S Janaki

anoikis

I lost my place quietly,
like when the fitted sheet pops off the mattress corner
in the middle of the night
and I just sleep on it anyway.

Nothing happened all at once.
Just a shirt, slipping off its hanger.
The kind of slipping that sounds like a breath
but feels like falling through a floor
you didn't know you were standing on. 

I still wash the dishes.
The plants wilt one at a time and I keep
forgetting their names.

I text my little sister to ask
if she remembers when the TV used to be near the window.
She doesn’t.
Says, it’s just furniture.

I think about how cells in the body die
not from trauma,
but from being left alone too long—
how absence can undo you
just as surely as a wound.

My body’s still here.
My name still works at the nursing home.
But something in me got lost
between Tuesday and not saying it.

I keep meaning to fix things—
the microwave, the silence.
But I don’t.
I just sit in this
clean, quiet house
and wait
for the floor to remember me.

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S Janaki is a writer and college student based in the Midwest. She likes updating her Goodreads, long walks and the way Adrienne Lenker writes about futures that never happened.