Every girl has a story spun around the simmering water in which green leaves diffuse their crimson hue, making a concoction that silently witnesses: the moments carefully and delicately woven to form a tapestry of life, thoughts that unspool from the contemplative mind, feelings that unfurl at the bottom of the heart.
If you can befriend a cup of tea, it might tell you her story — the ones hidden in her eyes, crinkled with laughter or swollen with pain, in a stolen glance or a fixed gaze across the sky into the void.
You can take a peek into her ordinary life at the tea stall, holding an earthen cup of tea and chatting with her friends — maybe about the weather, her day, something very global, or perhaps something extremely personal. You may also take a tour of her safe space that exists in a small cup of strongly brewed tea, flavoured with drops of lemon neatly sliced through the core (it has to be through the core to extract maximum juice), sweetened with a spoonful of trickling honey; or in a freshly brewed tea in a saucepan, old style — sweetened with care, sipped peacefully as evening slips in.
If the tea trusts you, it can whisper into your ears her muffled thoughts, laced with emotions that swell at the core of her heart, often surfacing on her face, taking the shape of angry rants, and sometimes drowning inside her.
The tea may share with you its relationship with her — how they have a friendly chat as she brews it with ginger and care, and how it feels a discomfiting detachment when she sees it as a blend of bland leaves and obligation.
If you can really be its confidante, it will share her silent accusations:
“Who are you?” “to decide who serves you? To decide the worth of a woman? Why do you feed to the sense of entitlement, the devious practice of hierarchy and patriarchy?”
She would then leave angrily; her silent blame lingering in what is left behind in the strainer.
“Are you not the taste of love, the teller of how nature works — organic and simplistic? Or has the hunger for power and status of humans rubbed off on you? Why so desperate to make a place in the human world as a torchbearer of superiority?”
The tea will not defend itself, but will look at you apprehensively, searching in you for the answers to it.
I know you may not know the answer— like any other girl whose story resounds in its ripples — but remind it of the quiet moments she shares with it, when she absorbs the warmth through her palms wrapped around the hot cup, forgetting her whines, forgetting her triumphs forgetting her society dictated mortal presence and being just a soul, a body, and joy fused into one.
Give the tea a suggestion if you care, tell it to take her to the world that lies beyond the world of agony, complaints, accomplishments, and defeat, the simple world sheltering a girl — not fully perfect, not fully flawed, ordinary, yet amazing — just like life, just like a freshly brewed cup of tea.
A garrulous mind 