All Things Pretty Will Be Killed.

I put on red glass bangles. My friend wore them to a wedding and left them in my bag, and as I rummaged through it for my lighter, I gave into the temptation of wearing them. It was a strange combination — shorts, ratty tank top, bright red bangles — but it wasn't the first time I had been adorned in that combination of apparel. He came into the room and saw me sitting on the chair by the window, playing with my bangles; I don't like many sounds but I like the clinking of glass bangles. It has an edge, a clink too far and everything breaks, the sound reminds me of that.

"Are you wearing..bangles?" He asked me, predictably shocked by my behaviour.

It's not that I mind jewellery, I'm wearing eight earrings right now, it's the cultural symbolism that I dislike. Ever since I got married I am much more wary of representing as the cultural ideal of a wife. I refuse, completely, to wear matrimony on me. Red bangles are matrimony. Every single aesthetic element of being an Indian bride is sexist and horrible, and while I have no compunction about being objectified, I will do so in service of my vagina, not the religio-cultural patriarchy. I will not be shackled in beauty and gold, sprinkled in red powder, bathed in turmeric; I will not wear cultural symbols of ownership in open conformity to my enslavement as a woman. I will wear an ugly choke-chain tied together by a shoelace as a symbol of my enslavement to a man I love, but that's different, only I know what that means, we designed what that means, no younger woman is going to look at me and see her inevitable future, just my weird aesthetic choices. I defer to a chosen authority, not one made of the fragility of glass and imposed upon me with the tenacity of gold.

But I used to love glass bangles.

He didn't know that. He met me after I had tucked my whimsy away and embraced a more egalitarian and fair system of destruction, but I used to own boxes and boxes of glass bangles once. The black ones were my favourites, but I loved wearing the red ones the most. It upset people. The colour red on a young unmarried woman upsets people; symbols that demonstrate marriage upset people when they're seen on young women. It's applied much more seriously to Indian things, I could wear red pants when I was a teenager and no one thought anything of it, but the moment I put on red bangles, it upset people. When I put on toe rings, the cook in our house tried to explain to me in very covert language that I was symbolising that I had been fucked. I got my nose pierced just to mess with my grandmother, because where we come from there's a tradition  of piercing your nose when you are betrothed, and having the  ring swapped out by your in-laws or your husband the night he first fucks you. There's also a community of prostitutes that have that tradition, you get a new nose-ring after your first client, anecdotally he's the one who is supposed to take off your old one and put on the new one. No points for guessing which tradition I enjoy more nor from where my fetish for extensive nose jewellery comes.

For the most part, when I was younger, wearing the cultural symbols of matrimony was just an act of rebellion for me. Maybe it still is and that's why I won't wear them at all anymore, now that I'm *supposed* to. It was fun to make the people in my life angry about me doing things I knew they would beg me to do one day, but it wasn't so with the bangles. I fucking loved them. Initially, I didn't understand why I was so taken by the concept, but one evening, very early in my relationship with my previous partner, he grabbed my bangles in his fingers from one side and smashed them against the wall on the other. They broke instantly, scratched up my wrist and scattered all around me on the floor. As soon as I saw the blood on my wrist, I got down on the floor and we fucked on top of the shattered glass. You know that highlights reel we all have of the best fucks of our lives? That one is the first clip on my reel. My first best fuck.

For years, I wore bangles all the time after that. My wrists were always torn up, my garbage was always full of broken bits of coloured glass forged in a factory in one of the most exploitative and unregulated industries in the country. Everything sucks, doesn't it? Everything beautiful is a lie.

But not violence.

Violence is my singular religion and the most potent acts of violence are always the ones that desecrate symbols of beauty. Break my bangles. Slap the ring out of my nose. Step on my hair. Smudge my lipstick. Break everything that decorates me. Force me to be pretty, so you can show me how little you care about beauty when you pulverise me. Violence doesn't car. It doesn't stop to adjust the temperature of the room. It doesn't remember to take off its rings before it hits you in the face. It doesn't care where you land and what breaks when you fall. Adorned with the fragility of oppressive ideology, bangles break so fucking easy.

Like me.

He knows that, but sometimes I am way ahead in the story than he is. He doesn't know I picked an object up off the floor and relived a romance with it that spanned decades. He doesn't know I've already cast him in a role he will inevitably find on his own, if I present him with the right circumstances. The improv of sex is predictable when the actors know each other too well.

"I used to wear bangles all the time, actually," I told him, putting my wrist into his palm.

"That seems insane to me," he said, as if he had seen a ghost in my shadow.

I took my hand out of his and banged it against the arm of the chair. The bangles flew everywhere, leaving a liquid imprint on my wrist. He took a sharp breath and opened his mouth just a little bit, but I don't need to see physical indicators of it, to be able to tell he is aroused.

"Does it make sense now?" I asked him, because sometimes a gesture speaks louder than a story.

He launched at me, taking my throat and biting my ear lobe, as if to tell me he understood everything.

"You have more of those, right?" He asked, smirking at me.

To break, I will buy anything.  

Because violence is my religion — a dangerous and irrational pursuit but I can make it make sense — he is my priest, and together we worship in this unholy temple, where all things pretty come to die.