2017 was a difficult, depressing year, but sometimes when you’ve been through possibly the worst time(s) of your life and emerged on the other side, everything else feels relatively pale. So, let’s say 2017 was a relatively pale year.
In January, I moved to New York.
In March, I published an article in Uncanny Magazine.
(In May, I acquired a new therapist.)
In June, I became a fellow at the New York Foundation for the Arts.
(In July, I turned 30.)
In August, Luminescent Threads came out, a book that I co-edited with Alexandra Pierce of Twelfth Planet Press.
In September, I started working as the Poetry and Reprint Editor of Uncanny Magazine.
In October, I had my first New York reading at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, one of the two largest branches of the NYPL.
In November, I published an article in Words Without Borders.
In December, in a few more days, I will have a small story published in Anathema Magazine.
In between, bleakness, writing, occasional pleasure, entirely too many cigarettes. The political situations of both India and the United States get worse every day than I have ever known in my life. (In India, I was born a few years after the Emergency, and was too young during Babri Masjid. I was still too young during the Kargil War, and actually considered it a positive thing.)
I am darker, angrier, wearier than I have ever been before. I channel my obsessive streak into reading the news for hours, and still never catch up with all the horrors sprouting everywhere, every minute.
My heart, that overused organ, has been put to cryosleep. The only thing that stirs it up any more is the occasional nightmare.
I feel like an animal, which isn’t fantastic, but preferable to feeling like a corpse.
What else? New York is cold and I like where I’m living, but Clinton Street is many miles from here, in Lower Manhattan, too far for the music to waft in.
I am getting by. I am thankful for the sunshine on my face, the kindness of strangers — all that has come my way since the time I tried to commit suicide in 2015. I am living on borrowed time and grace. Everything is a miracle. All of you reading this (or not).
The world will get better, I promise. We will live to see it together.
Mimi Mondal 
You are an inspiration, girl. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. :)
:)
you have come a long way and many miles you will cover. but the poem about the desert sycamore that you read to me during our TTIS days, will remain standtill, gorgeous. lots of love and good wishes for your writing.