i wait for autumn every year.

somewhere around the tail end of summer, i start counting down. the moment the air turns, i put my phone on dnd, choose a bookstore miles away from my phone, and go. i never choose a bookstore close to my home because i feel tethered there— to the pending chores, the people who might call, and the hyper independent version of me who never goes offline. but when i do get away, i get to be no one’s daughter, no one’s deadline or an alarm, for an hour or two. it’s just me in my knitted cardigan and piles of books waiting to be touched.

i have always thought that there’s a particular grief and nostalgia that exists only in bookstores. not in the silence of libraries, which is enforced, a disciplinary being with fingers pressed onto lips. bookstore-silence is chosen. it is the sound of dozens of people agreeing to the same hush under a shared ceiling. without saying so, i project my opinions onto the cover pages and titles. there, no one can judge me for it.

i have never walked into a bookstore without feeling my shoulders drop an inch. i always wonder what is it that can make me happy, happy enough to forget everything else. i figured it out after years of regret and guilt. because indulging myself into the lives of others without crossing a limit has always made me surreal and books do that. they make me feel like i am inside a daydream. and it isn’t even a lie. new books have a smell of potential. the faint chemical sweetness of glue still settling in the spine, vanilla and dust and the specific mustiness of pages that have been touched by many hoarders and readers.

some days, i go to a bookstore not to buy anything, but to wander through the shelves, to run my fingers across books just to feel the softness of a new title in my hands. i read the blurbs of many books while standing in the middle of that aisle, with no intention of purchasing. i love reading the opening lines of authors i’ll never get to know personally, authors who remain undiscovered in my memory for ages. and sometimes, that’s the whole point. the best part of my chosen bookstore is that there’s a cafe tucked behind these walls, an espresso machine hisses somewhere behind the poetry section. (funny thing is i always write about coffee or coffee shops in my poems and essays as if it’s the main character of my life, maybe coffee seems an easier confession to make. i give coffee most of my poetry and give bookstores none of it). steam fogs a window that looks out onto the street going amber at the edges, and it is always autumn in my favourite memory even when it isn’t. i still think autumn and bookstores are most loved parts of my life but this ain’t a confession so let’s keep it hidden for now.

but what is it that i look for in these places? maybe home? because i always long for home. a home that is nowhere to be found. where i feel safe and heard, without unfinished conversations and noise. home became a feeling i had to go looking for. and i kept fragments of it in bookstores, in the particular hush of a quiet shelf (seems like a contradiction but who cares). everything in the city asks you to move quickly, except this one place where i feel wanted the most. no one asks me to buy anything and the kind of patience i’m offered here is rare. very rare that it feels radical.

two years back, one autumn, i broke my own rule. i had a cup balanced on the first page of a book i was going through, a book i'd already fallen in love with— no plans of buying it though. the other hand was on my phone, which i wasn't supposed to be checking. i can't recall when the cup left a mark, only that by the time i looked down after capturing two photos, a ring had settled onto the title page already, right beneath donna tartt's name. i didn’t even realise in that moment that the book wasn't mine yet, that i was about to leave my signature on something i hadn't paid for. that's how i ended up owning a book i never intended to buy, its cover forever marked with a small brown continent. i love that book more for the stain than i would've without it. it became a proof that the book and i had a moment together, long before i ever signed my name on it.

this autumn, once again, i plan to give myself permission to wander through that place. because there's a lot to figure out if i give myself an afternoon without my phone and nowhere to be— what would i go looking for?

With love,

Hamna.

Last Sunday of July:

Every summer, i go looking for a girl who no longer exists. She isn’t hard to find because i know exactly where she lived.

She lived in the sun-bright afternoons of March, in the caffeine and grass, and in the boredom of a season she always cherished. Funny thing, i wait for summers to arrive so i can finally catch the sight of her once again. But i always rush forward to winter’s stillness and its absence and never really enjoyed the season i have in my palms. It is as i have never simply lived in the present at all. Therefore, longing doesn’t always seem as easy as it is. You wake up one day, upset about the time slipping away, and you can’t name what it is you are mourning. It ain’t a person, ain’t a place. just a version of a day you didn’t know to hold onto when the time was rough.

I know one thing that she has always loved summers. And i have seen her waiting for the person who used to belong here, who knew how to be bored without guilt, and who didn’t check the clock twice an hour. I didn’t find her last year, but this summer i think i did. Some years she comes, while some she doesn’t. And then i see those long, upstanding trees shedding their leaves, carrying their responsibilities, and i see her disappear with the golden crunchy leaf. Her identity packed away until the next summer decides to bring her again.

