Welcome to Readers’ Week 2024, where we celebrate the thoughts and voices of our blooming community. This year, we invited our readers to share their thoughts on the theme “Clean Slate” as the academic year restarts - unfolding a tale of fresh starts, new beginnings and untold stories. From an array of incredible submissions, we’ve chosen the top seven, and as difficult as that was, these pieces best embody this powerful theme.

As we take you through these seven submissions, they bring to you their own interpretations. With that, we present to you the fourth piece, which truly captures the essence of starting anew!

I loathe cleaning. The daunting responsibility of removing the marks of my existence from a space that presumably can’t be owned, having to pick up my scattered belongings, is a task too overwhelming to deal with. I generally look around, trying to find the most minuscule excuse to escape from the chore, but today is different.

As I sit on the floor of your room, surrounded by cardboard boxes and your old trunks—which you insist on using regardless of having the luxury of modern amenities—all I wish to do right now is clean this space you’ve claimed as your own. The abode you’ve built for yourself over the years, with items unquestionably yours, resting in their designated spots. The soft blanket perched at the foot of your bed is neatly folded, almost as if it’s untouched. The pictures of your courageous treks, which were once stuck onto the wall, have slowly torn away, fading with time, almost as if even this inanimate space wants to wash itself new.

You’re here, but are you really? I’m not so sure myself. Your new pair of clothes are still hanging in the closet as they yearn to be worn by you, the books you were once reading now at a halt, now never to be read one page further. Your absence is numbly loud; the hushed voices of all the guests in our house, slowly rolling out their condolences, get washed out by my ears desperately searching for one more jingle of your anklet. I’m surrounded by things that were once claimed to be yours, but not you.

The hands of the clock keep moving, and time keeps passing. My steps have gotten lighter, and your room emptier, now wiped clean, repurposed to have a new lease on its name. I don’t feel the need to look for you in things, to hear you once more and ask you why this had to end the way it did. I’m not questioning your absence as my anger at your departure slowly simmers down, because now I realize that you never really left.

You’re here when I make chai the way you taught me. I still wear the obnoxiously printed sweaters you once forced me to wear in an attempt to keep me from a cold. The lack of your tangible presence is now an act of love that lives on through a ritual of practice. Grief is indeed comical in the way it consumes your life, turning a blind eye to what you already have, but instead showing you a taunting vision of what you beg to attain back, now ceasing to exist.

Since the day you left, everyone has offered advice that feels entirely misguided. There’s no such thing as beginning anew, erased off the marks from the past. Even a slate, when rubbed clean of its chalk marks, has the remnant ashes of what was once scribed upon its surface. I cannot erase the fact that I loved pink when I was 5, and wanted to be a scientist when I was 11. The entire point of these facts existing is living proof of what I have blossomed into. I wouldn’t exist if these little tales didn’t unfold the way they did. Erasing as a concept is flawed; starting over is flawed. A truly clean slate is only possible if nothing has ever existed on its surface before, but you have.

It has been years since I last saw your smile. I did move ahead, continuing what I had to as an obligation of my existence. The engravings of your life have lost a bit of their pigment but remain intact with the marks made by you. Though, I did have to relearn to look not beside me but rather above me into the sky, as you stand twinkling above the clouds in the form of a star—or at least that’s what you told me when I was still an innocent child holding your hand for guidance.

“If you can’t see me, look around and call my name; but if all means fall in vain, then look up into the sky, and I’ll be there amongst the stars.”

And tonight, I see you, shining in the dark sky with other entities of the night, while I stand on the ground watching you twinkle. As the clouds shuffle and sway with the wind, acting as a veil to your shine, concealing it from me, I smile and turn around, stepping away.

You’ve wiped your slate clean of its aged marks, Amma (grandmother), and I suppose I have too. Yet, a part of you remains in my grasp—the small remnants of the love you left behind that stays alive regardless of circumstance. I make sure not to let it disappear from my sight, holding its hand, guiding it just like you once did with me, preserving it for the other stars to see.