I promised to phone Mom first this weekend. Would she think I had forgotten again? Or, knowing that a lot of the time I avoided our strained conversations, decided not to call? Her voice still echoed in my mind; my imagination allowed me to think about her agony over my self-neglect. She cared. I knew she did. Why could she never show me, though?

‘What is wrong with her?’

A question I have been asking myself for so long. What is wrong with me? All of this hard work, all of this pain, and I self-destruct, exactly as I always have. Two words. That’s all it would have taken for me not to be laying here, unaware of whether I was alive or dead.

‘We have given her something to slow her heart rate down.’

Two words I have never been able to say.

Help. Me.

Everything has a breaking point. A point where the external pressure placed on an object becomes too much for it to bear and it snaps, shatters, breaks. The thing about a breaking point is there is always an option to turn back, to stop adding the pressure that will cause the object to break. To yield the relentless push and pull and let go, release and allow it to just be.

I opened my eyes. Sunlight flooded through a window in a room that was not my own. Panic rose as I remembered the morning at the Goa Music Festival, when I awoke in a tent, not knowing where I was or what had happened to me. I tried to move, but my body refused, completely unwilling to listen to my command. I blinked and looked up at the white ceiling. My body ached, and my skin itched. My hand on my stomach told me that what I was wearing did not belong to me. I didn’t try to talk, there was no point; I was alone, I knew that. I was always alone. Finally, my body responded, if only out of pure instinct from the dull pain in my lower back. I rolled towards the window, hoping that some sun would help to orient me a little. Pain seared up my hand as I met resistance mid-roll. A drip. I was in a hospital. Someone had found me.

I closed my eyes, wanting to sleep again. A familiar hand took mine. I felt the warmth and the softness, the touch I craved so much. The hands felt older, but they were still her hands, my mom’s skin against mine. My mind fought my body, reminding me that my mom was more than a thousand kilometres away, but it felt real. She felt real.

‘Jhanvi?’ Her voice pulled me out of my agonising internal battle.

‘Mom?’ My voice no longer sounded like mine. It was hoarse, and I couldn’t seem to find any strength to say what I wanted to say.

‘How are you feeling?’