AFRAID

Esha Joshi ’26

It starts with the hot muggy air shrinking down on your skin and dripping off in a trail of salt, and then the rough hem of your denim shorts against your sticky legs, and then the comforting weight of your backpack looped over your tired shoulders until you hit the corner of the road and the twinkling lights morph into something darker with music blaring out of time with your heartbeat but maybe you should have known with the speed of its drums that the adrenaline should have been coursing through your entire body but you didn’t and you were lucky this time; there is safety in numbers in bumping up against their swaying loose pants and sand-crusted slippers in flitting your eyes carefully around the crowded narrow sidewalk; there is safety in numbers but not in the blatant truth bleeding out in the color of your skin and the bags you carried and the way you looked around, not in the wordless confession that this is not your place, not your country, not your home, that you are young and alone and vulnerable and pushing through with a desperate, cracking veneer of confidence even with the unease rising up the back of your throat in burning bile, so you walk and you look around and you try to forget because what your body knows your mind doesn’t realize and what your heart knows your brain can’t fathom maybe it’s the sheltered part of you used to strolling along wide, well-lit streets at night with no one around and your phone blinking on and off in your pocket maybe it’s the part of you that doesn’t know how to be afraid when the only reason you’ve been given is the voices of other women echoing faintly at you until they combine and scream into your head but you are not afraid until the plastic cup of alcohol in his hands and the drunken laughter, you are not afraid until he leans closer with a sordid smile and his eyes trail the four of you clumping even closer together and then you are a little afraid as you gallop down the uneven sidewalk as quickly as you can go nervous laughter bursting out of your mouth until he tosses you a crude invitation that you could ignore if not for his dusty hands bracing on the edge of his chair and his face that is blurring like watercolor in your mind coming ever closer and the swift patter of your feet these shoes were not built for running but you never worried about that before you were never afraid until you reach the end of the street with all the storefronts dark and desolate and deserted and you are determined to walk back with your head held high and all of you moving tightly as one unit folding in to protect the others but the raucous laughter can’t blend with the soft hum of the wind and the leering gaze burns into your skin but you fight your way out of the thick stale air and the whis- tles until you can breathe again, and you listen to “it’s not that bad” and “oh not a big deal” echoing from every direction until at the end all you have to show for it is the slowly subsiding banging of your heart but even that fades and maybe nothing ever happened in the end; but you do have something left and it burrows in your heart as deep as it can go, because finally now you know what it is to be afraid.