NOVEL ATTEMPTS by ashraya gupta

The last time I was home, I tore down everything from my walls except for the jigsaw puzzle I finished and framed in 12th grade. My parents bought a new bed and now the room looks like mine, but from some alternate past, in which I slept in a grander bed and didn’t cut out pictures from the New York Times magazine. Mumma said, “Someday you can bring your husband here.”

We called India this morning. I spoke to my cousin, Shruti. She is as old as I am American—what I mean is, she was born the year we moved here. She asked me when I would be done with school. I asked “You mean college or medical school?”

“All of it,” she answered.

I added the years aloud. The MCATs in August of next year, medical school, assuming I get in, autumn of 2010. Four years of that, then residency in 2015.

“I guess I’ll be settled around 2020,” I said. Three presidential terms. A decade. I’ll be thirty-three years old.

Maybe then I’ll bring home my husband, and we will sleep in the queen-size bed my parents bought twelve years ago. He will be asleep and I will stare up at the ceiling, tracing patterns in the darkness, just as I did when I was fourteen. 

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