By Anika Pandit

When I finally emptied the tub, strands of hair gathered at the grate, interrupting the water’s escape. Even detached, they lingered. Even removed, they stayed close enough to touch. Something is always left behind.

The impulse to wash arrived before I understood what I was trying to clean.

It began with a pair of scissors hovering at my collarbones, their metallic snip a small, sharp punctuation in the silence of my bathroom. I cut my hair without a plan, watching dark clumps drift down into the sink. This was not a reinvention; I only wanted evidence that change was possible, a physical proof I could hold.

I cut it after losing threads I thought were woven into me for good. Strands of myself, strands of others, all tangled so intricately I couldn't tell where they ended and I began. No one warns you about the quiet ache of a silence that just sits between you, the slow drift of outgrowing people, and outgrowing who you were beside them. They say cutting your hair is like starting over, and I was willing to try anything.

For a moment, it worked. I felt briefly untethered from the shadow who moved through the same routines and woke each morning with the same dull regret. But when the mirror stopped surprising me, nothing else shifted. My life closed back in and the hair stayed on the floor.

What was left on my scalp was choppy and wrong. The thought came quietly and without negotiation: You've ruined it.

So, I took a bath. Then two the next day. And another the morning after that. Hot water needled my collarbones, steam fogged the mirror into anonymity, and my fingertips pruned under the weight of repetition. I returned to the same motions, reaching for a version of myself lost alongside people I had once trusted to stay. I scrubbed as if I could abrade not just my skin but the memory of what it held, as if the body were a palimpsest and enough pressure could return it to blankness.

A rubber duck bobbed among the suds, tugging me toward childhood. Back then, we moved through the world unburdened, finding universes in small things, learning the heft of joy before we had a name for it. I used to spend hours in the pool cutting through lanes, a body in motion with nowhere to go but the other wall. I loved how water held me, how it let me glide weightless and asked nothing besides continuation. But swimming was about arrival — the turn, the push-off, the next lap. Here, in the stillness of the tub, I was not trying to get anywhere. I was only trying to disappear into whatever held me.

The water glistened under the light like glitter, not reacting, but rather absorbing everything without comment. Bathing felt sterile and contained. No witnesses or evidence. Just a clean surface restored each time I pulled the drain.

When I finally emptied the tub, strands of hair gathered at the grate, interrupting the water’s escape. Even detached, they lingered. Even removed, they stayed close enough to touch.

Something is always left behind.  

***

"One more shot! One more shot!"

Months later I found myself sitting in the corner of a crowded living room, as music curled and dissolved in the distance. Lucy Bedroque gave way to Blood Orange, a kineograph of sound that looped and frayed at the edges. Before me, scattered across the low table, lay the wreckage of hours: empty red cups, an array of lighters, and, beneath it all, restlessness that wore the mask of comfort.

“You should drink more,” Tai appeared beside me, her face catching the fuchsia lights.

Bodies moved and silhouettes swayed in rhythm. I remained in the corner, watching. My mind performed its familiar excavation, digging through the strata of nights exactly like this one. I had always loved celebration, always seeking out occasions to consecrate the ordinary fact of being alive. But tonight the room felt distant, as if I were observing it through glass.

Someone stumbled backward from the surge of the crowd, his elbow catching the edge of a red cup perched near me. It flew from the table and arced through the air before colliding with my lap, a cool shock blooming across my thighs. I looked down. The cup had tipped, spilling a cocktail of something illicit all over me. My stained skirt clung to my skin, a crimson Rorschach test staring back. It looked like an apple with a single bite taken out.

“Oh shit, I’m so sorry!”

Voices rose around me, but I was already standing, moving toward the bathroom.

I stumbled away from the careful architecture of my own isolation towards a new one. I moved through it all in the only way I knew, fighting the current, until the bathroom door clicked shut behind me and I was alone with the hum of the vent and my reflection. Something in the stillness of that moment slightly eased. I stood there, and for a breath, the sharp edges of myself felt less like something to brace against.

My hair was still choppy from months ago. I had theorized that to let go, one must cut it off. It seemed logical at the time, or maybe it only wore the costume of logic while something less coherent thrashed beneath. Living alone, trying to inhabit the skin of an adult who should have long ago cultivated her own sense of purpose, I unraveled in every way.

I stripped off my skirt and held it under the faucet. Water ran over the fabric, the red stain dissolving slowly into pale pink streams that swirled down the drain.

For a moment I stood there watching the color thin and disappear. The recognition arrived quietly, as if it had been waiting for me.

Life is cyclical. We pass through, we accumulate, we wash, and we begin again. Not because we are restored, but because continuation demands it. Cleaning becomes a rehearsal for survival, a return mistaken for renewal; yet return is never complete.

Something always resists being carried away. The body submits to the ritual without believing in erasure, allowing itself to be steadied while still holding what has passed through it.

I had aggressively scrubbed and washed my skirt, wringing it dry. The bitten apple from the drink had faded, but the stain had pooled into something else. Now it was the shape of a core, the rest of it gone.

Still, something is always left behind.

***

"Anika! Take off your shoes and wash your feet before you enter."

My mother's voice trailed behind me as I stood on the ledge of the temple entrance, the stone beneath my feet worn smooth by the bodies of centuries past. I peeled off my shoes and placed them beneath a faucet, bending to let water run over my ankles as dirt loosened and spilled away in thin streams. Standing there, the stone cool beneath me, I felt the old current slow.

I scrubbed my soles, thinking about where my shoes had been. Shoes touch everything: roads, floors, what is not meant to be carried inside.

My Crocs lay beside the faucet, dirty and caked with mud. Looking at them, I felt an unexpected sense of belonging for the first time in a while. All around me I saw fragments gathered from where we had been: the sound of my family’s laughter, the smell of burning incense, evidence of a life in motion. I felt safe being held in something larger than me.

I did not want to leave that behind, even if such motion lacked a specific direction. Even if I had no destination to arrive at.

The first time I had stood in India was fifteen years ago. I loved how nobody cared about anything there, I could move through the heat and noise without being seen or measured. Everything had shifted since then: the world, my life, my understanding of what it meant to be an adult. I wanted to tell myself I had matured, but perhaps I had only grown older. Beneath it all, I am still that six-year-old girl, uncertain each morning how to meet the day. The sun will come up tomorrow, I thought as I stood under the stream. We all return.

I once believed growing up meant leaving earlier versions of myself behind. I’ve realized now this cannot be true. When I finished washing my feet, the dirt was gone but the lines carved into my soles were not.

What I have come to understand is this: erasure never comes. Cleaning, then, is not a correction. It is preparation, a small ritual before the next movement forward. For a long time I believed growing meant outgrowing, that I had to scrub away the girl who needed too much, who loved too intensely, who came undone beneath fluorescent light. But she remains, some fragment of her always will.

I stepped forward, the stone cool and steady beneath me.

Still, I return to scrubbing.

Not to be made new, only to be made ready. ■