The refrain is a disinfectant, sprayed liberally over bloody headlines: “That’s not Islam, it’s their culture.” It is the standard incantation after news of an Afghan girl condemned for the crime of being raped, or the Iranian morality police enforcing hijab with violence. This mantra is not analysis; it is a ritual of absolution. It attempts a theological magic trick: to separate the pure essence of faith from the messy, corrupting flesh of human society. Religion is cast as the flawless blueprint, culture as the cheap, deviant construction. But this is a profound and dangerous fallacy. To confront power, punishment, and patriarchy in religious societies, we must incinerate the false dichotomy. The uncomfortable truth is this: culture is religion and religion is culture. There is no doctrine hovering above human hands, no sacred text that speaks except through a cultural mouth, no lived faith that is not simultaneously a cultural artifact. Culture is not religion’s spoiled opposite. It is its inseparable body, its amplifier, its staging ground, and, at times, its most potent site of rebellion.

The “culture vs. religion” framework is an ahistorical sleight of hand, what anthropologist Talal Asad would identify as a failure to see religion as a “discursive tradition”—a living, argued-over reality constituted by practices, power structures, and the very cultures of its adherents. The dichotomy collapses because the doctrine itself is a cultural product: a set of interpretations forged in specific historical moments, then frozen into orthodoxy. We cannot speak of culture brutalizing women without acknowledging that the religious scripts authorizing that brutality are themselves crystallized cultural choices. The blueprint matters. It is there in classical jurisprudence valuing a woman’s testimony at half a man’s, a ruling not from desert custom but from a specific interpretation of Quranic verse (2:282) codified in Al-Shafi’i’s Al-Umm. It is there in inheritance laws systematically privileging male heirs. It is there in qiwamah—male guardianship—bedrock of systems like Saudi Arabia’s, rooted in verse 4:34. The “honor” killing acquires its sacred sheen not from a pre-Islamic void, but from a religious ethos treating female sexuality as communal trust, whose violation demands extreme purification. That ethos is a cultural construction of divine will, proving religion and culture are one cloth.

This is not uniquely Islamic but a recurring feature of institutional religion. As feminist historian Gerda Lerner argued, the “world historical defeat of the female sex” was cemented when religions, emerging alongside private property and stratified states, provided divine sanction for controlling women’s reproductive capacity. Religion moralized a material concern: the policing of lineage. Thus, across traditions, the same obsessive regulation. The Manusmṛti (9.3) places women under lifelong male guardianship. Classical Islamic jurisprudence mandates a wali for marriage. Canon law enshrined the transfer of woman from father to husband. These are not cultural variations on an equality theme; they are doctrinal endorsements of patriarchal structure, where women’s bodies are the territory for ensuring social and economic order. And the doctrine is itself culture, patriarchal culture elevated to the status of divine command.

The apologist’s next move is to call any contemporary “bad” practice a pre-Islamic “cultural” holdover. This is dishonest. It ignores centuries of Islamization, where local norms are not simply preserved but actively reframed and legitimized through the authoritative language of faith. Patriarchal tribal codes of family honor were not erased by Islam; they were synthesized with Islamic concepts of female modesty (haya) and male guardianship, receiving a divine sanction they previously lacked. What was tribal custom becomes Islamic duty. The father who kills his daughter is not enacting a pagan ritual; he enforces a fusion where tribal honor has been sacralized by a religious framework treating female chastity as the currency of communal piety. To blame “Pashtunwali” alone is to ignore how it became Islamic Pashtunwali, its dictates justified by mullahs citing Hadith about protecting the community’s moral fabric. Here the distinction vanishes: Pashtunwali is now Islamic, and Islam in that context is Pashtun. Culture is religion, religion is culture.

This identity is starkest in state power, where doctrine provides law and culture provides enforcement, but the two are not distinct ingredients. Consider Aurangzeb’s imposition of the Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, a rigid Hanafi code. This was not an Indian “cultural” quirk; it was a deliberate project of Islamization using the state machinery to enforce a specific interpretation. The culture was the religion in action. To call the Taliban’s oppression “cultural” is tautology: it is the culture of a movement whose identity derives from a hyper-literalist interpretation of Islam. Their culture is the lived embodiment of their religious ideology. They cite scripture and hadith to ban girls’ education and enforce hijab; the doctrine is the cornerstone, culture the wall built around it—except wall and cornerstone are the same stone.