In the sweltering midnights of July, when i catch her memory: the way she used to hold me gently, providing company without asking for anything back. But I have always been the one leaving first, long before winter ever could. That quiet ache tells me that things aren’t missing when they’re gone, they go missing because i walk away from them when it’s still mine to keep.

let me tell you about my favourite poem dear stranger—

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poems, and yet i have seen myself oppose the very idea it stands for. The poem asks me to stop atoning, to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves without earning it first and still, every year, i negotiate with my own seasons like affection is something to be paid for. I hold these words like i understand them completely, and then go right back to waiting for a version of myself who isn't currently allowed to arrive.

Therefore, you too, dear stranger, might sit with a situation like mine, waiting for yourself to become yourself again. Maybe she's just waiting for you to stop looking for her everywhere except right here.

So the next time longing arrives, dressed up as a season or a memory or a girl who no longer exists, just sit with it. Let it ache. Because grief doesn’t stop our lives. One part of nature always asks us to remember its shape and connection. Eventually, life goes on.

whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.

And don't forget to look down at your own palms. what you’re looking for might already be there.

With love

Hamna

At first, I used to think, perhaps i ask for too much space to sit with, but it just settles without me noticing. Or perhaps i ask for too little coffee, but the larger cups offer no greater patience. Eventually, i arrived at a quiet realized, some things are just meant to be brief, the coffee, the good part of an evening, a good nap, a good coversation, those five minutes before deadline, the weekends, and the version of yourself who no longer sustains. You don’t notice the version of yourself has gone empty the same way your cup has, there’s no ice left at the bottom, no froth lingers to be seen, no ghostly residue of unbrewed particles left to warn you of what’s coming ahead.

You wake up one day, gave shape to your thoughts you were about to say to your older version, and she. isn’t. there.

The one who laughed at every joke of yours.

The one who never flinched at doors closing.

The one who could sit with people longer.

The one who encouraged you everytime you look in the mirror.

She. Isn't. There. And I don't think I consumed her too fast. I held her gently too, the same way I sit with my cup, I sat with her too. Consoling her, and sometimes embracing her unknowingly. I could've looked at her absence and said, she didn't vanish, she just spent those years on me because i needed her the most. I could've regarded the quiet and called it half-full.

I cannot pinpoint when i started reaching for the "emptiness" first. Perhaps, it's easier to mourn a thing than to measure what remains. And in that way, half-empty felt more honest, more intimate, more faithful to lthe shape of my exhaustion. Still I am starting to think honesty and pessimism are two different languages, i have long spoken the latter while calling it the former.

If i began calling these cups half-full, nothing would change but how I'd be perceiving those moments hereafter. Same beans, same ice, same froth, only the disposition with which i look at it (more like a company, less like a countdown) would be changed. So this time when i took a glance at my half-finished coffee, i tried to ask a different question.

What remains?

The half of it that is still present. Still mine. For another 10 minutes.

I do the same with every ritual I love. When flipping through a book, a part of me is always checking how much of it is left, even in scenes I'm supposed to be sitting inside of. When watching a tv show, ten minutes into an episodes, already calculating how much of this is left before it ends. I've never checked how much i've gained, but its me everytime dwindling. As if a story's worth depends on what's coming next rather than what’s unfolding now. Counting down when i can count the gains. Measuring the leaving while having a control over it.

Therefore, the strange thing i've been noticing is i keep searching for the end before i finish arriving. Always halfway into something and departing from it. Already bracing for the bottom of the cup, the last page, the final scene, the version that won't last long. I never realised when this became a habit, this reflex of anticipating the end instead of the moment. And yes, it started small, when i waited for things to disappoint me before they actually did, when i waited for the bus to become full before every passenger had taken a seat, because in the end, it just became easier to live half-departed from the things i knew already, with quiet certainty, that wouldn't stay.

What if, instead of watching the cup go empty, I let myself simply notice it was ever full?

With love,

Hamna

Sunday evening. 6:30 pm.

I am sitting with the strange, specific weight of the week ahead already pressing on my chest before it has even arrived, thinking that you can be homesick for a version of yourself that never existed. Nobody warned me about this kind of homesickness. The kind with no address. No before. Just a longing for a life that existed only in the space between who i were and who i thought I'd become. That I could have a routine, people who love me, a life that looks fine from the outside but still lie awake doing mental arithmetic. Whether the choices I made at twenty were actually choices or just the path of least resistance dressed up as intention.

