Notes from
Reality in Transit
Copyright © 2026
by Shreeda Subedi
Preface
Notes from Reality in Transit is a personal investigation of the pluralities of identity: how we exist in the pauses between moments, constantly shifting; our thoughts refracted by the present moment, language, culture, memories, and the act of remembering itself.
With Notes, I set out to write using techniques of abrupt shifts in thought, linguistic play, layered metaphors, and deliberate interruptions, to explore the fundamental and temporal instability of meaning, creating an experience where the reader actively pieces together a subjective truth rather than passively consuming an authorial narrative. A temporally fluid and kaleidoscopic exploration of memory and perception.
Notes traces an arc from childhood to adulthood, though not in a conventional sense; the pacing accelerates and decelerates, the forms grow more experimental, and multilingualism further fractures the text's cohesion. Nepali phrases and European landscapes exist not as exoticized flourishes but as equal fragments of a diasporic consciousness. The vin chaud sipped at the Marché de Noël and the jaulo eaten during Dashain are threads in the same tapestry of a multilingual and multicultural existence, their dissonance deliberate, and their coexistence as natural as my own.
The 'self' in this collection refuses to be geographically or linguistically fixed, embracing instead the discomfort of liminality. Inspired by the principles of Language Poetry, treating the text as an "open field," and by Lyn Hejinian’s masterpiece My Life, I write using an alternative form called the "new sentence," solidifying this "open text" as a prose poem composed mainly of sentences with no clear transitions. The prose poems oscillate between visceral immediacy and metaphysical abstraction, mirroring the unreliability of perception. Thus, the text becomes a living entity, each section with its own rhythm.
This tension between the cerebral and the corporeal, between an illusion of coherence and the chaos of an "open text," mirrors the central paradox of the work: writing as both a tether to thought and an escape from it, the text as both being written 'by' the author, and the authorial inside-voice as well as outside-self being created through the text. Here, modernist stream-of-consciousness collides with the raw self-scrutiny of confessional poetry, while surreal juxtapositions fracture any illusion of stability.
At its core, Notes from Reality in Transit is an account of becoming and there are no answers here, only the residue of a mind in motion, a testament to how language, memory, and identity are not constructed but lived.
PART I
My mother cultivated very particular gardens
From here, each day seems like a paddy field and all the days reap and sow across a vast plain of green and muddled brown. We were like colored cattle grazing along the pastures, caught by the earthen breaks. The mist was so fine that it felt more like an odor than a texture in the air; an odor of damp rice stalks growing so remarkably green against the deep blue sky. There was something almost religious about it, something mystic, something abstruse. I think they were mustard flowers, though out of season. My grandfather had two cars: one numbered dui saya chaurasi (two hundred eighty-four), "the best of its time," and the other, unan nabey dui (eight hundred ninety-two), and each of their driver dāis (brothers) would wait in place, for decades, so that climbing onto the back seats felt like coming rather than going home. Little rainbow-colored rowing boats waited along the lake’s mouth. Tell me, how would your game of "Match the Memory to the Weather" go? We saw a patch of barren land where the lake refused to tread, beginning that autumn. There are places on this path I never revisited. It was a while before I understood why the stars had decided to move a certain number of steps from each other to form the constellations. Old buildings decompose, more so by water. Five or six children in the neighborhood were fishing along the shore, pretending to be their fathers and shouting at the younger kids to "Bring me more rocks!" or "Pull!" simulating a larger catch. “Little children should stay in the back seat of cars, not on the laps of drivers, pretending to drive”. My mother cultivated very particular gardens: the marigold garden, the cucumber garden, and the garden of spices disguised as plants (which were curiously more fantastical than their dried-up forms). "We do not expend more of ourselves when all we need is right here," I said, imitating what my mother's mother's mother's mother always said. I used to marvel at the immense difference between the destitute jogis (ascetics) at the temples and the priests working there. There was even a kuire (westerner) jogi collaborating with the occasion. The obvious analogy is with chants. Their choices felt more consequential because they lived as they did, at their own liberty. Meanwhile, we stood around the enclosure, hoping the miracles they prayed for would 'appear' soon… which interested us more than it perhaps should have.
What memory is not a recrudescent thought?