Yet if culture and religion are one, the same entanglement that enables oppression can enable resistance. Orthodox tradition polices women’s bodies and voices: music as haram, public adornment as tabarruj. But parallel to this ran a deep, resilient stream that refused to separate the sacred from the beautiful. The Gnawa spiritual ceremony, with its entrancing drums, persisted because it was framed as dhikr—remembrance of God. A suspect act was re-coded as sacred; the drums became prayer, the rhythm a path to the divine. As musicologist Lois al-Faruqi documented, a “shadow tradition” of music flourished outside mosques, in homes and courts, often by women beyond clerical reach. This was not culture hiding from religion; it was an embodied religiosity asserting its own legitimacy. The henna painted on hands before celebrations—which online fatwa-mongers nervously debate—was never sanctioned by Al-Azhar. It was armored by a religious culture: elevated by generations of women into an essential, blessed rite, its symbolic weight making it theologically unassailable. Henna became a sacrament no fatwa could scrub away. In these acts, women didn’t resist religious patriarchy from the outside; they rewove the single fabric of religion-and-culture into a survivable cloth.

This is what James C. Scott calls the “infrapolitics of the subordinate.” The public transcript may be pious conformity, but the hidden transcript, encrypted in cultural-religious practices, hums with a different truth. The storytelling embroidery of a Palestinian thobe is an aesthetic manifesto against a drab, imperialist vision of modesty. Begum Rokeya’s 1905 feminist utopia Sultana’s Dream was a cultural missile launched at both colonial and religious-patriarchal structures, dreaming another world using the imaginative language of religion-inflected culture. In these spaces, the inseparable identity of culture and religion doesn’t soften doctrine from within, it builds alternative architectures of meaning that are themselves new religious-cultural syntheses.

The apologist’s final fortress is the claim: “But Islam allows for good culture!” This logic presumes a neutral arbiter of “good.” Historically, that arbiter has been the same clerical gatekeepers who viewed expressive, feminine, collective joy with suspicion—almost exclusively male, institutionally shielded, administering patriarchy while claiming to transmit divine will. Their authority depends on conflating their interpretations with the faith itself; to oppose them is cast as opposing God. The survival of joyful cultural-religious forms is not proof of religion’s tolerance. It is proof of a people’s lived synthesis stubbornly enduring beneath the radar of official fatwas, asserting that the divine is bigger than their books.

Who benefits from the “it’s culture, not religion” lie? Those in power. It is the ultimate accountability shield, protecting religious authority by externalizing blame onto a vague, savage “other.” It silences reformers and victims by dismissing their experience as “cultural misunderstanding,” not as the systemic reality of how religion is always lived culturally. It allows a believer in the diaspora to cling to an idealized faith while disowning its most powerful earthly manifestations. Most crucially, it obscures the foundational bargain: institutional religion’s dependence on controlling women to maintain social order and hierarchical authority.

The Afghan girl’s tragedy is not a case of “culture or religion.” It is the end product of a single, indivisible process. Patriarchal tribal code and literalist interpretation of Islamic honor, chastity, and female responsibility are not two forces meeting; they are one force with a double name. The political movement enforcing them is a cultural-political entity born of that religious ideology. It is religion being culture, culture being religion, in its most lethal form.

To deny the religious component is dishonest. To blame it solely on religion is to ignore that doctrine never moves without culture as its body. The hammer and the anvil are a single instrument, forged in scriptures and interpretations that deemed women’s minds deficient (naqis al-aql), their bodies a source of disorder (fitnah), and their social worth conditional. It is wielded by clerical and communal authorities whose power rests on maintaining that sacred inequality. The sharp edges are real, in classical texts, fatwas of the powerful, and the lives of those who flee. And yet, because culture is religion and religion is culture, the same fusion that provides the hammer also provides the only shelter. It was the garden our grandmothers tended inside the walls doctrine built—a garden that was itself an act of faith, a lived theology of survival and beauty.

To blame culture alone is to mistake the sanctuary for the prison, and the jailer for a savior. The phrase “it’s culture, not religion” is not neutrality. It is a choice to protect an abstraction over a body, a pristine ideal over a suffering human, and the comfort of belief over the inconvenient, fused, and bloody truth. It is a refusal to see that in the economy of institutional power, women’s freedom has always been the price paid for religious order. And it denies the most dangerous and liberating reality: culture is religion and religion is culture, so the struggle over one is always a struggle over the other. The battlefield is whole.

