If things had been different, perhaps I wouldn’t have been dancing under lights in a green lace dress trying to forget everything that’s occured. Curves - taunts - swallowed back pride and drinks that send my head into a world - the land of the free. But no land really expresses freedom. I just try to feel the music as I close my eyes, drowning out neon and camera flashlights. Dance, dance, dance. Pretend that it’s all okay, pretend it never happened - what? Yes, pretend hard enough that my mind forgets why I needed to play pretend in the first place.

One of your eras returns to the front - prove it. Prove that you were once happy and not this sorrowful woman drowning in the sorrowful laments of your language. This tide I ride is not safe at all, vulnerabilities in revealing lace unable to prevent the exposure of my pain - the ship sinks - a one-way ticket to the bottom of an ocean of grief. Who is ‘you’ - who am ‘I’ even? Broken, broken soul, when will you learn to decipher the language of heartache rather than escaping it?

The pain always hits hard at one song where the writer chose to become learned in the language of heartache and the singer chose to become skillful at feeling lyrics before sending them out into the world to hunt me down. One step at a time to safety, one step out in the open to learn the ways of the Angel of Death, one step away from what I once knew. -- I stop dancing and in a sea of people, I am the only one dislocated from the moment - or are they all dislocated from my moment - “you always make it about yourself”. Static. We ignore the outlier, remember the control variables. Let us stop. I’ll stop.

I break traditions as I pass and yet tradition is what has always broken me. I try to learn the pretty life like every shameless(/ful?) broken girl just to escape the restraints my lovesickness has upon me. But always to no avail as there lies retribution for breaking traditions - my yearning as proof.

I was never perfect and yet I was somebody somewhere and no matter how hard I’d have ever tried to make that somewhere permanent, it would be a sin in the eyes of the world. Permanence, even in the right way, cannot be accepted. Permanence is a problem. Even the fleeting nature of love is a problem so always and forever would fall on deaf ears. Oh what a sin.

Welcome to the days where you have no choice but to sin with your head in the stars and your body handed over like assets in an agreement. Let us transfer the ownership from one person to another because that is tradition and tradition cannot be broken. These shackles are the only permanency known to us. If you’re lucky, you can enjoy this life shackled to the earth with the dances behind closed doors and the drinks under camera flashlights. Perhaps in a green lace dress without our owners knowing, we could pretend we’ve been liberated, and suddenly the sweetness of liberation would fill our empty hearts. What would we do without neon lights and wasted limbs anyway?

Who taught you how to dance to sad songs? - not having just learnt to dance them, I have become learned like the writers of the songs and as passionate as the singers. On-stage, in a green lace dress, I sing my broken heart out to a stadium of empty chairs. The hollowness speaks to me because I have always lived my life screaming to be heard. Maybe I just took a step forward and tried several in the past because I was hoping my hands wouldn’t be left empty but their emptiness is the only permanence. How fast you forget is beyond me because I am still mourning next to the trinkets. On-stage, in a green lace dress, I sing verses on heartbreak and I hear your name in my head the whole night. All the steps I take forward to the crowd that doesn’t exist, I see a vision of you stepping back, trying to disappear into a crowd that isn’t there.

Another step forward, and have you already stepped away? Have you shut the door in my face as you run away? Sometimes I can’t even place why this wardrobe of heartbreak has to exist. It all feels meaningless. I, who followed you in a blue dress, has been defeated and sentenced to a life of purity, virginity and jealousy outside of all I wanted. My only respite from this world is the revealing dresses behind drawn curtains and the dance under the lights of heaven - the neon lights of heaven - the warning lights that I’m approaching hell.

You don’t even try to read the pain in my eyes because you have been taught to disappear and I have been taught to reap the lyrics of what I once sowed. The infinite loop of the world where my hurting someone has returned with me hurt at another’s hands. Concert over. Income at £0. Popularity at the 0.01% where my imagination decided to create a packed audience he could hide in and my eyes could find him in. All over the internet is my green lace dress and everyone is trying to get one but why would you want the dress that marks my interlude, that marks this current world of (im)patience, questions and lies? Through the lace, you can see my limbs restrained by loyalty, shackled by obedience and wasted by release. Streaks of burgundy earnt through the years and a little shine under flashing lights to say I’m happy dancing with you all tonight. But really, it’s all pretend, and the green dress is about pretending you’re okay and taking a break when really, there is no break from heartbreak.

Lishyx

The first wardrobe post:

- Tu me manques, mon amour -

There are so many words that halt themselves when I begin to say them. My own tongue becomes a cage to enslave me between four walls where I cannot confess. And confession is only the most important thing I must do in my life. Confess. Confess till my organs blacken from the knowledge that I have committed the crime I was forbidden from. Confess till it comes out from me that love was never the problem; it was the way we have been taught that loving is a sin.

So love became something I had to covertly embrace so that it could engulf me. Consume me. Reduce me to something that wasn’t even worthy of being because love in the home always taught me that love from others outside would be worse than the declarations inside. But I loved. I loved till I could not love anyone more than I loved my love. But even that was so gentle that the smallest touch of someone else managed to make my life identical to the broken mirror glass on the floor.

Now, every single time there is an opportunity to have your proximity, my heart claws its way into my mouth awaiting your return - but you never arrive. So my heart has to sink back into my chest and the vessels have to be tied up again. You’ll learn how to do that one day right? Carve someone open and widen their arteries so their own body doesn’t clog up and die. What about me, will you save time to save my heart too? Cardiologist. Would you be a surgeon in that too? How many people will lie on the operating table while you unpiece them and fit all the parts back in like a puzzle? And through all that, I will have to stand on the side, on the other side of the glass, watching your meticulous movements in your craft, hoping you know that my own heart pounds recklessly and needs you to carry out that open-heart surgery on me.

Whenever you could be even a step closer to me, my body leans towards where you could be, the compass spinning to point towards you as North. I thought you’d let me walk with you around the world, or at least follow you with the same devotion and reverence I have till now. Who knew you wouldn’t even want me to remain rooted in one place in wait? I miss you, why? Why do I miss you when you told me not to? I take the long way back to the house on fridays, my hands grazing the few flowers and plants somebody planted in front of the offices on the main road. I take the main road because even the back alleys I know well can be dangerous even if I know where to run. I’m scared I won’t even have it in me to run. The same way I can’t run away from you even while you want me to.

One day you’ll learn to fix others but who will learn to fix me after you’ve gone. I’ll call you but you won’t pick up. I’ll bury myself where I last met you but you won’t remember where that is soon. I’ll imagine you in love again and again and again till eventually I believe you’ve fallen in love with someone else.

- WHERE R U? -

I think I’ll become one too - a cardiologist, not a body on a table - but in a different way, teaching people to heal their hearts so broken from love. When I stitch souls back up I’ll tuck the flowers in their body and teach them to not just fill the gaps the lover wrenched the heart out from, but to grow another heart in a garden where even when Winter comes, the beauty returns in the Spring.

On the walks back to the house after saving someone else, I’ll collect more flowers while I’m out of my mind. In the house, I’ll crumble at the sight of my naked reflection. The flowers will litter the ground, flecks of dust that were meant to be pretty petals thrown over us while we walked towards the altar. I’ll pull out the love letters I wrote to you, trace the way you’d sign off in your replies. I’ll miss the way you used to be there, when I’d wake up I could read you and feel hope. But those days in the future will only hold my yearning where I cry on the floor with a box full of my love for you being opened. Pandora’s box. Every time I open it, I unleash horror and pain into my own world. The sorrow rises like a flame and burns a circle around me and I sit in a ritual every night, healing others but unable to heal myself.

Every time you ignore my words, it’s another stab into my chest. Like you don’t even want to know how I am.

( 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 6 / 7 / 15 / 16 / 17 / 18 / 20 / 26 / 28 / 31 / 37 / 43 / 45 / 93 / 123 )

I’m caught counting the days you’ve left me behind but before I used to count the days till I return to you. You don’t even want to return, I don’t even want to leave so how about we both just stay standing where we are, caught in a vertigo we don’t know how to leave. You can stand miles away but I’m spinning in a world where I’ve hurt someone I love while subverting everything you left me with.

Who said A + M was the greatest love story? I did many times. I take it back. A + M will always be full of separation, sitting so far away with other letters in between. I will miss you but that is because I am always without you, with an expanse of red threads in between us but none that ties us together. You will never be near me and somehow, this cruel world is telling me to accept that. I have barely learnt to accept that our initials will always be far from each other, it will take a long time to accept more. I miss you, wherever you are on the other side of the world or in the same continent as me. I wrote our initials in the pages of a diary full of kisses and remnants of my favourite lipsticks. I leave my lips scarred from teeth but untouched by anyone else as an offering to you and only you. I’ve never kissed / been kissed by someone else. Never felt the need. Now there’s a sanctity around giving away that first kiss because it will be like giving over my entire self. Like handing my heart over to someone and leaving it in their pocket. Like I did with you.

You weren’t here when Paranoia placed his hands around my neck and choked me, when I looked at the prayer mat and averted my eyes, when my lips were parted to scream but the sound wouldn’t leave my body. Every single night since you’ve left I think of you incessantly and wonder where I went wrong. In the darkness, I pull out the memories and hope the night is long enough to remember you for until the morning where I have to focus on the real world. The real world that doesn’t contain you anymore. A world where I hold the shattered fragments of my dreams because as you left, you pulled the cloth on the kitchen table with you and all over the floor still lies broken glass and wine in pools. Thank you for not being here right when I needed you to stay.