Colored cattle were grazing on a Chitwan hillside… so deeply covered by a single orange that, at sundown, the haze made it impossible to see any disparity between orange-colored mist and sunlight. She suggested we take "a nap underneath the warm winter sun." Even though I was too old to climb the playground bars, I loved the peeling red, white, and blue cylindrical metals, set parallel to each other, and I watched my younger brother clinging to the bars, moving his still-stretching limbs back and forth between them, feeling senescent since on Saturdays, I took up yoga on grassy hilltops, and yet, envious too, since it was not a Saturday and it was my brother whose feet would not touch the sodden earth beneath the bars and not I who was swinging with free will now. They spent the day building a fort in the basement. It was called jaulo (lentil stew), and my mother made it for breakfast in patterns. An indolent 'soup for the soul'. Whenever you've exhausted contemplating, talking, or voice begins a new paragraph. People must flatter their own camouflaging eyes with their changing selves. A version; aversion. My late teenage years were colored with experimentation and a love I was made to believe would last. A recurring ecstasy would surge from deep within our bodies and the makeshift family-bedrooms, flowing outward toward the alleys, the bridges with constant traffic blocks, past our favorite restaurants, the decade-old "new" mall, two distinct school campuses, and the two hotels where we made sure to explore a room on each floor before a voluntary relinquishment of truth in front of the gates of my mother’s home. Between us was an entire world we chose to ignore. I was a lover, I belonged to someone, suspended in a role, a being with breasts and a poetic-living affliction. On blue nights, the branches of the Bodhi tree stooped low. What memory is not a recrudescent thought? But it is a powerful chant… It took a year and a half. He had stolen the dreams of another man and given them to me, and I was tasked to return them to someone unknown…But I managed to put it off and somehow gave them back. The romance of two summers vanished, I had begun to learn, from the experience of passive conduct, about love.
Snacks were served at four every day after school before dinner.
A subtle movement of my palms called the waves. Eyes closed, tan skin, and a warmth that reminds me of childhood. Summers were spent in a daze of limbed instincts. They were fantasies, no different from the crystal-clear lagoons where lily pads broad enough to bear my weight would float amid shoals of friendly fish. And those daydreams were for me the truest parts of myself, conjured from the depths of my being; the contours of my soul. The universe exists for its own purpose. There were more jokesters than there were jokes, and everyone in the family shared the same kind of humor, making it impossible to trace its source or know whose style it truly was. Dust mites collect on autobiographical memorabilia, a politician "lies to prove a point," and in games, luck tells the winner. A sweet aftertaste of amalas ( gooseberries ). Yet even a minor change in tone, a shade lighter or darker than the last, can ruin his mood, but a child catches ladybugs without fault. I was hypnotized by the incoming, the outgoing, and the clashing of waves. Year after year, the festivities at my grandfather’s, uncle’s, or aunt’s during Dashain followed the same card games: ‘flush’ or ‘marriage,’ with my uncles cracking jokes that drew the same inevitable laughter from us all. They were humorous, and my two older cousins followed suit. We relied on their humor, a kind conjured in my father’s childhood, ingrained in the personalities of the four children. These yearly card games saw the young grow older and the old become elders. Here, trees are much like people; growing roots till they stand on their ground tall and proud, then slowly wither from the inside out. Soon after, I found myself hoping that you, too, would have this experience and breathe the same air, so that we would share the same rose-colored lenses, so that we were two halves of a whole. We had to wear glasses in order to see them. I chose partial blindness. Snacks were served at four every day after school before dinner. Small grains of rice were turned into turmeric-yellow mush, atop which a puddle of lime juice and tendrils of skinned potatoes made a meal of yellowed sod, tart puddles, and crisp timber. Jaulo for the soul.
How do you separate personalities from personal predicaments?
