How Great It Would Feel to Be Resetted
By Fanna Sharma
It’s one in the night and I can’t stop watching these videos of her palms pressing on someone’s hip, her arms rubbing someone’s back, her thumb stretching the muscle between someone’s neck and shoulder; these videos of popping sounds, of moans of ease, of a chiropractor cracking the bones of people in pain.
“I feel resetted,” one of them says. A big smile, a chuckle.
I’m fixated on how wrong the word resetted is, it doesn’t even feel like a word. It doesn’t feel right that reset would need another ‘t’ and a suffix. It’s obvious the word reset should be ‘reset’ in every tense because it means reset.
I wonder how great it would feel to be resetted.
Maybe she’ll unhinge every joint of mine, pluck my arms from their sockets, lift my entire hip cartilage like a crown from the head of the longest bones, letting the ossein flow; bend my spine and swirl it, letting it unfurl and slither away in this freezing night for a long crawl that is therapeutic, meditative, and every other correction to the wrongs that have left me unmotivated, unmoving, and unable to breathe.
Maybe she’ll open my ribcage and let in a breath that feels like a breath, and let out all the breaths I’ve held in rage at myself. Maybe she’ll also let my heart leave its prison.
Maybe she’ll send me back in time and let me start all over again.
For now, I can only scroll through these videos of others being resetted. My head is on a pillow but it’s not resting. I catch my jaw tense, and a deep breath leaves me every time someone inevitably moans on the screen. I imagine myself on the other side: the chiropractor asking me to relax, to trust, as she holds my head in her hands, turning it to the left—far left, far enough for my brain to signal fright, far enough for my neck to turn tense, far enough for her to whisper again, relax.
A crack.
A moan.
A relief—a reset.
Fanna is a writer, poet, and a 1998 born. Her work attempts to capture, distil, and serve the mystical as well as the extraordinarily ordinary around us. She lives in Jaipur, India where her days are spent sipping on historical aesthetics and admiring a hot cup of chai. You can find her on X slash Twitter, @fannawrites or on her terrace, silently staring at the moon.
Artwork Source: “Rest,” Caitlin Walton
Artist Statement: I struggle with body image and use painting as a way to combat that. I do this by using my body as reference for all the figures in my work. This allows me to see myself in a different light as momentarily I am no longer concerned with how other people see me, I’m just interpreting my own self. I change features such as gender, skin tone, weight, muscle etc. so that I can include lots of different beautiful bodies in my art. However, I still get a sense of putting my physical form into my work as well as my emotional self.
I’m from Kent and currently living in West Yorkshire. I consider myself to be an outsider/lowbrow artist and like to portray a slightly unsettling vibe in an otherwise calm environment. This is due to the fact that I am comforted by the odd elements of life as well as the beauty the world has to offer. I experience thoughts of self doubt and self criticism however the response I get from sharing my art is overwhelmingly positive which is so validating and inspires me to create more.
The Turning Leaf Journal 