- Mon amour -

During the day, I continue to love you softly, even while you are missing from me and my body aches yearning for you. I miss you and I scream I wish a million times over while avoiding love letters of us. I love you as though you never left, tapping out letters that could be with you one day, that I’ll preserve because I’ve never known how to leave memories behind. I look at a childhood photo of myself and I mourn the little girl who died before she met you, who was reborn in your hands, who has died once again now you’ve left. She has gone through much, I couldn’t protect her my love, I couldn’t protect myself but most of all I couldn’t stop myself from hating you a little for leaving me behind.

Letters of yearning leave my body, individually tied with the heartbreak. You aren’t near me, you don’t know how to be anymore and I can’t remember the sweet emotions that lived in me while you were here. The gentle rushes that breathed life into my blood vessels that are now barren deserts living in a prolonged drought. This separation has leeched life from my body and I only know how to lie on an operating table with my wounds exposed. I’ll walk upon roads I thought I would walk with you, I’ll fly over your country, step close to the city where you live - hoping I could meet you - but I’ll just be another broken girl drained of life walking through the stages of the world. I’ll pass you like a ghost and you’ll never recognise that I was even there, a wraith, perhaps a maid of the Angel of Death. Soulless. Heartless. Lifeless.

Nowhere to mark home as I dance in the rain with the street lamps on. The canvas of stars covered by clouds that know how to cry with me and not just stare at me while I’m begging God to have you back. If I overthink this all enough, what if I cause its fruition? The eternal ache inside my body as I mourn till the day I die. Holding it all in my hands with a torn veil crowning me as your unwed bride, dancing in an ivory dress the colour my people mourn in. I’ve been left to soar across a night sky where the storm kisses my face and you think I’m insane, someone best left caged. Who’s going to tell you I’m already caged and these screams I let out in the night are the product of my desire to escape?

All my verses started with you, ended with you - cyclically dancing around you. My desire to be free lived in the form of loving you for an eternity outside of this prison. I don’t even have the guts to tell you that this distance is a method of entrapment too, that the loss of you is like a brick placed upon my chest and my diaphragm aches because it can’t keep in time with my inhales and exhales while I’m drowning in the pain. My love, my love - MON AMOUR - look at me, look at me once last time, while I exhale and my lungs sigh. - I’ve waited, I’ll wait, I’ll never go. - The rise and fall of my heartbeat declares everything I’ve felt, charts dating eight months of separation, one more to the cycle - and I carry in the womb of love something twisted, that cannot grow beauty, only wilted pain.

All my internal organs try to leave my body and exist on the ground, not floating in the sky, suspended in that vertigo. My love, loving you scars my systems and leaves them incapable of functioning when you turn away. I watch you walk further and further away and call out your name and all the sweet words I used to call you and all the sweet words you used to call me. I even call out your name and my voice breaks as I do it. It isn’t enough for you to turn around. It never is. You are missing from me and yet I can never make you return no matter how much I miss you.

Lishyx

Had a successful panic attack so I thought it shouldn’t go to waste so here’s the piece you get out of my pain. Warning: references that may trigger sensitive readers (e.g. rape).

Paranoia is a serpent that crawls through my blood vessels and leaves its venom to lace my iron into clots that choke me all night. - Forever, I lay at his feet, trembling as he guides me to tuck a knife in my hand before I go to bed, clutching it the way one might cling to a lover or a rosary. Paranoia sits behind me on the train to London, on the car ride during late nights and he never lets me sleep without leaving me naked and vulnerable. Paranoia worships the altar of overthinking, thriving on the decay of a broken girl and her pretty little hourglass dreams. On the nights when I do my all to hold sanity close, he glides through my defences and my lymphocytes are left questioning just how deep this knife could penetrate my flesh.

(Paranoia is a knife / the knife is Paranoia?)

He presents the moments that I swallow back pills like a glass of chlorine to bleach my insides and purify my heart.

Instead of crying about the heartbreak, he lets me cry about the man standing outside the door that wasn’t locked, the man that could have kicked the handle and it would’ve opened at his will - he who might feel like God then, at the top of the system.

[00:24]

In this house, I tiptoe, afraid of the sound my own steps will make and give me away. Outside, the storm encompasses the Earth and rain kisses the empty streets - streets empty except for that one man. The snake leaves my body through my mouth - his tail catching against my windpipe as I suppress the inhumane noises of pain that threaten to give me away. I stand in front of the window, staring out at the streets for any sign of him but all I see are the movements in the shadows my eyes are making.

While drawing the curtains and checking the windows are locked (for the fifth time) the light refracts and I see movement bend towards me - twisting all forms of normality. The air is denser, the clock ticks, all while I choke on it the way I writhe at the hands of Paranoia. In front of the window, I murmur holy verses of protection, handing myself over to God (but someone hand me the pills that will act like chemotherapy and kill the paranoia in me. It might kill some of me too - it’s worth it). I seal every crevice of the house with sanctity and hope that even the devil cannot enter through the door. Hiding in the darkest corners of the house, I hope even the Angel of Death can’t find me.

Even if I’m left with the snake, it’s better than having a gun or a knife pressed against my neck or my head - the tender parts of me - so I follow through rituals, reverently seeking God’s light in a house where all the lights are off. WHERE R U God in the dead of the night - when my back is pressed against the door and I’ve sunk my teeth into my hand, buried my face in the pillow and pressed my eyes shut - and the man outside who thinks he can carry out something only the Angel of Death was created to do walks closer to this house? Do my angels ask you now why I’ve cried today when I promised to be sane?

Paranoia, sweet belladonna in my veins, who would I be if he hadn’t scarred my arteries as he glided through my body in that attempt to prepare me for the pyre? Purification. Sanctity. Perfect enough to leave when the man outside enters and takes my life. Mother called the man outside a harami (bastard). Paranoia wishes to extinguish sin from my body and let me be slaughtered like an art, carved out from like a statue - but he himself has grown inside my body - not gentle like a mother’s womb. He was corrosive, erasing parts of me I never knew I needed till they were gone. I’m on the ground mourning the loss of it all asking God when he’ll return me to glory.

[00:45]

Father is home now. Praying. Brother - praying. Everybody else - sleeping. Sleep, the mercy from God that I can’t find during the nights as my tear-stained pillows keep me away, the dampness soaked by my skin and my skin being soaked by the silk sheets. At this moment, only I stand by the window searching the streets for threats, my nails embedding themselves in flesh and Paranoia’s hands around my neck like a necklace. Someone turns the light on and I sit there fighting the urge to scream that he can see us because he can hear us too. The walls are too thin that the sound passes through with ease. Windows so fragile they break under the pressure of my fingers, a little like my neck at the hands of Paranoia. He thinks he’s God and he’ll know how to enter the way Paranoia knew how to enter my body and grow off of the death of me.

Even the smallest sounds echo repeatedly in my mind and the pain corrodes my vision. My stomach burns and the acidity rises up my body, trying to leave but only successfully incinerating my trachea instead. Through my mind plays scenarios - movies graphically filmed by Overthinking and played at her altar like a debut of just how deep the dagger she crafted goes. If I move back the curtains, the man jumps out at me in my visions but he isn’t really there and my melatonin pills are at the bottom of a trash bag in the red bin outside.

[01:00]

The roughness of the carpet grazes my skin and I realise just how raw the flesh on my body is. Is that what the man outside is looking for? Tender, raw flesh to bury his marks in? Now the possibility of his desire to kill me and my murmurs of seeking protection in God’s mercy leaves me. What if he only seeks warmth - to live in the moment and part skin, to fall back and embed himself somewhere he’ll forget it hurts for? At the cost of my aches? I can be destroyed in such a way - with a man calling it passionate night exchanges and midnight trysts - after all, am I not the one waiting at the window while the world is asleep?

[Nightmare]

He enters through the door I locked nine times. I knew I should have locked it the tenth time. Unlock / Lock / Unlock / Lock. Do it fast enough that he might never hear the sound of it occurring but he did. Sound travels faster through denser mediums - the denser air with which my heart lurches and the clots float in my body like a dead body floating on water. - it reached him. Paranoia helps me open the door to let him in.

There was no force. Only the way he glided in looked a lot like Paranoia and his tricks so perhaps he knew who to learn sin from too.

Silver duct tape tying my arms, my mouth. My limbs parted. Destroyed. Pain travels faster without any numbness to save me and my nerves tire from passing towards my spine and my brain all these impulses that sharply electrocute my body. My cells carry the memories and engrave them into my mind - never to leave. Do it fast enough that I can’t feel it but he carries out my execution slowly, so each impulse is felt deeply in my core till the next one comes. Father’s snoring upstairs pounds in my head, reminding me how I’m lying so close - if only I could scream. Guttural noises that could wake the dead but who would come to wake me up?

His breath is tainting my body, his musk is sickeningly sweet - not like Paranoia’s. His scent promises to never leave my body as he smiles at me. Almond shaped eyes - eyes I would admire were they not looking at me this way, were his limbs not unravelling mine and leaving his DNA all over me and inside me. Once it’s over he walks out the door the same way he entered and I fall back on the grey satin sofa. Paranoia returns and unties me.