The year came to its eventual passing, but the passing of it was recorded in real time, five months later. I hear a distant neighbor vacuuming or water-spraying, or air-spraying outside, or perhaps a mechanic testing a car’s wheel on the ground; the noise coming from outside my window feels… frictional. In those days, I had the mistaken notion that complacency meant normalcy, which kept me from discovering a new normal. A bird chirps like the Samsung alarm clock, or the alarm clock chimes like a bird. Now, times have changed, and I tread on a foreign wilderness that will later become familiar, I sit on rain-streaked park benches, accepting the newly formed specks on my outerwear, as in, what I am wearing outwardly. I turn to look out of my window, my attention drawn to a covey of passengers on a cluster of metal convoys, collected on a track of iron rods. White and black are the ways of life you find mixed in curious corners. They are not interested in the new colors but in how they make people move. They’ll smoke soon. Heartbeats participate in the logic of substances that speed it up or slow it down, which is why we chose two opposing kinds to trick ourselves into a normal state of functioning. He believed a baby born in a pretty apartment would be porcelain. I like to think about them in the bath while the water ecstasies my fears. The body hides old stories within the epidermis.“They call pretty girls 'sweet ', back in London,” he said, and then, “lookzmaxxing.” How do you separate personalities from personal predicaments? A classified dialogue between seeing and watching. Quiet days go by fast, too fast. On the movable bedside table were four diaries from the past four years. Mostly memorabilia and some sporadic journaling; a physical account of recurring pain that made it embarrassing to hold, a place where all memories go. The ghastly buildings collect pale grass, and the ashen pavements gather cigarette butts; two from me, add them to the collection, what an education. A conversation begins only when the celestials sit right above the self.
A dichotomy of responsibility and innocence.
There once stood a red-bricked outline of a cottage; my father had said it would be ours. Now, they use it as a storage room; it was pre-destined. The five-and-a-half-foot tall fences enclose it on each side, and the cracks in the concrete mirror dried earth and shifting tectonic plates. Too many memories slip through, but my mind holds only fragments. I don’t get to choose… well, maybe, sometimes. At L’Marché de Noël, men wore paddy caps, had hooked noses, grilled raclette sandwiches, and poured overly sweet vin chauds. I did count the number, sixty-four. But a fifteen-minute joyride on the machine that flips you upside down yanks the conscience into a fleeting recognition of death. I could die this instant and remain at peace, happily. There was a distance between ‘waning’ and ‘wanting.’ Égal means ‘equal’ or ‘has-the-same-consequence-as,’ but two variables can never truly amount to equality in consequence. The dictionary differs from the diction in dying or in drowning. A translator connotes the denotations. Is it a coincidence, or do they choose? Consequence: barely sequenced, a lie in the sequence, a con. Perhaps friendship with your children grants you back your childhood, a dichotomy of responsibility and innocence. The act of forgetting suggests that memories leave a gap in space for them to happen again, if they choose to. And when asked to present myself, I raise my eyebrows, hoping they can read into the impossibility; it would not forsake just one sentence, but two. And there is no ‘sameness’ in the sky, as opposed to how we regard that which is pure of heart with hard-edged cynicism. The parks were haunted by invisible spiderwebs that clung to the forearms, or perhaps the subconscious delivered a sudden terror through this ghostly spider, and the body jerked in an instinctive, fearful state, the threat fictional and two hours late. Kiwis eat the proteins on your tongue, surely karmic. Displacements alter delusions, which is all for the good. Diction is used in discourse, making it possible. Yet… better left unsaid if I could have. That stranger isn’t looking at you; it is simply their line of sight. A glance as a singular, not as a thought.
My mother holds my palm lines as we take the stairs up to a palm reader.
Somewhere between an understanding of the self and the other, one is likely to encounter religion. Maybe we can find God once we stop conjuring reality as it unfolds, in the present. Tense. Jeevan ko kaam ho jeevani (Life’s work is in living). From the attic window, we could spy on whoever stood at the front gate, their figure suspended in a bodily sense of waiting, an anticipation that rendered adults almost childlike. When we wished to hide indoors and lied that we weren't home, we would peer down from either corner of the window at the unfortunate neighbor caught in the act of asking. They would always look up, searching for, and sometimes meeting our deceitful eyes. Pre-tended. You can only ever look at ‘one’, not ‘everyone,’ because if you did, you would be looking at no one. I hear morning prayer bells. My mother holds my palm lines as we take the stairs up to a palm reader. It seems to me now that fiction is taken over by philosophers, or vice versa. No wonder we are all drawn to stories, mostly our own, which we keep repeating to ourselves as ‘factual’. What does he think he is doing with statements when he means them no longer? And what else should I amend but shame and inadmissible folly (for which I kept a journal), just as a responsible person simply ‘doesn’t walk out seeking mistakes’? A fact of the familiar is different from a familiar fact, and bravery delivered by circumstance. They worry over the agility of time. I remember the chest-tightening discomfort of an outspoken lie, but not enough to remember how I had bent the truth or what ‘truth’ was in that circumstance, feeling only the unease left imprinted on my body while the words themselves dissolved into a preamble of memory. Well… there are always more leaves than flowers. In sunlight, they obediently photosynthesize, changing the rough outlines of themselves, perhaps unaware of their seasonal mortality. And I, with daring, consequently faltered, perhaps hoping to amend my previous faults, or if nothing else, simply to think of them.
