Hot Pot Magazine

By Aditi Choudhury

There is the little girl, the stranger, captured mid-twirl or riding a bike or showing her mother a drawing
she made. In that one I can’t be older than six, because that little girl’s hair is set in a natural curl and
clipped back by colorful pins that I probably still have in a box somewhere.

I wish I could ask her how she does it, how she so easily lets her mother touch her hair. Maybe it’s
because she does not know that the next thirteen years will turn and bend and leave her in a place where
she knows that she loves her mom, but doesn’t think she likes her so much. To her, her mom is her best
friend. There’s no one else she’d go to the library or play cards with. She probably doesn’t even know any
other people. Of course she’d let her best friend touch her hair; she’d probably bend over backwards for
it. I envy the bond she has that--I can’t seem to remember how--has slowly faded away. For all the photos
I have kept over the years, that is one that I don’t have that I need the most: a photo, a concrete moment in
time, in which I can identify what went wrong and why. When did I stop letting my mother touch my
hair? Was it teenage angst or a 9-year-old finally making some friends? It had to have been before age 11,
because I pretend I don’t see all the photographs from that age because in them, my hair is wild and
pleads for my mother’s hand, but I refuse its cries. Sometimes it’s not useful for a photograph to be a
lovegraph, especially when you have abundant evidence of your happiness but not a single clue as to why
things ended up so wrong that if the little girl from the photos materialized now, she would shatter
immediately.

My hair doesn’t curl like it used to, either. I could scrunch wet hair with leave-in conditioner until my
hands fall off, but I won’t be able to recreate the clean, polished ringlets in the photo.Of course, my
mother has advice, but I’m too stubborn to listen to her, which she claims was always the case. But if that
were true, then the girl in the photo wouldn’t have such a nice lob framing her face.

Aditi Choudhury is an 18 year old writer who has published various poems, often with recurring themes of home, reflection, and the relationship between mothers and daughters. She has been featured on Paper Crane Journal, Pastel Serenity Zine, Seaglass Literary, Calliope Hour Youth Arts, and The Dried Review.