“Where was your love to save you?” - not here, anywhere but here with fluids soaking the furniture and my hair spread in a mess like my limbs. Outside, the storm continues, never ending, just like this ruthless chapter that extended for hours till I knew that somewhere, dawn is beginning to emerge upon this island, somewhere way above the clouds where I can’t see it the same way nobody could see everything in this house. Paranoia knows the right drink to soothe this moment, hands me my favourite glass of chlorine and I drink it back to clean my insides. Paranoia passes me pills - medical tracers - they’ll find every ounce of what the man left in me and kill them as they try to grow. Only Paranoia can feed off of me and rise, own a glorious renaissance in my body of broken glass and broken girl dreams. Only Paranoia can destroy me and whatever is left in me.

[06:55]

Someone’s shouts of my name wake me up and the glaring lights burn into my eyes - a contrast from last night and my attempts at hiding in the dark. Perhaps the Angel of Death has found me, but it’s only morning. At least it was all I dream - I tell myself till Paranoia guides my hands to my body, visions of crimson stains upon my thighs burn into my eyes that even if I close them, I can see that I’ve been corroded, my sanctity abolished. My purity was made to be wrenched and mangled into shame. Paranoia and his favourite sin of shame entangled in my hair.

Lishyx

Share Her never-ending chapters

I was gifted jewellery, there were pearls in the design of the set. Pearls that were sewn into the hood of Catherine that symbolised mourning but in her partner’s traditions marked marriage. How can something so beautiful mark the oxymoron purity, of death and of unions? Of separation and of alignment, of the tears and of the smiles: my epiphany began when I set that necklace around my neck with its cream pearls and golden stones. The same golden stones that reflected the light in my eyes, in his love they were beautiful, but today we both lie dull. Stars were plucked from us and we shine no longer.

There was a certain way I’d walk, with a smile gracing my lips, with my eyelashes kissing skin softly as I blinked. Everything felt like a lucid dream - a world I was existing in as it was in every single way I wanted it to be. Somewhere along the way I forgot that all dreams have to end, that we have to wake up but the world I opened my eyes into wasn’t the one I wanted to be in. That is why the blue dress is wrapped in the package it came in, placed in a suitcase at the furthest corner in the house from me. It is why the song نور is trapped in my mind and the ballad بے قدرا never leaves me in a position other than in tears crying to the Heavens to save me. I have entrapped the robe in which I felt I was yours where I can never face it and in that same way, I have incarcerated my own heart in the loss of you.

After all, I am well versed in the anatomy of heartbreak.

They don’t teach you about the heart in that much depth do they? The cardiac muscle the size of my fist that has pumped life around my body, that beats, that pounds, that can scream so loud, so fast that it overpowers all my other senses.They don’t teach you about how the heart wilts over time like a rose. Even the thorns falter and can’t protect the rose from the cruel touch of another person. Phrases inscribed upon the walls like ‘ Seni çok sevdim, beni çok sev ’ are brushed away and the petals are plucked and pressed between the ground and another man’s shoe. Crushed. Utterly defeated. After the muse of a lifetime leaves there is no one left to write ballads of but the writer’s ink never dries as she writes till her last breath of every emotion. At one point the charts on her heart rates become too much to read and she stops counting her pulse as the sorrow deepens. Hearts swallow the ache. Choke. Corrode.

تیرے بن نہیں لگدا دل میرا

Without your love, I am caught listening to the songs of sorrow that I listened to even while I was in your love. Only this time the lines calling for a lover are striking too deep as I call for you while I sing them. Wherever I go, from the parting of lips arises these verses and nobody understands why. ‘ İnsan insanı böyle sever mi? ’ - with their voices caught against their throat and the words of heartbreak memorised in their mind? I must always be the lover with her love far away. This جدائی has always caught me wrapping a steel chain around my neck that I can never break with my bare hands. In front of this separation, I am powerless.

It is عيد الأضحى now and I am the lamb being slaughtered. On this morning, the sacrifice of animals occurs in the streets of countries around the world. Years ago I watched this sacrifice with my eyes in the streets of Pakistan and it all felt holy, something the twelve year old me was incapable of understanding. But the purity of it all wasn’t lost on me. I had worn red and black that day. We dress in reds at weddings and in my culture we mourn in white the way the english brides are dressed in ivory on weddings. But I was dressed in the colour the streets were soaked in - I was the unification of people around the world in the obligation, in the act that I revered for there is a certain unity after the sacrifice that occurs too. It is where the meat is separated and we go from house to house and give each other meat, where we reserve a portion for the poor so that they too may enjoy the blessings of this tradition.

Today, in my white dress, I am placing my head on the ground after crossing bridges. He was always meant to be far away, divinely appointed so, and I was always made to hold the organza scarf in a dress - crafted at the hands of someone in my homeland - smiling while carrying a bruised heart. The red and gold embroidery are a testament to that muscle of mine that will beat for a while after my sacrifice, as the blood will flood out of me - the love has left me. Everything that I cherish slowly leaves today, the smaller traditions I have known from birth too - like the hours spent laughing with others. I am alone, in the colour of mourning and this is an untitled decay. They don’t play مجھ سا نہ today do they? But I know the lines and I know how to sing the lines out of me because there will never be another girl like me who knows heartbreak like an extension of her own body.

I will always be eternally alive in that pain that starts in my mind but began long ago in my soul. I will always be the one far from her love on the days of celebration - the lamb being slaughtered - because the secrecy of my situation, the end of my relationship - it will ensure unity. Unity in my family, unity in someone else’s.

‘ İnsan insanı böyle sever mi? ’ - indeed a broken girl will always love like the self-sacrificial gazelle, accepting the end of the fairytale if it means everyone else can be happy. That is why acceptance has slowly drifted into my body on this day, that this sacrifice will make things better for us all. There was a forbidden nature that encircled everything before but today I am in ivory, mourning but perfect. Stainless in virtue to the eyes of everyone else. Being untouched by love equates to purity. I am the pearl of the red jewellery set I wear around my neck - a choker, one that could be worn at a wedding for how extravagant it is. I am the crimson in the stones, the colour of my blood, of love, of marriages and of passion. The rope that ties it at the end is the noose: one day I shall seal myself off in this way, in a form of sanctity that is really obligation and one day, another girl will have dressed the same way for him. Where I wear white now, she might wear blue and spin under the night sky. She will wear the blue that marks her as yours the way I once was, all under the same night sky where I’ll see fallen stars and taste broken glass on my tongue as I swallow back and choke upon the love that was never meant to be mine.

On that day, somewhere in my body, I will know to wear white the way I knew to wear white today. In my guts, I will have felt the agony of an eternal جدائی that no amount of my feelings, accomplishments or existence would be able to prevent. Whatever I do, you will always be the one that got away, someone I’ll have to forget. But I can never erase you - I fear erasure. He never needs to fear being removed from my heart or my mind. The dreams never fail to let me reach a moment suspended in time where I am by his side. The distance is a little less when my soul reaches across the bridge to meet with his. But I will be in white as I am today, wrapped in a shroud, prepared for moments. Perhaps lightning will strike the ground that day. Perhaps I will lie on my Persian prayer mat in the hands of God, weeping till the angels ask their Lord to relieve me of this pain.

Then, I will rise on the second day of عيد الأضحى.

On this second day, تم نہ ہو remained in my mind. I couldn’t evict it from my thoughts at all, existing in the vow of writing and only ever writing about him. How do people find it in them to change the muse? The sanctity of that role, I can never find someone else to place in that position. Till the day I die and am buried in ivory and the few who mourn me wear the same, I will not find in me a part that can abandon all the times I said کاش and wrote of him. Even in the pink dress I wore today, I was caught between the gold patterns similar to the blue dress and the palest pink that was almost white - I was suspended not only between reality and fantasies, but in the knowledge that destiny has forged me a path in which I will remain trapped. My love for you will escape my body and return to engulf me till my thoughts begin to corrode.

The pink dress I wore today was a testament to my love. The lovergirl in me never dies, after all, I have counted three heart birthmarks upon my skin. God created me with these marks as a tribute to the fact that I will forever be a broken girl who descended to the depths of something corrosive as she lost love. Without love, I have lost that sense of belonging. The urge to scrub at the birthmarks till the rawness of skin could erase them fills me. This taunt never escapes my thoughts. My pale gold net scarf was wrapped in my arms and I smiled hour after hour, swallowed my pain every second and took to running barefoot, my freshly dyed hair flowing in the wind. We ate the fruits of sacrifice and I exchanged words with people. The lamb can never retell her story. Eventually, even the stains of the sacrifice are washed from the streets and we rise to meet each other with smiles. While he stands at the altar promising a future to another woman in blue dress, I’ll be in pink replaying the ballad بے قدرا and drowning in the یاداں . The ache of another broken voice as each and every moment blurs past me. Memories of our union and the dismantling of it that caused unions.

Time will perhaps pass as it did today. Softly. Slowly. Then a blur of all at once. You may not see me walk past, golden heels in my hand, a pink necklace without pearls around my neck. After several years, this is the first time I wore this necklace. There is no purity of pearls, no element that is akin to a noose. Just the soft elegance of a necklace with pink stones, darker than my dress - as if the love did not leave them yet the way it was wrenched from my heart. He might never turn around to look at me, the queen of hearts card is torn and was never placed in the deck and I did not deserve the love that rose from his heart. That is why yet again, God has separated us. I smiled at a man who bore the same name as you, wishing instead of him sitting there, it was you.