You might know this feeling. Maybe you’ve never had a name for it until just now.

The feeling that everyone else received a manual you didn't. That rest is something you have to earn before you're allowed to want it. A friendship that has quietly shifted into something you don't have a name for yet. A dream you've only ever said out loud once, to yourself, in the shower. The grief of a version of your life you thought you'd be living by now.

The urgency, lord, it's a kind that swallows everything whole at once. One moment you're fine, the next the entire weight of your future is pressing itself into a single Sunday evening.

And the thing about this urgency is that it doesn't announce itself. It just arrives. It sits beside you uninvited and starts asking questions you don't have answers to.

Career. Creativity. Relationships. Identity. Who am I actually. All of it arriving at once, all of it tapping its foot, all of it asking well? and when? and why haven't you yet?

There's a line in Tuesdays with Morrie that keeps coming back to me lately. That you should let yourself feel it all completely, without fighting it. And then let it go. I'm still learning the second part because it is harder than i thought it would be. I often think about that on sunday evenings: what if detaching yourself from reality is never actually an option?

what if the only way is through it?

what if the weight is just the price of being someone who feels everything a little too much?

Somewhere in my copy of Tuesdays with Morrie, nearly every page is marked. Next to certain lines I've written small notes to myself: come to this when you feel anxious. come to this when you feel regret. As if I knew the hard moments were coming and wanted to leave myself something to hold.

And each stamp answers my questions yet it never does.

Writing this letter from a coffee shop that has just opened feels like exploring an undiscovered existence of a life that hasn’t been claimed yet. There are only three people here— the first with the laptop in front of him, the second texting on her phone (she might be talking to a loved one because her smile has everything), and the third writing this letter so that many people will read this in the comfort of their lives.

This coffee shop will be discovered eventually. Someone will write about it, tell a friend, and the quiet will fill with noise and laughter. But right now it is just us — me, and two strangers, and a space that hasn't been named yet.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe existing before you are found is its own kind of grace.

There’s no solution to this. No door that opens and suddenly the weight lifts. But there is this— naming this weight. Saying out loud: I am carrying something heavy and I don't fully know its shape yet. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

So I'll leave you with the questions I sit with every Sunday evening:

What are you carrying tonight that you haven't said out loud yet?

What version of yourself are you still homesick for?

What dream have you only ever whispered once to yourself, in a room nobody else was in?

What friendship have you been grieving without calling it grief?

What have you stamped in the margins of your own life?

What if you’re not behind, you’re just undiscovered?

You are allowed to not have all the answers at once. You are allowed to just be here, in the weight of it, a bit longer.

With Love,

Hamna

I came across a quote recently which says “artists are rebels” because they break the rules for the survival. Many of you might not agree with this but there’s a deep inclination within this saying. Artists enjoy chaos and survival meanwhile survival often demands disobedience. Disobedience to life itself. Many painters have invented new colors, simply because old ones existed for too long. No painting is ever made with same six colors. Even within the color, there are many different variations to give that color a new language. (Colors do speak too. I believe nature, which is itself a compositiom of colors, speak to human beings)

Writers, too, have dismantled language, to carry the weight of what words couldn’t. Many writers and poets across centuries have even bent grammar rules to make their pieces look enchanting. They refused to be bound by convention. If the heart does not always beat in straight lines how could the art? Now here’s the fun part: When I wrote my first poem, I never thought of sharing it with anyone publicly. Not because it had mistakes, rather it mirrored my inner voices I had never shared.

Does it mean I broke the rules of life?

Does it mean I invented something totally new?

Or does it mean I am the rebel?

Artist can be anyone. The label isn’t reserved for a chosen. It belongs to anyone who dares to create. Who has a desire to live freely. A desire to make the world a better place. And how can the world be turned into a better place? this question has stayed in my mind for a very long time. I sit with it every night, with my journal open, my latte resting on my desk, and my mind wandering far away.

I wonder if the willingness itself makes an artist carry both chaos and silence. Transforming into each other slowly. When the light dims, their transformation holds them, transforming their personality into a new one labelled as “a rebel”.

Everything beautiful in the world can be turned into an art. Living itself is an art. So is the willingness.