You never know what might happen.
If it is put into writing, it becomes more real… I say as much, to live with an illusioned perception of memory, to refuse to write them down as truth, which is far from what I wish it were. Do you ever wish to escape the daily procession of surfacing from unconsciousness to consciousness, tied to an 'I', a 'you’, a 'here', a 'now', and a 'tomorrow'? She woke up each afternoon, remembering the possibility of another day, perpetually in a state of completing her to-do-today list, yesterday was today, and tomorrow will also be today. A kid in the distance says he wants to stay here forever. They should have installed air conditioning. And you can never have a friend if you always have a sense of yourself. Secret-not-so-secret diary entries were written in the park amongst friends. Misty days of childhood, cloaked in the mystique of experiencing oneself as the first man alive. We wore two pigtails. She didn’t want the other kids to upstage her daughter, even though that child was clearly worse at drawing; we all saw it and wondered why they chose to act out this scene of the play. It glorified self-sustenance but left a tangy citrus on my tongue. But all things are settled before we go, as I’ve got my own to-do, and maybe the falsities and the would-bes and the could-bes speak for themselves. “You never know what might happen,” but they do, they monopolize on the happenings. Noon, but it's five o’clock somewhere. The balcony-boxes were slanting slightly to the left, and ‘up in the air’ felt more stable than ‘grounded’. Permanence, and the hypocrisy in its meaning. We hid reality from ourselves so that this hiding itself became reality. You are what you think. At the bank, an old lady was tapping her feet and complaining with her pointer finger, which they were all compelled to do. The tongue sticks itself to the ice cone, compelled by the contradictory burning-cold. A pear is a ‘p’ added to the ‘e’ of an ear, shaped as such.
Present in the Present to Present
You stretch the elastic to its limit, then wince as the band slaps your wrist, perhaps because we forget the nature of things. The quarters of the apartment separate my quarterly cleaning of them, and when I vacuum from the hallway to the living room, the cord remains taut, unmoving from the single outlet I refuse to unplug. The stretching of a singular to function at its limit, comfort zone, but you can only vacuum if it's plugged in. The great fear of diverging from one’s fate, for the three, you must make sacrifices; they stand in front of the two metro entrances on your right and left, watching and waiting for you to choose a gate. A conglomerate of shedding human cells. For them, you must move into a new apartment, pack your boxes, place curved dish bowls in makeshift corners, unpack those corners, and set yourself in temporality, dusty. The wayward cigarette ash on the boot, singular. Never-the-less, I find it uncomfortable inhabiting the I. Concord, accord, d’accord. The languages of gestures vs. the languages of sentences. I gesture myself to the full stop. The ways of presence that fractalize the present; Present in the present, to present. One cannot be seduced by what you think we wish to hear. It isn't easy to prevent the transformation of thoughts into ideas and then ideals. There is a good kind and a bad kind of water. “Hawa pani ma nei reicha.” (“It's in their water and air”) In my dreams, I swim in the sky, arm in arm with this guy; a flowing sequence inseparable from sleep-talk. The low vibrational Om mani padme hum over the gong’s gyrating gong. I digress, object, correct, cremate, and exist in all the verb forms asked of me. Camouflaging is a skill within oneself; You do not change your scales, merely their color. It reveals multiplicity, the natural state.
PART II
P.S. I’m self-publishing the book! ( parts 2+ 3 included )
Support ^^ to get the print version mailed to you, by January 2027!