That is the tragedy of the nights where I pray for you to return and the days where I live concealing the lamb and pretending to be that pink flower pressed between the pages of my book. Yesterday I placed a pink flower between a diary you know? It was on a page where I wrote something you said. I preserved it all, wrote a lot of what you used to say. Now these relics are so holy that I do not open them on these days.

I might never leave this night where even the stars disappear. Under the same sky as you only two hours in the past, it is still too far. Now I sing WHERE R U again and again, where all the lines are in my mother tongue. Slowly, the love is bleached from my body and my insides burn from the loss of you. In my chest lies a hollow cave where a heart should have been but it has wilted to the same pale pink as my dress and my lips. Gentle moments exist in the golden jewels studded around the pink stones in my necklace, preserving the love.

Outside of that is my neck with the necklace of my name. عَلِیشا - in arabic, the language he speaks. Somehow, I will always be wearing something that I feel attributes to him even if I didn’t adorn my ring finger today. The soft pink of that ring was too gentle but knew how to chaotically remind me that I could never adorn myself for him again, our love has been placed in God’s hands and judged to be eternally over. Even if my heart cannot leave, one day his will. Then, the ivory dress will return and I will walk like a lamb towards sacrifice. I can never wear the blue dress of his love again, only live in the aftermath where I don white or pink, death or the colour of my soft heart that decayed on the twenty fourth of april. My eyes that swore to never cry bled night after night and I never found myself any closer to believing it’s over till I wore pink. In this dress on the ride back home, I give myself over to God, hand myself over completely. There are houses where the driveways are lit by lights as though guiding souls back home. On this path I walk upon, there are no candles, no Sun, no flames, no Moon and no stars to lead a lovesick soul back to her lover. Even the angels steer clear of me and robes that carry more meaning that they should.

Whatever I wear, it will be attributed to the sorrow or another devoted emotion to my love. The love that never decreases but only wilts, drained of vibrance like the softness of my dress on this second day. Whatever I wear, it will always hurt to remember him because I still love him.

- عيد الفط to عيد الأضحى stands my pain incarnate in fabrics and all that is in between.

Lishyx

Thank you sm for reading, this was a piece that drained a lot of me even though the writing process was fast. There are many references in here to other pieces I’ve written that I will publish here soon. Most of the other language are urdu songs and if you want those ask me and I’ll send you the links to the songs. This piece has layers in the meaning paused because those songs are whole references (I’ll expand on that soon with pieces attributed). Tell me what you felt about this piece ! It’s definitely a fave for me.

Leave a comment

Present does not mean now. A resolution is not reached because the past was created as the past. Once upon a time, that was the present and to write in that present might mean being trapped in that phase. On the other hand, it might also mean I don’t want to let that present voice die before understanding the psychological depth of that voice. Whatever you choose to interpret as reality or fiction stands up to you, only a writer will ever know every truth and every lie they weaved into their piece.

Giving context would distort the blurred window between you and I, so no, I won’t give context. Also because halfway along the way, I lost the difference between the reality I added in. Of course one could read every single piece from a person, establish patterns, deduce events that could be real but then one would feel like literature. I don’t think this is literature. I just saw a spiral worthy of turning into a metaphor. Most people’s constant companion, overthinking. But if you see her as anything else tell me, I’d love to see your view on what altar this really is.

Also, considering the topic of religion is quite fragile, I am expecting attacks in the comments and whatnot and it’s the first time I took to writing towards that tangent and posting it. I want to just reiterate, this whole piece was just a perception, created under conditions I don’t wish to specify, but it is in no way definitive of religion as a whole at all.

Anywayy, Love yall xx

I can’t tell you any of the confessions lined up on my shelf. All these jars holding memories are bandaged with white tape and marked with a sharpie. A timestamp. Like the day I died, given a month because I can’t seem to find the exact moment I died. And the day I buried the corpse - but I dragged her around with me so long I don’t remember when I took the time to carve the headstone. Since when have I become so voiceless, that I’ve turned pages after pages just to fill them with another woe? Somewhere in my grief, I felt hope, but how long these nights are without any respite. The monsters only feed on my fears, feed on the high I chase, feed on all the deception I use upon myself and now the monsters are too big to be kept caged.

And I can’t keep bandaging up these jars because the monsters can’t be incarcerated anymore. They lie under my bed, teasing me to sleep then haunting my nights till I beg them to kill me. Fuck, they’re so consistent I can’t remember anything outside of them. The greatest monster of all, I can’t even trap in the back of my mind. She lives like a parallel version of me, singing lullabies in my head and screaming in my face to wake up and face this monochrome world. To face a reality I don’t want to believe in but she and I have already spent two nights in a row learning. Fuck overthinking: she’s a monster with talons that dig so deep she’s torn my heart out before and left it on the table.

Everybody talks like she’s always wrong, telling me not to believe her but if she made me believe one oncoming thing like a warning from God, then why shouldn’t I? That day when I cried for so long, my heart pounding so hard it begged to rid me of my ribcage, she saw what was coming. She sowed the seeds of pain in my heart but only so I could learn to water the plant earlier. So I could teach it to grow faster. So I could feed on it and call it healing.

At her altar. I lie at her damned altar all while the sun burns my naked back down to when the moon rises. Dawn brings a new day, another world of suppressing my screams. But oh how the nights tear at me: who knew she could be a permanent gift from God? The only permanence I’ve seen so far. She likes to call out his name and tell me lies about how we’ll end up failing. Fuck her pretty little fantasies of my pain, this monster feeds on my agony, breathes through my choked cries, preserves all the roses to lay on my grave.

*

I hate her. I hate her. I fucking hate her and I wish I could be the monster and not the fucking victim. I think I’d rather be anything but be the one told at the end of the night that he won’t be here when I can be. When the smallest candle of hope flickers, she blows it out. Face reality. Face reality. Face reality. We have far too long a history for me to be able to evict her from my mind, she crawls through my blood vessels and leaves the scent of decayed flowers in me, a reminder for me to grow something worthy of burning so that its incense penetrates through my tissue and leaves me lying on the floor unsure of where the time stopped and when the clock’s hands began to move slower and slower till they didn’t move at all.

She reminds me to grow some more heartbreak to feed on, to learn the processes of decay recklessly and chase the flames that’ll burn my body till it feels cool enough to live in. She reminds me to take my medicine but she has ulterior motives to that too: the longer I live, the longer she can torment me. The more I suffer at her hands, the happier she can be. At least someone’s happy I guess? Perhaps I should let her be happy.

*

I forgot to take out the fire. Lying under the stars, I burnt the forest down and nobody came to save me. So I just burn in my dreams. I was on fire. fuck. fuck. fuck. God made me dream of being on fire and it felt so soothing, like halfway through the way I accepted this was going to happen. That I was going to burn. But apparently it means there’ll be success in trials, that I’m going through a hard time, that I’ll get past all of this but how? How do I do it when I can’t find it in me to get up and call him back to me?

*

Lying on the prayer mat and once again I have no word to say. I go through all the stages and call it a day, I’ve lost all my meaning where I once cried to God, I just cry to myself these days. And she sits there watching it all then sneers in my face.

“Did God give up on you too?” - I guess he did.

*

I’m sorry God, that I can’t find it in me to turn my head to you until it’s midnight and you’ve left me no more distractions but to try. And I’m so sorry I don’t read those verses even when I should. Even when I should search harder and find myself healing through you. Morning to night, there are monsters in my mind, begging me to look for something to drown myself in. So I do it with all the songs about heartbreak and those people who lie to me. I used to dance on a pendulum of sin and call it devotion.

Dear Lord, why was my love a sin each and every time? Something that blossomed so softly like the first flowers of spring but were wrenched and mauled and carved into a statue devoted to the devil; how did my love, my soft, intimate love the sweet pink shade of blush turn into the darkest of greys? I cried over the end of something I yearned like an obsession when really, I should’ve picked up the pen and covered all the bruises that were left behind.

*

The way my past self perceived all of this hurts me. I used to exist in the gentlest of hues, in watercolour, only to have my art piece ruined with slashes of oil paint. It takes too long for the marks left on me to dry, and then even longer for me to accept that these rough strokes are part of the painting forever now. It hurts because it proves the impacts of the paths I had to pave just to walk out of that forest alive. Burnt, but alive.

Who gave overthinking an altar? - It was a younger, loveless me that adorned and carved from stone such an abode, where I could return to whenever I needed to. Whenever God’s stars faded from the sky and everything felt hopeless, I could return and burn at her altar, calling it devotion that was inevitably dancing in the court of blasphemy. It was the naive and broken-hearted version of me that carved a castle atop a mountain and called it pretty.

- Dans le futur, j’aimerais habiter dans un chateau a la montagne puisque ce sera vraiment divertissant et joli. -

But I’m already trapped in a castle so ancient it’s walls are crumbling. I built this abode years ago and I can’t find it in me to tell you I call it a cage. Would I be romanticising entrapment if I directly confessed I entered this place myself and now call it a prison?

