The Seven-Year Cycle

During the year she spent in a Singapore prison, ArunDitha lived through her first encounter with dying. What came after was a renewal and the emergence of a new person, a journey she chronicles through a series of pivotal moments, seven years apart. Originally published by Ethos Books in the anthology Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore, “The Seven-Year Cycle” charts ArunDitha’s evolution from using avoidance to deal with loss toward relinquishing her resistance to it. At the heart of this piece is the writer’s turn inward, a yearning to peel back the accrued layers of a busy life and examine what lives inside her core. There, she finds more questions than answers about how to live cyclically, and offers her writing as an invitation to the reader to consider their relationship to mourning and death.

— Alexandra Valahu for Guernica Global Spotlights

Iam folded upon a cold concrete floor, my back against the wall. A few doors down, an inmate is wailing. The warden tells her to be quiet. On the other side of the bars, crickets scrape themselves into orchestral song, and a car drives by. I wonder if those people know how lucky they are to be free.

This is my introduction to dying. It is a good place to die — in a Changi Women’s Prison cell. I