Annotations on Chappell Roan’s “My Kink is Karma”

May connotes debts unpaid—to the rain, to flowers, to each other, to the land, to the past and the future. A year ago, my body was confined to its bed in a rhythm of collapse. A year ago, we placed our flesh in the path of the death machine; a year later, it continues to trample our sacrificial sinew. A year ago, I spoke to you for the last time. And today, you dance at the seams of my mind, a haunting nostalgia unravelling ever closer.

I refuse to miss you, but I think of you every time Chappell sings about karma. So here are my annotations for you. Consider them a herald. Or cookies left out for a beloved intruder.

We broke up on a Tuesday / Kicked me out with the rent paid

If our friendship were a wedding, the sadhus would deem it inauspicious, the end written in their cards. Unsurprising that the stars would paint discord between your bootlicking, landgrabbing ancestors and my labouring, desert-dwelling ones. Good thing neither of us believe in fate. 

Your parents always said karma is when the rent comes due. I’d hold back an angry gasp because I’d already paid it, several times over. I’d been paying it my whole life and hundreds of years before. But you’d catch my eye and you always could silence me with a look. Landlords are like fascists—we don’t try to reason with them, you’d be thinking. You never did understand irony. And you’d return to your food, our Sunday evening routine.

Who knew that we’d let it / Get this bad when it ended?

Our last conversation took eight hours. It felt miraculous, entire sentences flowing from me without your righteous interruptions. You even took out a notebook to remember such novel ideas as do not harm people and intention and impact are not equivalent. 

You, who carried yourself like a bully and yet professed the liberation inherent in every act of agency, the violence intrinsic to any form of control. You, who lorded over others in your perfect understanding of anarchy, dutifully noted the practices of compassion as though they were a revelation.

It’s comical, bridges you burn / If karma’s real, hope it’s your turn

Illusions are fatal when they shatter. Exactly one year ago, I wrote: I think they’ve broken me and I don’t want to be broken again. At the first hour, I wanted you to hurt, to know that the pain I felt was real. I wanted karmic justice. And can you blame me? There’s a reason karma has a six thousand year old history in our cultures. The same reason you own our lands and I am but a tenant-in-exile. Moral superiority feels ecstatic. 

I heard from Katie / You’re losing it lately / Moved back with your parents

A White man pointed out the casteism. What I felt most in those days was shame. I thought myself clever, perceptive, and I let you scream me down in public. I knew myself to be every woman I have loved. The fear felt like return. But that is why I survived you, I think. Terror is comfortable when it is the substance of your marrow. 

Oh, God / And it’s coming around, yeah, it’s coming around, yeah, it’s coming around

You should have this in your notes, but here is a quick refresher: the Hindu deity, the first principle, the divinity at the heart of creation holds all beings as equal. I am god and you are god and the robin on my windowsill is god. Anarchy before their words.

But injustice must be defended, or else you could not remain with your boot pressed to my chest. Karma is the justification behind oppression. I am born Avarna, oppressed-caste, due to my moral failings in a past life. You are born Brahmin, holier than the gods, because of your previous incarnation’s good deeds. What goes around comes around.

People say I’m jealous, but my kink is watching / You ruin your life / You losing your mind

I am speaking to people who would kill my whole family given the chance. This is not a thought foreign to my bloodline. Your mother said, All Muslims should be killed. You told me this breathless, wondrous at its primal malevolence—an ideological opponent that must be crushed and dismissed. 

To me, it was a shove back to the memories of fire and death simmering in my marrow. I was gone, returned to the homeland, to a hellscape I’d never known, fighting to survive. And you continued your anarchist sermon, Brahmin like your mother, more god than I could be.

You breaking your heart / You thinking I care / People say I’m jealous, but my kink is karma

The pattern between us was familiar, generational wisdom instilled from conception. I was your servant, your inferior, a body to extract care and labour and love from. And I did love you. Karmically, wholeheartedly, bare-faced.

If I sloughed off all the justifications and qualifiers and theories, if I finally scraped the bone of the matter, I’d realize I still love you. Maybe because your voice still lingers beneath my scalp, achingly familiar. Maybe because I still refuse to admit that I could have been so mistreated. It must have been love after all. You must have been unwell.

Wishing you the best, in the worst way / Using your distress as foreplay

I am terrified of running into you. Terrified of knowing what you have become. Or maybe of knowing who I would become if we met again. By the third hour, I was negotiating with myself, trying to map out all futures where I could still know you. I know the intricacies of your hurt like the lines on my palms. Who could get so close to someone and not love them?

Six months since April and I’m doing better / No need to be hateful in your fake Gucci sweater

Last May was a reckoning. And we have all been raw this month, agony blooming from even a whisper of wind. The pain is karma, not justice. I hope you are not suffering alone. There are days when the grief of everything you took is bile clawing up my throat, foretelling my destruction. All I have done this year is survive, and dig frantically, ascetically, for words. And still, here I am, protecting your name. 

It’s hot when you know that you’re caught / And you’re getting pissed off, it’s getting me off

It feels pathetic that you still shape my days effortlessly. Last month, a date had so many of your mannerisms I thought I would die. I’d look at them and see your face and want to peel mine off. By the seventh hour, I could have predicted this. By the seventh hour, I did not want you hurt. And you were injured like all humanity, prowling at the edges of your cage.

People say I’m jealous, but my kink is karma

I will not become you. You called yourself an anarchist to dignify your behaviour. And I do not want the cycle of karma. Here is the meaning of anarchy: you hurt me because you did and you can get better because anyone can. I did not deserve it because no one does. I do not want you to abuse. I do not want you to be abused.

Today, the people in my life treat me better than I could have hoped in my most hedonistic dreams. Nora called me yesterday and we talked until we fell asleep—about you, about last May, and love, and jewellery, and trauma, and drag queens, and amatonormativity, and this essay. We spoke for eight hours.