It is something that halts my development; she watches me smile and rolls her eyes, and afterwards, she’ll whisper till I grow insane and the voices in my head will overpower the voice of religion, of basic humanity. She still has the ability to make me fear leaving the four walls surrounding her altar and she still sees every single thing.

Like the way I clench my jaw silencing myself when father shouts at me again.

“He’s protecting her, next time just do what you said you would”. - maybe I will.

She teaches me to live today and face the consequences tomorrow but the second I smile she has her hands at my throat. Think again. Think again. Think again.

*

You’re schizophrenic.

Then why is your voice the loudest in my head? What does that make you?

I only want what’s best for you.

Then why are you the reason I’m always in pain?

You come to my altar yourself.

That’s because you won’t leave me alone, and when you do, I remember I’m afraid of the dark.

*

Yeah, I am now. She tries to overpower every single piece of sanity that I cling to. And although she likes to taint the image of love with more failures, reminding me I grew up loveless and that I should die loveless, her altar is often deserted when my veins freshly flow with love. When the smell of death is washed away by the sweet Persian perfumes of my blood and I’m dressed in the gentlest of silks. Or even heaven’s green brocade. In the light of God, in his favour, I remember that happiness was not given to me by her but He who created me. So I don’t blindly follow her, as much as one might believe. You don’t follow the creation, you turn to the Creator.

And even though that monster was born off of my damnation, although I am drawn to her, seeking her companionship when the nights are dark, when my eyes shift away from hope in God’s plan, I find that destroys me more than not having her to disturb my peace. In God’s hands, crying feels so much better.

*

Like the other night where I cried so hard it scared my cat. She just laughed and told me God abandoned me again. But I just sat there and asked God why? I asked my angels. I apologised. I begged the stars to ask their Lord to forgive me.

I’m sorry dearest angel on my left that you write all the time. I’m sorry dearest angel on the right that I make you wait there staring at the page, wondering when I’ll give you the chance to write. One hand that wishes to stop writing and the other that wishes it could write.

That time, I didn’t sit at her altar from dusk till dawn.

Lishyx

tyy for readingg, probably gonna make a part 2 xx

More altars you can visit in the meantime :

Sorry this is another miserable post, I only know how to write about miserable shit in life </3

07/04/2026

Tear down the walls, burn the whole building down, the memory box is better as ashes I keep in a jar on my shelf. Morbid, like I’m keeping the ashes of someone I can’t let go. Yes, I can’t let these memories go because who would I be without the extent of my pain. How can I be eternally wounded if I find it in me to let go of the pain? I wonder whether along the way I’ve developed Stockholm syndrome: where I’ve developed an attachment to every single road that leads downhill. Or something else, where my whole identity is woven into all the things that threw me off the cliff. What is self-identity if all the arrows point back to all the triggers, if all the themes surrounding my name are just synonyms for the agony?

I guess I’ve been defined by it too long to believe there could be a world outside of misery. That I might be somebody outside of shy and timid and heartbroken.

Count your cigarettes father. How many are missing, how many did you take? Turn your eyes on me, ask me how many I had. Do you just pretend you don’t know, that you can’t smell tobacco on my clothes or is the sweet cherry and soft vanilla stronger than the taste of death? If I shut my eyes, the last one I took resurfaces on my tongue. Longing burns, my fingers reach for another that isn’t there. You’re in the house. I can do it in front of you, show you that I’m like you. You are me, I am you. Father, we’re both the same.

I can’t do it in front of you. I can’t show you that I am you.

I was only at my best swallowing your sleeping pills father. The nights were easy because they didn’t exist anymore. I didn’t have to lie awake and overthink about every little thing. About all the big things. All the pent up hatred inside of me faded away because the darkness and dreams cradled me. Even the nightmares ceased to exist. I became addicted to that rest, but you took them away, locked them and took away the key. I’m back to lying awake on my bed and battling the demons with no distractions to save me from my fears.

Rotten corpse, return to where you belong. - I’ve returned.

I’m afraid of myself and all the ways my body could turn on me and send me to death when it’s too early. My lungs stutter, gasp, choke. The cardiac muscle races - always fighting - too scared for what would happen if it stops running. Who’s behind you darling, that your arteries are always filled with adrenaline and your veins with acidity? Anxiety is chasing me. It always has.

Those scars are too wild for this world, too jagged, spontaneous. Your face is was perfect last night. If I burnt roses and wove its incense with my dna, what would you mistake it for? I’ve already left the romanticist in me behind to rot, and the decay is reaching up to me. No amount of my favourite arab perfumes will cover the smell of death on me. I died long ago.

.

Press your hand against my cheek. Do you like the symmetry of my burns? It’s a fire, it fucking burns, just like tasting the flame of my father’s firelighter. My lips look smaller against my face now. Mother hates my natural lips. Too plump. Do you like my eyes lined with kohl smudged by the tears? I forgot to wear waterproof eye liner. My brown lipstick stained the white silk sheets, mother. Better keep the sheets black.

Yes, black. Will you mourn me in pure white, in ivory as though it were a wedding. White is not a wedding colour in our culture. Then commemorate my death in the vibrant reds of my homeland. Pay someone to do my henna, floral designs, I prefer the floral designs mother. Do you know that? Then for the sake of it, I’ll say to the groom:

“Till death do us part” - oh but a marriage with death is eternal.

Will you send me off and throw dried rose petals as they carry my mourning bridal train? Set my sad song playlist on random, play all the songs I listened to. As I leave, play Mujhsa Na.

.

“Mujh se na mile ga phir kabhi”

You won’t find someone like me again.

.

How will you find someone like me? Nobody has the scars I have, so even if you think you see me in the streets, you’d be wrong. Her hair isn’t dyed. Look closer, her ears don’t have 4 piercings each. Her wrists don’t have the bracelets I used to wear. The necklace around her neck has a different name. Can’t you see that she’s not me, then why do you call her by my name mother? She tried to look like me. Look at her now. But she looks like you, why did she do that then mother?

Tell me what helplessness feels like. It can’t be as bad as the desperation in me right now. The way just by confessing, my eyes tear up - fuck on this sunny day it’s raining inside of me. And how my voice catches - stops. Somebody take the weight off of my chest, breathing was already hard enough. It feels as though I tried to fly but someone cut my wings. And I foolishly believed I could still fly.

.

Do you know what I like about dark chocolate? That the bitterness is real, it doesn’t hide its effect. White chocolate is too sweet, a show, a facade always held up, and then an exposure of everything that feels sickening. Milk chocolate gives me headaches. Overconsumed, milk chocolate is too common. Everyone loves it. Nobody likes dark chocolate.

Yeah, but I do.

“That’s because you’re a nobody.” - thank you.

.

Always looking in the mirror, princess of insecurities. What the hell have you done to your face? - I was trying to make myself prettier. Like you mother. I was trying to look like you but I messed up. I just want to look like myself again. He thought I was pretty and yet I still tried to make myself look like you mother. I guess I should stop trying to be something I can never be.

.

08/04/2026

Lined up the pills yesterday. Count them. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. New count today. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. One of them is small and round and a pale yellow. My favorite. The one that slides down the throat easily is white and big and it kills off the physical pain. I always have packs and packs of it. There’s too many pills in this house. Everyone’s addicted. Addiction is real.

Pretty woman that found my lips cute is coming today. Adorn your lips baby girl. Sweet tea lipstick, mauve lip liner, petal coloured gloss. Line your eyes, edgy mascara, that one soft black eye liner. If you feel cute enough, use the dark brown mascara instead.

That one woman that hopes her kids will be like me when they grow up, stop wishing it. You don’t want them to be like me, you don’t want it at all, I swear you don’t want it to turn out like that. Damnation. You’re ruining what they could be. Stop. You don’t want it. I’m honoured. It’s sweet of you. No. Don’t wish for them to be like me. Please.

.

Hey, let them be normal. WHY CAN’T YOU BE NORMAL? How can you be normal if a knife is pointed at you on a daily basis? scream. scream it all out. Cry yourself to bed again. Cry yourself to bed again? Not a bad idea. Crying is an addition too. It helps me go to sleep. The effort of holding yourself, of doing something therapeutic, of wiping your tears but crying the whole way through. Crying is the only way out beside the sleeping pills.

Wish it all away. Wish me away. Wish for the end of all the pain so hard that it sort of kills you in the process too.

Listen to regardless on the night drives. sit back and pretend you’re enjoying it all but you’ve just felt the lyrics a little too deep again to confess to anyone else why you just sort of died in the car. Now find a reason to rise again, to look normal and laugh. Smile. You need a resurrection for that.

Resurrection? There’s no reason to though.

.

.

Yes there is. Get up. All those people love you.

“No one else can love you like a mother does” - I know mother, no one can love me the way you did. No one can make me hate love the way you did. You didn’t need to say that for me to know. I already know all of this, rub more salt in the wounds mother. The sting is so constant I can’t even feel it anymore. Rub a little harder, dig your nails into my skin as you do it. Leave permanent marks.

.

Last night the burn was worse. It ached as though someone set my skin on fire again. I was tearing at my face. Dehydration finally caught up with me. He reminded me to drink water. I forgot. My throat was parched, my lungs ached. But I lay on my bed in the dark with no ounce of energy in me to get up.

