Sheena D'Lima
“City-living gave me talons and claws, but now I want to put those away. I want something else. I want softness. I want grass under my feet. I want the fist in my stomach to slowly unclench. I want the garden of my childhood to get lost in play while letting sunlit hours pass over to rosy dusk.”
The story is so well told and is written with such a light, deft hand that it is almost easy to miss what makes it so quietly radical. To review it within the scope of exploring the coming together of literature and sexuality we must begin with its central cast of characters – the widows.
My journal has many entries that are speculative and fantastic. Writing about the mundane leads me to question the way the world operates and from there I frog-leap into a world of ideas where I imagine a radically different way of being. In my journal, I imagine a politics of care, community, and compassion. I become grand, valuable, and unstoppable, even in a world where I am sometimes made to feel small.
In my adulthood, I have experienced God outside of how I was taught to experience Him. I have discovered that I am a sexual being with infinite ways of experiencing pleasure. Almost all of these ways are outside of the tame abstinence-penetrative sex to get pregnant-abstinence cycle prescribed by the Catholic Church