Her Half of The Story

Why Every Major Religion Is Obsessed With Women

This essay is concerned only with religions that have become institutional. It does not examine private belief, mystical experience, or informal ritual practice. It begins at the point where religions acquire structure: codified doctrine, designated interpreters, enforceable moral rules, and continuity beyond individual communities. It centers primarily…

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7 months ago · 58 likes · 14 comments · Apoorvaa S Raghavan

Amnesty International. (2014). Afghanistan: Women and girls face grave abuses amid worsening insecurity (ASA 11/013/2014).
Asad, T. (1986). The idea of an anthropology of Islam. Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. Yale University Press.
al-Faruqi, L. I. (1985). Music, musicians and Muslim law. Asian Music, 17(1), 3–36.
Rokeya, B. (1905/1988). Sultana’s dream. In R. Jahan (Ed.), Sultana’s dream and selections from The Secluded Ones (pp. 1–11). Feminist Press.

There’s a strange inversion I keep noticing, one that feels so embedded in how we talk about faith that we rarely stop to name it. I’ve started calling it the humanization of religion and the dehumanization of humans.

We treat religions—abstract systems of belief, texts, symbols, and rituals—as if they are living, breathing beings with feelings that can be hurt, dignity that can be offended, and a right to be protected from criticism. At the exact same time, we treat actual human beings who have real, sometimes painful experiences with those religions as if their stories are irrelevant, dangerous, or even criminal. The religion gets the empathy; the person gets the blame.

A woman posts online about her complicated relationship with the hijab. Maybe she felt coerced into wearing it as a child. Maybe she was shamed for not wearing it “correctly.” Maybe she simply describes the day she took it off and the freedom she felt, or the loss, or both. She’s sharing her life.

And the comments explode.

Not with compassion, but with people rushing to defend Islam as if Islam itself had just been stabbed. “You’re disrespecting the hijab!” “How dare you insult our religion!” “The hijab is a command from Allah, your feelings don’t matter!” Notice the language. The religion is being disrespected, insulted, attacked—all words that imply a person-like vulnerability. The woman, meanwhile, is no longer a person with a story. She is a threat. A violator. Something to be shut down, corrected, and silenced so that the religion’s imaginary feelings can be soothed.

This is the humanization of religion: the hijab is treated like a sensitive friend whose honor must be defended. And the dehumanization of the human: the actual woman is stripped of her complexity, reduced to either an enemy or a cautionary tale.

“don’t disrespect my religion,” as if belief has nerve endings

This pattern isn’t limited to one faith. It shows up whenever someone says “you’re disrespecting my religion” as a conversation-ender, implying that the religion is an entity that can feel disrespected. But a religion doesn’t have a nervous system. It doesn’t lie awake at night feeling hurt. People do. And yet, we often leap to protect the imagined emotional state of a set of ideas faster than we protect the actual emotional state of a human being in front of us.

Think of how often blasphemy accusations operate: a person draws a cartoon, writes a book, makes a joke, or speaks about their own sexual abuse within a religious institution. The immediate response from many believers is not about the content of what was said—it’s about the harm done to the religion. “You’ve offended the Prophet.” “You’ve mocked the sacred.” The sacred is spoken about as if it has a heart that can be broken. Meanwhile, the human who drew the cartoon or told their story might receive death threats, face violence, or be prosecuted under blasphemy laws. Their real fear, their real pain, is invisible. The religion is the only victim that matters.

sacredness mistaken for personhood

At the root, I think, is a psychological sleight of hand. Religions are deeply tied to identity. When my sense of self is fused with a belief system, any challenge to that system feels like a challenge to me. But instead of saying “I feel hurt because my worldview is being questioned,” it’s reframed as “you have hurt my religion.” The religion is anthropomorphized so that I don’t have to admit my own human fragility. Then, to defend this now-personified religion, I dehumanize the challenger: they’re not a person with a legitimate perspective; they’re an enemy, a hater, a blasphemer, a sinner, a tool of evil.

This swap shields believers from engaging with uncomfortable truths. If ex-Muslims, ex-Christians, or ex-anythings talk about the damage they experienced within a faith community, acknowledging their pain might require re-examining something sacred. It’s emotionally cheaper to treat the religion as the fragile one and the person as the aggressor.

real humans become collateral damage

When religions are granted this kind of personhood, protecting their “feelings” becomes a moral imperative that overrides the safety of actual people. Blasphemy laws across the world don’t protect God—God, by most theological definitions, doesn’t need human protection. They protect the idea of a sensitive, person-like religion while punishing the human beings who deviate, doubt, or criticize. Women who remove hijab are harassed, threatened, sometimes killed, all to shield an abstract concept from “disrespect.” Child sexual abuse survivors within religious institutions are pressured to stay silent because speaking would “harm the church,” as if the church is the one that needs healing.