I don’t even know what to name this mess. So I’ll call it Untitled decay perhaps? Like a reckoning that doesn’t even know how to reach itself, too far away to be understood but close enough to scar. Oh my never ending chapters that never cease to destroy me, being eternally wounded is my story. So I’ll lean towards the story, lying on my bed, with my ribcage collapsing on my heart. Just a little more pressure and there’ll be star-like fragments inside of me. Break me. Break me.

No one can love me like you did mother, no one can leave me crying to sleep as often as you did. You can stop rubbing salt into the wounds now, my skin is starting to die, decay has caught up to me.

Lishyx

Israeli soldiers tortured a 1 year old to get information out of his father. Why is no one talking about how atrocious it is that they burnt his skin with cigarettes and hurt him with nails? A baby. A baby was tortured AGAIN and no one out here even gives a damn that a child was hurt. Everyone’s caught in their own lives and there’s no front cover screaming justice for a baby. Fuck which side you’re on in this war. Fuck those “neutral” assholes. How do you sit there and not say anything when a baby was hurt?

If the baby was yours, would you still stay quiet? Parents- remember that’s someone’s child that was used against them. Remember that this isn’t the first time someone used such a heinous and low act in war and you know what is sickening? That we all know it’s not the last time. Call them out. Makes no difference, tyrants will remain tyrants. Nobody physically stops them. You know what happens instead? People condemn those who fight against these tyrants.

But all my political views aside, I’m not here to convince you to believe that the side I agree with is right, I’m here to remind you all that a child was tortured and no one’s talking about it. I’m young, I physically cannot make a difference in the world. But we underestimate the power of awareness. I need you all to remember that whether the child is Palestinian, Afghan, Mexican or Japanese, American or South African, a child is a child. An innocent person is innocent. Civilians are civilians. They all deserve to live a happy life.

Imagine. The child was birthed into a world of bombs and attacks. All the while, the child is unaware of anything. All the baby knows is the family faces of those around him: his mother, his father, the faces of people in the camp. They’re all crying but what does he know. He’s too young too understand why everyone is tense. When you reminisce your own child how many of us actually realise that “fuck, so many children around the world never even got half of what I had”? I know I don’t and I’m ashamed to say that. I’m ashamed that I got something where those children didn’t.

We used to play in playgrounds. Buy toys. Children all around the world live amongst rubble, call it their home. They play with rubbish and anything they can find, not knowing about all the things we take for granted. They have a right to smile too, to laugh too, to grow up with their parents happily.

All people talk about are rights when it affects them. Human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of other values. Okay. What about that child’s freedom to live? Why are people silent about that? What happened to being human in this world? Where the fuck has people’s humanity and empathy, kindness and respect even gone? No human deserves to have that happen to them. Some people are just monsters and I have entirely lost faith in the justice of this world. No way do we have a UN, different boards regarding rights for humans, charities, and even after all that, another child can still be harmed in countries around the world in the name of their “greater cause”.

War is not meant to cost innocent lives. Most religions outline that. I’m sure even athiests believe that innocent life should not be hurt. Harming a child in something you believe is holy is downright disgusting because no God would teach you that. No human with a functioning heart would ever do that. World leaders can claw at each other’s throats, I genuinely don’t care, but when you’re hurting people who are sinless while you’re at it, that I do care about. It is unfair that you can drag innocent people and use them as armour, as shields. These soldiers revolt me. How are they even called soldiers? Soldiers are meant to have an honour to their name but how sadistic can these person actually be? The answer to that, they’ve proved many time and yet there’s no accountability. They see pride in it and that is outrageous.

And you know what, people in Sudan, in Iran, in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, in every so called “third-world countries”- it’s our greed that left them in that place - but they still have hope that other civilians in other countries will have the humanity to speak out for them. They believe that we’d fight for their rights with the same way we fight for our own. But who does? Nobody. We let them suffer in the mess created by the governments we support. Then we get up and point hands at other people, calling them terrorists often because those “terrorists” actually believed in the rights of their own people.

I don’t know how you go to sleep at night, knowing your tax dollars, the people you support, they are all devoted in this cause that tears away a child from their family and friends, leaving them to grow up in a chaotic world. In that world, the constant sounds are not laughs, but actually the whistling sound of missiles, the destruction caused by bombs, and heartbroken screams of pain and agony. People rise in multitudes, take to the streets, demonstrations, protests, all of the lot when it’s about pride and racism. What’s horrific is most of them lose their voice for freedom and justice when someone talks about how children around the world are being killed.

May Allah protect all the innocent people in this world and save us from that pain. May He heal the baby and bring his father back to him. May he reunite families and friends together and prevent another child from losing their parents and another parent from losing their child. May he guide the misguided and inshallah, people learn some semblance of humanity before it is too late. Ameen.

Lishyx

Share

Leave a comment

My heartbeat racing faster each passing second,

I know I’m about to lose you again.

Then each and every night of mine will rain,

So drown me till I go insane.

Gave second chances as long as I lived,

But now I’m dead so won’t you,

For one moment, remember me?

So tell me I gave you a second chance,

Let go of my soul again,

I know what it means to forget to breathe,

To forget how my heart beats.

When I barely pieced myself back last time,

Come back to end me again.

So don’t break what I barely hold,

Can’t you keep me safe in your heart?

When I don’t know what to do,

Why am I still standing next to you?

If I turned away, I might save

So love the very heartbreak in me,

And let me love you silently.

I’ll be a shadow that was swept away,

Won’t mess with your fate today.

So the next time my ashes fall,

I’ll remember I’ve known this pain before.

Lishyx

From Her never-ending chapters…

Subscribe now

I don’t know how to call you mine without being afraid of the day I can’t. The fear would be dissected as insecurity by some, why would you fear if you were stable enough? But I’m certain of where I lie and it is in your heart. There is no doubt of that. But there’s a different emotion associated to my sentiments. As I carry the love for you, I will constantly fear the day I can’t and that is not my insecurity. That is proof of your value.

Model of insecurity.

I have felt insecure of where I stand countless times in most relationships: platonic, familial, romantic. Am I a wave that brushes against the shore only to have what I left behind swept away by the next? And we all tend to leave indents on the people around us. To have these crescent stars where my nails dug in, would that please you? And for it to blur and fade away, would you want that sooner rather than later?

If my marks were made to be abandoned, do I stop creating them?

But that is the ultimate fear of oblivion and of being forgotten. A model of insecurities, wearing a cloak so thick she gasps under the weight. To breathe becomes a burden. She slowly shrinks into herself until there’s nothing left in her, no room for a heart to care. What if I wore that cloak again one day? It would be the day I ceased to exist in your eyes. If you couldn’t trace the movements of my fingertips or the gaze my eyes travel, then I guess I have passed through your life meaningless.

The what-ifs all revolve around me standing elsewhere.

But I don’t ask what-if.

I value you

These insecurities are not what I indulge in. Neither whether we would forget each other nor whether you were made for someone else. I don’t believe in you ever being anyone else’s, nor of I ever being claimed by another. My body is a painting and the great majority is devoted to you, an altar where I keep the sacred relics of you and all you mean.

I do not carry the ruthless shadow of regrets when it is about you and only you. In my mind, I think of only the things I’ve promised we’ll do together and whether there is enough time in this world to do it all. But there is no hurry, and whether time beats us or not, there is always the next life for us. Wherever you’ll go, I’ll be there, by your side, eternally yours.

I do not love you half-heartedly. To be yours is an honour, and I hold that you mean tight against me because you are an inevitable, a constant and to have the pieces of you even closer till my skin absorbs you and preserves the memories, that is perfection.

Lishyx.

From Her never-ending chapters…

Share Her never-ending chapters

There’s a particular death I am subjected to each sombre, starless night of the year. False smiles are so continuous, linear, endlessly existent upon faces. The effort to tear them away shakes, digs through the foundations of my walls, and threatens to break all I strive to protect and then bury me in its ruins. So I choose to keep the false smile on this night till I get the moment to myself. That silence. To be entirely alone. The solitary confinement my senses are subjected to beckons the release.

And at the edge of this cliff, I accept the fall.

Welcome to the day I despise so freely, so effortlessly. The day I was born. To ruthlessly and directly confess, I wish that I were aborted or a mass of blood that couldn’t survive the nine months, like two of my siblings that could have been. This piece of my nightmare. I wish that I had become what my body fears most, a miscarriage.

On this day, or rather, in the dark, rainy storm that approaches at night, I always somehow swallow enough heartbreak to have the energy of release, of tears and spirals. I wish that I were the daughter of a better man, one whose daughter had burnt alive that cruel night and spent his life grieving her. I wish that I were worthy of being grieved and that if the angel of death carried me away in his strong arms, that I might have had a life before that I’d want to stay in, and to ask the angel to take me back home.

But I dance in the court of the Queen of Heartbreak. The agony of existing scars and my body chases me into the corners I cannot even name. Holding myself while crying is a difficult task, let alone simultaneously wiping the tears and carrying out a therapeutic act.

I thought you were better. You held me, pretended to change.

You’re still the monster I can’t even name.

And to have someone hold me tonight would be a blessing. But I’m left all on my own, suppressing my cries and hoping to silently join the rising storm outside. I was born in tears and drenched in blood, and I fear the day I die, I shall decay in tears and in blood.

