real life human girl. Maybe it’ll be moments before my sun goes out, but I will be all the stars in all the universes. Mama, it’s in my genes. This desire to escape comes from the need to subjugate the notion of women being the anchor of the home and anchor of relationships, right? It must be. I cannot confront my age, my steady relationship without also understanding that I wanted and still want nothing more than to be immensely alone. A painter who lives in a box of paints, as Joni Mitchell sang. Agnes Martin turning her back to the world. The woods call to me too, Thoreau. I too could be someone who cannot be seen, who keeps making things, who lives in a shoebox. 




2


In reality, of course, I am actually not as selfish as I say I am. I just wish I could be. I still wake up in the mornings, I do. And I stay put, analyse myself to death, converse with my feelings—it is after all, the things I have and the things that make me, the intersections of my various identities that have led me to think of escape in such a romanticised way. I stay put for my grandmothers, read and write for them, lay in bed all day at my relative youth, something they would not have been able to do. I stay here, thank them, though they are dead, thank all my ancestors for making me a culmination of their timelines and personalities. I am not them. I am a freer woman than they ever were, and I have choice, I have been lucky in so many ways. I have choice, I want to tell my grandmothers, though they are dead. I am someone spoilt, so I stay put, and call my Ma. And try not to die, and I take my meds and I will brush my teeth now. And I apply to jobs, I think about motherhood and plan for it. And I try not to die. Try to fix my head and keep my body alive, try and usually succeed to cry covertly. 




         But if I have a child, no matter who they are, I might raise them to become escape artists. 
                                                                                       
                                     ***