Stars:

One of the greatest revelations of my childhood was that the stars never truly disappear. They burn just as brightly at noon as they do at midnight. Just no one sees them until the sun sets.  When the last vestiges of red sink into the high-rise buildings, the stars come out and we find them as though they had been missing.

But they hadn’t.

Repentance:

There are moments in my life that I look back on for years after. There are others I forget. It is for the latter that I am the most profoundly remorseful. For the memories and people and places and sights that have been pushed to the back of my scattered mind to never be heard of again. For the mistakes I never realized and the consequences I never received. For the lies gone unheard and the truths forgotten somewhere along the way. For the pieces of history that have made me who I am and for the people along the way that I will never thank. For the music in the background and the flowers along the sidewalk. For the warmth of the sun or the heat of a fever. For days uneventful that are more often than not. For sentences and words and voices and art.

Violet:

In England, the color violet means royalty. In Hinduism, violet is the seventh chakra – the crown. In China, it’s the harmony of nature – red and blue, yin and yang. To me, violet is a flower, frail and delicate and blue. Shrouded in green and overpowered by red roses and blue hyacinths, it stands drooping and subdued, the wallflower of nature. Violet, cold as ice.

Tranquility:

Along the highway, there is a small obscure exit that takes you up a ramp and into a small, quiet town. In this town, there is a small, quiet road that leads past houses and stores until there is nothing on either side other than one long wooden fence and the only direction to go is straight. At the end of the road, the wooden fences meet in the form of a rusted, bolted door, separating the car from a cemetery with a small, obscure sign two feet in front of the car reading “DEAD END.”

That’s all the warning you receive that the road is going to end – two words, seven letters and a wooden fence. The road has taken you miles from where you began and then just abruptly st…

Anjali Agarwalla is a student in New York. Growing up in one of the cultural hubs of America has made her enjoy not only writing and reading, but also art, dancing and music. She is a trained Kathak dancer.