Each year, I choose to remember life from the earliest memory down to the recent reason I cried. I’ve been carved into believing I was the cause, then the course. But the consequences are I can’t untie myself from the blame so I just pour gasoline over the memories and light a match to create an inferno to burn in. And burning is exactly what I do - but it feels wrong, the shivers mistimed. The crescent-shaped scars on my skin demand permanence where they receive none. I do the same. And I’ve done it all my life, and I might till the day I die. Sweet sixteen, you enticingly promise a night coated in agony, in tears.

A I always tell myself, I’m prepared. Even though I never am.

Lishyx

Shrill wails pierce through her senses, far enough that there is no possibility of survival, but close enough that the sound knifes through her skull above the steady crackle of flames. Perhaps the firetrucks haven’t even begun their journey to rescue her from this oblivion, but the illusion of distinctly being saved - a hallucination even - lingers.

Almost like believing in the mirage of water in a barren desert.

Except that she crawls along the marble floor of her once majestic sitting-room. It is as though she is holding her own damnation in her hands as everything she cherished, everything she quietly created to preserve, burns before her eyes and she is sprawled across the floor, entirely helpless. In her hands lies her incapability of ever preventing this moment, and of ever extinguishing the ache. This house was a memory box. A collection of relics. Her past. It was meant to be her future too.

And yet, no amount of her endeavours to cage the truth prevented this moment, so maybe she shouldn’t have tried so hard. The flames are now roaring, passionate screams, intent on destroying. Destroying all she loves first, and saving her for last.

Once soft, traditional carpets, with their intricate, hand-crafted designs draped the floors. Each and every one has charred, stealing away the sacred warmth that used to insulate her home.

Insulate. Insulate the walls of her home too, she tried. Plastering paint in layers again and again, a ritual to cover the cracks, to pretend they were never there in the first place. If she can’t see them, do they still really exist?

She’s left crawling across tiles that have glass scattered like stars all over. Yet as she does, she leaves a trail of burgundy in her wake, and the scars? They demand permanence on her limbs. All while she tries to fight towards the window, flames lick the dark oak furniture, so that one cannot distinguish between the cause of ruin and hours a carpenter had spent creating.

- Beautiful things are destroyed so fast.

Prussian blue curtains that framed the windows hide her escape. Tucked in the corner of her house’s most eloquently portrayed room, she fears what it means to taste death; her doe-shaped eyes look like those of a deer caught in lights. To hold one’s cause of death, of ruin and loss of any semblance of redemption is no reckoning. It is foolish disbelief painting your features and destroying your world.

Her treasured pieces of furniture, carrying the memories of all she knew, also carry the silent rage of all she lost. As burnt as her own bruised body, the memory pierces. Not even worn at the edges, it is defiantly and undeniably the clearest picture she sees in the smoky abyss of the room. Is this divine revenge perhaps? Retribution for her sins? A sign of her fatal flaw of mortality? Have the curtains she lovingly draped across ten years ago really turned against her enough to prevent her from being saved?

Yes- they must have. For the desecration of her holy grounds tastes like ash that invades her mouth and clings to her trachea. She gives in to a series of successive chokes that wrack through her body with a burning pain that settles deep in her chest. Almost like a constant reminder that to the last minute, the anguish she tried to suppress would remain. Even her breaths become gasps - her lungs fighting for oxygen to grace them - and yet to no avail. The flames stalk closer and she remains rooted in her position, decaying.

The flames are a hunter, and she is the prey.

And when this inferno is finished destroying her home, all that will remain is the framework, the skeleton. It might be as though someone had peeled back the skin to expose the ribcage. Carefully constructed, standing despite all the chaos that ensued around. She built the framework of her cage with steel just so it could always remain no matter how many times the walls are torn down and built back up again. The foundations must remain like the roots of a tree, embedded into the ground like a vow. A vow of permanence, of forever.

So maybe while the flames move towards her, at least she can remember her mark is forever, even while everything is burning away and she might never be saved.

Oh how she wishes to be rescued...

Context yap:

This was just me practicing for my language exam for next week, and the photo they gave us as a stimulus was horrible, it was literally an AI photo of a burning building, so I retreated to a burning building in my brain and decided to yap, which personally, I think I did well. Got it marked somewhere and it said 40/40 marks but I guarantee if I handed it in to my english teacher, she’d have given me 22 because she expects me to write like a university level student but oh well guys I loved it, Idc if she doesn’t bcs girly pop doesn’t even read the essay properly and gives me a comment. What building? Oh darling, I clearly told you it’s a house, why do I have to say the burning house over and over againn??

Anyway, we were meant to hand this in but me being me took mine home because no way you sat me down for an extra hours after-school every friday to do english only to take away my gorgeous baby I created and never give it back to me. Like don’t pmo, I refuse to let my paper go into the bin until I’ve dumped it on substack.

Yep, that’s all guys, lysmm 🤍

Lishyxx

Share

Just in case, it never was

Clear enough in words,

I’m yours, forever in each world.

And if the white roses ever forget:

I learnt to love red roses through you

Without regret.

And if the dandelions are alive,

I hope you know I wish on you

Because deep down, you’re my only truth.

I know the white lies tear us

But I’m forever yours. Till my grave

And beyond I’ll ask the same.

To love you and be loved by you,

And be forever yours.

Lishyx

From Her never-ending chapters…

I’m offered a rose-flavoured Turkish delight, one of the most perfect desserts. But it’s coated in dried roses, dehydrated remnants of love. Almost as though my tears weren’t enough to keep them alive. Almost as though the river of our love has been lost to a drought that I fear might never end. I wonder if you would ever pluck these roses from the ground to offer them to me. Each petal is clear, distinct even. Shrivelled up and pressed onto the sugar bliss, I’m certain that in another world, I am one of these petals, so infatuated by your presence that I cling to you just to exist.

I do that in this life too, just to stay whole. In that harmony, I’m eternally fixated against you, because in that moment, I’ll find the home I’ve spent an eternity searching for.

In this life, I bite into the dessert and the taste itself is intoxicating. Proudly, I can say I know what the death of red roses taste like because it’s taste has infiltrated my senses, and I’m caught in that moment. I used to drink rose water, feeling foolishly romantic, with the taste almost an intrinsic undertone on my skin. My kisses taste like roses too.

Now, I drink in the sight of you and the familiar taste of those silky petals against my teeth claws me to the past. Love has always been a weakness. Yours is a dire necessity like pretty innocent affection turned to ruthless addictions. It’s like dancing in the rain, bathing in the death of my roses and hoping I don’t get sick later on.

For this heartbreaking world, I learnt to dance on pendulums and burn roses as I did it. Your love is like the roses, revived and just as hypnotic. I don’t dare destroy these petals. I let them destroy me.

Perhaps to still believe in the name of love when swallowing those lifeless petals in my mouth is difficult. Your distance scars me deeper each night and buries further into my veins. These sensations become a means of my decay, brutally ripping away any comfort I ever had. I’m left swallowing a cruel woe that knifes through my defences and tears me apart.

So do you still love me sweetheart? I wonder who burnt away the thorns on the stems of my roses. When I eat the Turkish delight, the thorns return to haunt me, dig into me, and I’m left whispering my apologies with my throat painted in burgundy and the metallic taste of my decay present on my tongue.

But this is all a process of pain and I whisper sugar-sweetened words to comfort myself that you still love me as I do you.

I’m sorry darling, that your love tastes like rose-flavoured Turkish delights, because as sweet as the taste is, the thorns of my roses are chasing me, clawing their way past my defences and I can’t unsee these reckless, ruthless fears of mine.

-Lishyx

19/02/2026

From Her never-ending chapters…

Share Her never-ending chapters

I am alone because my world is aflame,

Tearing my heart as if you feel the same.

Do you see the way I cry it all out?

Have you seen how the night echoes my shout?

There is nothing for me to lose in death,

The only survivor left.

Wishing for another moment to take my soul,

Taking the knife to end it all.

Losing you was the last breath upon my lips,.

Within my own world I was the last one left,

My own heart was difficult to accept.

And the way I lose you when I hurt so hard,

My own soul tears me apart.

Am I still alive when the pain is all I feel?

To exist still is the sin’s revenge I feel.

I kiss my fingertips stained with blood,

Let myself drown in the crimson flood.

My own words betray my start,

A move towards death, I accepted.

To impart pain upon myself, but my heart,

Convinced by my own wishes, attempts to be free.

The horrors I faced, I can’t unsee.

Reject me once and I’ll fall apart,

Piece me back together so we may restart.

I miss the way we used to be,

Before your hatred turned upon me.

Cannot breathe while you turned away,

My lips tied, what can I say?

I was never one to be among the stars,

Life is a constellation of scars,

That trace along my back as I engrave you there,

But you turn away and you’re nowhere near.

I’ll drown because my lungs were taken,

You’ve left me forsaken,

My heart attack will end what used to beat,

Even though I wish to keep,

All that existed between us.

But then again I’m not enough.

My vitals were ripped out,

Now my vitals shut the door.

Lishyx

From Her never-ending chapters…

Subscribe now

My gentle rose without thorns,

My only light, guiding through storms.

How can something so beautiful,

Hurt so hard? Hurt like a broken heart?

I never asked to see the likes of your painful side,

To witness the exact moment, you lied.