And then there are moments from history that reveal, with devastating clarity, where this inversion ultimately leads. Scratched into a cell wall in the Mauthausen concentration camp, a prisoner left these words: “If there is a God, He will have to beg my forgiveness.” It is an almost unthinkable reversal of the religious script. Here is a human being pushed to the absolute limit of suffering, and they are not begging God for mercy. They are not protecting God’s feelings. Instead, they are demanding that God—the ultimate personified deity—kneel and beg forgiveness from a human. In the camps, after systematic, industrialised slaughter, the old transaction of human guilt and divine forgiveness finally broke down. Faced with the furnace, the prisoner didn’t try to soothe an offended religion. They insisted that if there is any forgiving to be done, it is the human who must do it. It’s a cry that strips religion of its fragile, person-like mask and places the moral weight squarely back on the only beings who can actually be harmed or healed: people.

the irony is staggering, some people decided that the religion—a thing without a body, without tears, without the capacity to suffer—is more deserving of our care than the actual human standing in front of us, bleeding.

What if, whenever someone shares a difficult personal experience related to religion, our first instinct was to see them, the human being with a nervous system that can actually register pain, as the one deserving of gentleness? What if we stopped treating God, scripture, and symbols like fragile porcelain dolls, and instead acknowledged that the divine, if it exists, probably doesn’t need us to be its PR team?

A religion that cannot withstand honest human stories is an idol that demands human sacrifice. And a person who is shamed into silence so that a religion’s imaginary feelings can remain intact isn’t being protected; they’re being erased.

Next time you feel that rise of defensiveness when someone critiques your faith’s symbols or shares a negative experience, pause and ask:

Am I about to protect a concept at the expense of a person? Am I humanizing an idea while dehumanizing a human?

To critique Islam’s position on homosexuality is to hold up a mirror to a profound theological and ethical contradiction at the heart of the faith. When examined through the lenses of its own proclaimed attributes—divine mercy, justice, and omniscience—the traditional Islamic condemnation of homosexuality doesn’t just appear harsh; it appears fundamentally nonsensical. The doctrine collapses under the weight of its own illogic, creating a deity who is at once the all-loving creator and the architect of a cruel, inescapable trap.

The first and most glaring incoherence lies in the collision between the concept of a merciful, all-knowing creator and the reality of an innate, unchosen sexual orientation. Mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that homosexual acts are a grave sin, punishable in this life or the next. Yet, modern science, alongside the lived experience of millions, confirms that homosexuality is a natural, deeply ingrained aspect of human identity, not a perverse “lifestyle choice” made in a vacuum. This presents a sadistic theological paradox: God deliberately creates an individual with a fundamental, unchangeable core of attraction and the human need for love and intimacy, then decrees that this very nature is an abomination, forbidding its expression on pain of eternal damnation.

This is not a test; it is a setup. A test implies a fair playing field. A heterosexual Muslim can fulfill their spiritual and emotional needs through a divinely sanctioned marriage, enjoying companionship, sexual intimacy, and family life as acts of worship. A homosexual Muslim is handed a life sentence of mandated loneliness, a complete prohibition on love, touch, and partnership, with the promise that their only reward lies in suppressing their entire affective existence. This doesn’t portray a “Most Merciful” God; it portrays a cruel puppeteer who creates a soul destined for either a life of abject misery or the fires of hell, all for the “crime” of being precisely as they were made. That is not divine justice; it is cosmic bullying, and it makes no sense.

The scientific illogic only deepens the wound. The claim that homosexuality is an unnatural aberration, a violation of God’s intended order, is utterly annihilated by the very creation that God is said to have designed. Over 1,500 species have been documented engaging in same-sex behaviour—from lifelong pair-bonding in penguins and albatrosses to the all-female lizard species that reproduce through parthenogenesis after same-sex courtship. Homosexuality is not a human “deviance”; it is a widespread, enduring feature of the biological world. If nature is the mirror of the Creator’s will, then that will clearly, and abundantly, includes homosexuality. To label as a sin what nature itself expresses with such diversity is to argue that God’s own book of creation contradicts his final revelation—a theological catastrophe for any claim of divine consistency.