And here’s what I wrote when I started believing in artists’ rebellion against life.

I was, once, full of light

Keeping every memory with me

I wonder if it was right

To hold myself with glee

Then, somehow it reduced

To the depth where no one can see

As if it was life, and I was used

By it, and found myself killed.

Every night, I stargaze for hours and quietly get up. Perhaps turning the world into something gentle is always subjective. I may hold one vision and people may not agree to it.

Perhaps this is what rebellion looks like.

Choosing to share what was once hidden.

Am i running before things that are nothing but illusions?

This thought strikes my mind many times in a single day. I often wonder if i am chasing mere illusions, shadows, and untruths.

But i have come to a realization that not everything needs to be understood. Some thoughts, ideas, and visions are meant to stay unclear. But does that mean we, as a human beings, simply are unclear at our core? Probably no. It is the beauty of our complexity perhaps. The more i lean into this question, the more i understand its fulfilled emptiness. Not every doubt has a cure. Not every shadow has a light.

Ever thought about the meaning of a riddle? Which makes us stay focused, searching, restless but it rarely grants a purpose. That’s the whole point of living too: the riddle itself shapes us, not the answer expected at the end. I often ask myself what if the void ain’t a defect but a design?! What if that space allows me to grow and heal without relying on someone else? It can be.

The void unsettles me but it makes me alive.

It is the ache i bore in my heart with sincerity—the ache that pushes me forward. Perhaps, this void is the silence that was always there, beside me, that deepens my listening. Maybe the void is not something to conquer, but to be befriend.

And so I sit with it. I let it breathe and grow in me. I let those unheard questions live freely in my head because that’s the only way i can conquer the world. Without knowing too much! If there’s no answer i can create my own.

For me, the act of wondering is enough.

Did you destroy that painting of yours because it never made upto someone’s standards and they actually commented negatively on that? Did you delete that novel of yours because someone didn’t like it although they never tried writing one?

Did you throw away your sketches and calligraphies because you thought you’re not a pro at that? Did you ever feel like you are not enough for creating art?

I’ll tell you a secret.

The artists you admire, and you wish them success. They never started with perfection. Their first drafts were messier than yours. Unreadable, unrecognisable. No one starts as a master. That perfection you were taught at early age is just a myth. Perfection makes you remain silent because your art is not worthy yet. Creativity makes you feel alive because you choose to make your art public. Someone devalues you because your manuscript is messy, then let yourself show them “it’s not only the mess but courage”. The courage to show up everyday and start creating. You’re allowed to show up everyday when your hands tremble. When you’re feeling low. Especially then. When your voice quiver and your heart feels like the heaviest. Your worth ain’t measured in perfection. No one’s does.

Two years back, I tore apart my first draft of novel because it wasn’t upto my expectations. The rest is still caught up in my old folder where I keep my not-so-important-things. After that, I wrote two more novel drafts and guess what did i do to them? Yes, same thing. Today, I got my poems published in a book and I will be holding that book in my hands in some weeks. My first drafts were messy but they didn’t hold me back and doubt myself.

The art always comes from within. And we all are imperfect by nature. You can be mistaken so do I. And you are always allowed to begin again—imperfectly.

Go and write badly. Paint something terrible. Sketch like nobody is watching you. Make them public. Post them on social media. And let yourself breathe freely without giving up to the society’s standards.

You. Are. Allowed. To. Create. Imperfectly.

A part of moving forward.

A part of living a Life.

Sometimes, there is a strange feeling about such moments often carrying an ache or heaviness. Sadness comes quietly and sits beside you, refusing to leave. We’re often told to shake it off, to be brave, and to “focus on the positive”. But isn’t it true that sadness is not a weakness anymore? It’s not a failure.

It’s your mind and body asking you to pause.

To listen.

To breathe.

I know, melancholy, at first glance, seems unlovely, something to be fixed, hidden or cured. But here’s what Bill Murray says about this feeling:

Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes, I think. It’s not a negative thing. It’s not a mean thing. It’s just something that happens in life, like autumn.

I’d say if someone is trying to break free from these thoughts and live life to the fullest, they don’t need to run from them but walk with them.

Such heaviest feelings remind us of who we are and what we are about to become. If you find yourself in that quiet ache, wondering and waiting, just know that it’s all going to be okay. You don’t have to rush through it.

When that feeling will leave you, it will open a soft spot right there beside you— a form of clarity, a little more of yourself.

You are allowed to feel it all.