Pale blue dot | Pratiksha Malayil

We are staring at a pale blue dot with its location in the middle of the sea, 

in the middle of a tunnel. We are sitting on chairs that speed past metal 

and are made of metal holding metal and glass that never dent. We are 

laughing in the name of a “beloved pain”, written in Japanese, 

from someone who is eating an edible and filming it and 

definitely does not know Japanese. 

This was the whole of what we knew, huddled 

around a piano after the worst hours of our lives: 

dreaming at twelve about sixteen, about an internship. 

Nothing ever worked out how we planned it but we ended 

up in the same place, with different parallels, and we came from 

the universe either way, but here we are as pale blue as 

the sea foam, iridescent, and we have not driven all the way down to the sand 

while the beach was closed but we still walked and came 

to water, projected – an island across the street. 

The wind always blows you in every direction and 

the scope seems like it is constantly missing and we don’t 

realize what people mean or what they say and we cannot 

zoom out like before, at twelve – to see what else we cannot 

outside on a field in the daytime, the flares of the sun 

where we swore we could feel it all on our skin 

that there was more from somewhere beyond 

that would touch us the same, leaving messages. 

We do not know Japanese either, or much of anything 

but we sit on a pale blue chair in the pale blue sea 

and the conductor asks for our tickets to the same exact place – 

the car parked fifteen minutes in the trees.

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Pratiksha Malayil is a senior majoring in Public Health at the University at Albany, from Long Island, New York. Her work explores systems and liminality, tracing lived experience between the physical and the abstract as it emerges through the tenderness of the everyday, the responsibility of attention. You can find more of her work on Instagram @pratikshamalayil.