Even more devastating is the anatomical evidence written directly into the human body. The male G-spot, the prostate, is accessed exclusively through the rectum. It is a deliberate design choice. One is left with the absurd conclusion that an all-wise God purposefully installed a pleasure button in a place he then deemed a forbidden zone, and then punishes the very beings he created for pressing it. This is the blueprint of a trickster, or worse, the evidence that the doctrine is a man-made rule inverted onto the body in ignorance of its basic biological reality.

The logical failures extend to how we interpret scripture. The story of Prophet Lut (Lot) is the bedrock of the prohibition. The Quranic narrative describes the men of Sodom for preying on male travelers, engaging in highway robbery, and practicing their lusts openly in public assemblies, defiantly rejecting their prophet’s call to righteousness. This, the text implies, is the sin. Yet the doctrine extrapolates from a story about a violent, predatory, and deeply inhospitable mob to a blanket condemnation of a loving, committed, consensual relationship between two adults. This is a catastrophic interpretive leap that fails its own logic test. Rape and loving intimacy are not the same act; a mob assault in a public square and a quiet life in a private home are not the same context. To miss this distinction is to be morally illiterate. The conflation is like pointing to a case of violent armed robbery to argue that a gift between friends is a capital crime. It simply doesn’t follow.

Furthermore, this interpretive rigidity is wildly inconsistent when applied to other injunctions within the very same faith. Islam’s jurisprudential genius has always been its ability to adapt to context and the objectives of the Sharia (Maqasid), evolving its rulings on slavery, concubinage, and the caliphate as historical realities shifted. Yet on this one issue, a harsh, centuries-old, pre-scientific consensus of medieval jurists is treated as an eternal, frozen truth, more immutable than any other. The same religious texts that provided a careful, phased approach to eradicating the deeply entrenched social evil of slavery couldn’t muster a single nuanced pathway for a natural human orientation. Why is the moral logic so utterly paralyzed here? Because the edifice is built on prejudice, not principle. A principled position can be debated, contextualised, and refined. A prejudice can only be blindly enforced.

Finally, the ethical absurdity of the punishment—ranging from public lashing to death—in a world that now understands consent, psychology, and human rights exposes the doctrine’s complete detachment from any sane conception of justice. A victimless act of love between two adults seeking solace in a difficult world becomes a crime demanding state-sanctioned execution. The “harm” is only the offense taken by people adhering to a literalist interpretation of a 7th-century text. To destroy a human body and a human soul for the thought-crime of whom they love is to forfeit any claim to a moral high ground. This isn’t a clash between divine law and human desire; it’s a clash between an archaic purity code and the most basic principles of compassion and reason.

In the end, the traditional Islamic position on homosexuality fails because it is intellectually, ethically, and now scientifically incoherent. It forces believers to worship a God who creates “broken” people just to punish them, who cannot tell the difference between a rapist and a lover, who designs bodies for pleasures he then condemns, and whose eternal mercy is dwarfed by a crumbling wall of tribal taboo.

A theology that demands such a systematic leap away from logic, biology, and observable human reality isn’t a mystery to be humbly accepted; it’s a contradiction to be soundly rejected.

The body is a temporary agreement. A treaty signed between stardust and water, destined to expire.

For a while, it holds its shape. It walks around with a name and a set of preferences. It loves, it aches, it builds cathedrals and bombs. It forgets what it’s made of. But the expiration date is written not in ink, but in the very code of its being. The treaty, one day, will be revoked.

And when it is, the great unraveling begins.

The party ends.
The rented skin is returned.
No refunds.
The guest list? All of us.

We call it decay. We call it rot. We build boxes of reinforced steel and polished wood, thinking we can keep the soil at bay. We anoint the flesh with chemicals, a final, desperate attempt to preserve the illusion of separation. We are terrified of the dissolution because we mistake it for an ending.

But stand in a forest and watch a fallen oak. It does not despair. It softens. Its rigidity gives way to a plush, damp surrender. Beetles carve intricate maps into its bark. Fungi, those patient philosophers of the underground, spin their white filaments through its heartwood, breaking down the lignin, the cellulose, the stubborn structure of “tree.”

The log is not becoming nothing. It is becoming everything else.

What we call rot is merely the process of remembering. The body is a library of borrowed elements, and death is the due date. The carbon, the nitrogen, the calcium, the iron—they are all checked back into the infinite circulation of the biosphere.