A rose is pure,

Perfect without flaw.

No one wants to believe that she’s dangerous,

Her eyes, like steel, softened his features.

But they said she engraved her heart in stars.

Ignited her ivory scars.

Her strong-willed heart, that he wants seared,

With the steel in his own lips, cutting the rose,

Splitting the petals, a nightmare arose.

She’s a rose standing in the rain,

She’s my rose lasting all the way.

No one wants to believe that love can hurt,

That all this isn’t worth,

Storms in the night, and floods against the tide.

A single rose can’t hide,

A single rose always dies.

Lishyx

From Her never-ending chapters…

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

I choke upon my words,

grasping the clifftop -

as I taste death at the edge.

Fear claws itself up my throat -

Lashing out at muscle,

and skin.

My windpipe collapses

- my breaths finite -

and you stand at the top

of it all.

You ruthlessly peel back

my fingers,

till i’m hanging onto you -

as I always did in life.

But somehow in this fall

- I smile -

for death at your hands

is a blessing.

Lishyx

25/02/2026

From Her never-ending chapters…

Share Her never-ending chapters

My body in ruins on the floor,

I’m broken once again,

I’ve cried so much today,

I must have drowned again.

Nowhere for me to turn,

Maybe a lesson’s left to learn.

Why am I so fractured how I live,

How many more sacrifices must I give?

Shivering, the result of this cold,

Just someone catch me once, and hold.

I wouldn’t let go in a thousand years of torture,

Holding on despite the slaughter.

Every limb left scarred and bleeding,

My bruised body lay preserved,

Where is this road leading?

So misunderstood by every person I knew,

Just wish you’d hold me, only you.

Believe the cuts and scars, all over my skin,

Or deny the breathing reality, my pain suffering within.

I only wish you’d come and piece me back,

No one ever told me what I lack.

Only neglected my existence,

Rejected my presence.

All until I lost who I am,

A ghost of the past they said I was.

Nothing but something to hurt, to mock,

They don’t know me, they keep the key-

Throw away the lock till

Nothing at all, they trap me in the folds of time,

Confine me for some fucked up crime.

I’m done breathing with all this.

Tired of living with all this.

How they hurt my broken heart more and more,

Might hang myself but shut the door.

Pale and lifeless, my blood drained away,

They might not find my corpse today.

Wishing someone would find me, but my wrists are slit,

Know that each pain was worth it, bit by bit.

I lost my soul somewhere along the road to hell,

Cut myself just to feel well.

How I hurt my own existence,

Destroyed my own presence.

All so I could end every pain to be,

Don’t mention the wounds already upon me.

I hurt myself once,

I’ll hurt myself twice.

Maybe even hurt till the end of time.

Lishyx

From Her never-ending chapters…

Subscribe now

Let me settle this image in your mind darling. She’s sitting, studying for chemistry. And studying chemistry reminds her of you because you once asked her about it. Today, she struggles in a question. Now let me describe what she looks like: hair in a plait like Elsa, hung over one shoulder, bangs out, wavy and framing her face. A cardigan she cut another hole in just so she could slip her thumb through it. Glasses perched on the edge of her nose in a cute style. She is the definition of cute nerd, fingers at her lips in awe, wonderment, biting her lips in concentration. In this bookish-school-girl way, she suddenly feels unconventionally beautiful, and she pushes away the flaws because whenever you called her gorgeous or pretty or yours, you built her self-esteem back from ruins. Whenever you praised her for the things other people taunted, you helped her see reason, see something worth holding onto in the little habits like poetry. You helped her make those little things into bigger dreams she chases to accomplish. And that girl is indebted to you for the love you gave and the person you made her into. Because of you, she wants to accomplish greater things. For you, more than herself. So these tests, these trials, she’s going to pass them all because she wants to make you proud. She wants to be able to carve the future for the both of you. She’s sick of seeking validation from everyone else, but never of yours. You have always been her greatest supporter and she wants to let you know you’re the person she’d ask for in every lifetime. She wants to tell the people that try to hunt her to leave, for her heart has your name etched all over it and she’d only wish to be the hunt at your hands. To have the arrow carved with your initial to sink into her back. Anything and everything from you is a blessing, even captivity tastes like freedom. She’s rejecting redemption in other eyes because you showed her she was worth more than seeking forgiveness at the same place from corrupt minds that only tried to break her down. You made her better darling, she’d destroy herself if you asked her to.

Lishyx

From Her never-ending chapters…

Share

I chase the perfection of beautiful friendships, where I can freely pour the depth of my heart and seek equal emotional input from the other. I seek companionship, time and time again, where there is no sign of the ill-fated flaws that have slapped me in the face before. And yet they still wrench me from the dreams and the castles I bury myself inside, and remind me there is only darkness and solitude in the deathly silence six-feet under.

Betrayal

There is always a moment that sinks deep into my bones. It burns away the parts of me that began healing, the scabs and the little silver crescents of scars, and it beckons a new body. This new body is bleached of warmth and love once again. This body chases death and devotion just to balm the new wounds.

The betrayal tends to stick to my insides, and clog up my blood vessels. Breathing becomes vital and yet I refuse myself that kind of blessing. For if I were not worth your companionship, am I ever worth anything else?

All the days you turned away from me, all the little things I forgave, what did they ever amount to?

Each day I let you ruin me gave you another night to cradle me in damnation. Oh and I accepted it out of some fantasised beliefs I instilled into myself.

A- That I could change you, but I never could. You were too rotten, too internally broken to ever heal me or let me heal. You craved my broken pieces, for if the pieces were smaller and more intricately bruised, perhaps you could convince yourself at least you could fix yourself where I could not myself.

B- That things would change, but would they ever? Would I ever understand that cycle would never end unless I let you go? For even now, I am giving you room, time, the space you desire.

Gently, the moments before pile on and the realisation dawns on me. I was tying the rope around my neck, tighter and tighter, of my own accord. My own burning will that ached with the sort of muscles that I tear and truthfully, never allow to flourish to strength.

Last Week.

Often, I search for reasons for faults between my own lines, but take last week. Each and every time I think of how petty you took a little situation reminds me that it is not always my fault. Perhaps I’ve changed a little. I’ve learnt to trace the source of each pain back to the triggers, to the little things, the bigger things that might have caused such a brutal deterioration. And I take the little fuss you made over a spring, a small coil of wire. Insignificant. Nothing of importance.

You asked for it, but I gave it to another friend. I don’t know why you took that to heart.

Lunch time, I come outside with my best friend. I get that friendships in threes never work, there’s never enough balance, but I always try to balance the scales. Your sister is her sister’s friend. Right, you know each other. I’ve known her for five years. Lovely. Before this, you have always given me “social tests”. Pathetic attempts where you try to prove that I favour her, when I try to give equal input to all my friendships.

But on this day, I sit, laugh, eat my food - normal day. But you say - out of nowhere too - “You haven’t punished her or taught her a lesson”

Obviously my head whipped up from my conversation with my best friend, and for her it clicks, and for me… it just doesn’t.

She takes my hand, and grabs my coat, pulling me and telling me to stop excluding you and to give you what you ask for. She goes on telling me of your complaints and how I should change and be better. She tells me this in a voice that I can’t tell is meant to convince me she’s sorry, or to convince you she’s doing what you asked. She’s trying to hold onto her friendships. I’m trying to hold onto mine. I bit back tears and continued the day with a smile, but to tell anyone who would listen the truth, it felt as though someone cut something deep into me.

Be better.

But I’ve tried that all my life, for you, for my parents, for anyone that was within reach and none of it seems to work. No way of bettering myself seems to satisfy you all. So what if I just cut myself up and dedicated one piece of perfection. If you cannot love the whole of me, why not make room for a third, maybe even a sixth.

Punish.

I have existed with a sentence on my name, constantly at the gates of death row. So if you ever want to punish me, perhaps you might find me kneeling by the entrance.

Exclusion.

Ironic. I find it quite rich coming from you. If isolation and segregation were ever anyone’s middle name, they were always mine. I have always been a member of the sidelines, never close enough to feel the full love of acceptance in any chapter.

Now.

Now I avoid you. No more lunch outside in the cold. I sit inside, in a company where I can laugh and love and feel entirely blissful without ever needed to second-check myself.

No, I don’t desire an apology. I just wish that instead of trying to instill change in me, you looked at your own faults and learnt to be more compassionate.

I realise I should never have let you become my lifeline. Should never have cut away parts of me I should’ve kept close. I brought all the friendships too close to me, and now look at me. You cut into me too deeply and I should never have let that be the case.

Lishyx

From Her never-ending chapters…

Subscribe now

I stare in the mirrors,

hanging my appearance upon

pretty whims and desire.

At your hands,

I place my confidence, my

love, my dreams -

content that drowning tastes best

at your hands.

*
If you carved into me,

deep etched of onyx and gold

- I’d lay myself bare -

so you may find an art

within me,

to create. At your hands

my silence is inevitable.

I gaze into your eyes,

willing your movements to be

just as painful.

To hurt me just as much.

*
Why don’t you instill,

within my heart

the love of you eternally?

Do not believe that if you

ever hurt me,

that I would leave.

At your hands, I vow

I accept anything.

Lishyx

25/01/2026

From Her never-ending chapters…

Share Her never-ending chapters