A single hand,
so deft with keys and coffee cups,
becomes a feast for a thousand tiny mouths.
The calcium of its knuckles
strengthens a beetle’s shell.
The iron in its blood
blushes the edge of a new fern.
The water, of course, the water returns to the clouds,
and falls again as rain.

This is the oneness we deny. We think unity is a feeling, a spiritual concept to be attained through meditation or love. But it is a physical fact, a biological inevitability. You are already a walking community. The bacteria in your gut outnumber your own cells. They are you, and you are them. And when your personal narrative concludes, the community simply expands its borders.

The rot is a bridge.

It is the dark, damp, teeming corridor that connects the poet to the worm, the lover to the dandelion, the king to the root. The thing you spent a lifetime building—your identity, your ego, your carefully curated self—softens first. It is the least durable part of you. What remains is the matter. The humble, miraculous, recyclable matter.

The green blade pushes
Through the dark, remembering
A mouth that once ate.

We seep into the earth. The rain finds us, carries us into the creek, into the river, into the sea. We rise again in the mist, falling onto the fields, into the grapes, into the wine on the lips of the living. We are the ancestor in the apple, the philosopher in the soil beneath your feet.

There is no separate self. There never was. There is only this one, long, slow, beautiful rot, dreaming itself into a million temporary forms. The name on the gravestone is not the occupant. The occupant is everywhere now, whispering in the grass, holding up the tree, warming the back of a sleeping cat in a patch of afternoon sun.

So let the flesh rot.

Let it be generous.

Let it feed.

In its final, humble act, it finally tells the truth.

We were never just one thing.

We were always everything.

lunch time...

the cafeteria ladies know my name. not my real name, the one my mother gave me, but the name they chose. skinny. they whisper it when i push my tray along the metal rails, when i slide it past the steaming trays of mashed potatoes and gray gravy, past the green beans floating in butter. here comes skinny.

the head lady has a wart on her chin with three hairs growing out of it. i count them every day. three. she always gives me the smallest portion. the burnt chicken patty, the one with the blackened edges that crinkle like burned paper. the scoop of corn that’s more spoon than kernel. she smiles and her teeth are small and yellow like old corn niblets.

i sit in the corner by the window that’s always fogged up, even when it’s not cold outside. the glass is sick, i think. it has a fever. i press my finger to it and write my name in the condensation but it disappears before i finish the last letter, like it was never there at all.

the other girls sit in the middle of the cafeteria, at the long tables where the lights are brightest. they laugh with their mouths open and i can see their food, pink and chewed, sliding on their tongues. they don’t know i watch them. they don’t know i count how many times they chew. twenty-three for a bite of pizza. thirty-one for an apple. i wonder if there’s a number where it becomes safe, where the food stops being a stranger and becomes you.

today the head lady motions me forward. her wart hairs quiver. she has something behind the counter, something she’s been saving. she lifts the lid of a small silver tray and there it is.

a sandwich. but not like the ones wrapped in plastic, the ones with the crusts cut off. this bread is dark, almost black, and it’s shaped like a hand. five fingers, a palm, a wrist where the crust is crimped. inside, something purple and glistening. jam, maybe. but it moves. just a little. like it’s breathing.

“for you, skinny,” she says. “special.”

i take the tray. my fingers are shaking. the sandwich is warm. too warm. like skin.

i carry it to my corner. the fogged window has cleared just enough to show the parking lot, the cars huddled together like sleeping animals. i look at the sandwich. it looks back. not with eyes, but with a kind of attention. a focus.

i pick it up. the bread gives under my fingers, soft and resilient. there’s a pulse. i feel it against my thumb. a small, stubborn beating.

i bring it to my mouth.

the first bite is salt. not bread salt, but skin salt. the salt of someone who has been crying, or running, or both. the jam inside is sweet but there’s something else underneath, something mineral and dark. iron. i chew. the bread tears like real flesh, fibrous and reluctant. seventeen. eighteen. nineteen.

the cafeteria is quiet. i look up. they’re all watching me. the girls with their half-chewed pizza, the cafeteria ladies with their ladles frozen above the steam trays. even the wart on the head lady’s chin seems to be looking, the three hairs pointing at me like tiny accusatory fingers.

i swallow.

something shifts inside me. not in my stomach, but deeper. in my blood. in my bones. it feels like a door opening that was always locked, a door i didn’t know was there. on the other side, something waits. something that has been waiting for a long time.

i take another bite. twenty-three. twenty-four.

the head lady nods. her wart hairs droop, satisfied.

i finish the sandwich. every last crumb, every last pulse. when i’m done, i look at my hands on the table. they look the same. but when i press them to the fogged window, they leave prints that don’t fade. five fingers, a palm, a wrist.

my name stays on the glass.

outside, the cars are waking up. their headlights blink yellow in the gray afternoon. inside me, the door is still open. something breathes on the other side. something that knows my name now.

not the one my mother gave me.

the other one.

i touch my throat. feel the swallow moving down. feel the new thing settling in, making itself at home.

tomorrow, i’ll go back to the cafeteria. i’ll push my tray along the metal rails. the head lady will smile her small yellow smile. and maybe, if i’m lucky, she’ll have another one.

a hand for the hand inside me.

a body for the body i’m becoming.

the quiet ache of a too-familiar room.

the air here is thick with words that were never said, and words that should have been left unsaid. it hangs like old wallpaper, a pattern i know by heart. the soundtrack of my days is a low hum of tension, the careful clicking of locks, the sighs that speak volumes. it is a life measured in sideways glances and held breath. a masterclass in making yourself small, in folding your dreams up tiny so they don’t take up any space.

i am so desperately bored. not the boredom of an empty afternoon, but the deep, draining boredom of a soul waiting for its own life to begin. it feels like living the same page of a book, over and over, when i can sense whole libraries, whole landscapes, waiting in the wings.

because i have dreams that don’t fit in these hallways. they are too loud, too colorful, too big. i crave a life that tastes like accident and feels like connection.

i want to get deliciously, purposefully lost. to turn a wrong corner in a town where no one knows my name and find a family-owned bakery, its windows fogged with steam and promise. to poke my head in and say, “do you need help?” just for an hour, just for the joy of it. to feel the heat of the oven, to knead dough that will become a stranger’s breakfast, to be given a sticky, warm roll as payment and have the grandmother pat my powered-sugar hand. a moment of pure, uncomplicated belonging, bought for the price of curiosity.

i want to end up on a sun-bleached stone wall in italy, the afternoon light like honey. and there, an old man with a face like a kind map, who shares his bench. he will speak in a dialect that curls like smoke, a language i barely understand—just the music of it, and a few floating words: bella, sole, tranquilla.

i will answer in my own broken, textbook phrases, and we will build a bridge from the wreckage of two languages. we will point at the cats, at the church bell, at the sky, and he will tell me their names—gatto, campana, cielo—as if handing me small, important keys. i will mispronounce something, and his laughter will be a warm, rasping sound. he will offer me a fig from his pocket, its skin splitting with ripeness, and say, mangia, mangia.

and we will talk. it will be the most senseless, sensible conversation of my life. he will tell a long story, his hands painting the air, and i will catch only every fifth word: nipotina... anni fa... quel albero... but i will understand the heart of it. i will understand the loss, the love, the deep root of the memory. i will nod, and say sì, capisco, and for once, i truly will. not the facts, but the feeling.

for a moment, i will not be a character in a tired family story. i will be simply a girl on a wall, learning the world anew through melody and gesture, where misunderstanding makes the understanding sweeter. i will be translated. i will be new.

these are the small, wild freedoms i fantasize about. the kind where my story isn’t written by the past, but by the next step, the next question, the next open door.

so i wait. i am a coiled spring wrapped in quiet. i am gathering these daydreams like provisions for a long journey. they are the proof that my heart still beats in technicolor. this is not forever. this is just the quiet, boring prologue.

one day, the door will click shut behind me for the last time. and i will walk, not run, into a world ripe with chance. i will trade this heavy silence for the beautiful noise of living. i will say yes to the strange and the kind and the spontaneous.

my adventure is out there, breathing, waiting for me to finally arrive. and i am on my way.

just. not. yet. but soon

growing up, i was taught that creation was a sin. to mold beauty from nothing, to let my hands dance across a page or hum melodies into the air, was a dangerous distraction. a path that could lead you away. they spoke of it in hushed, serious tones, framing it as a kind of idolatry—the fear that in making, you might forget the maker. they called it vain, called it worldly, called it anything but what it was: the most human of impulses. a prayer the body recites without permission.

but how do you sever the soul from its need to speak? to create is to reach into the void and whisper, i am here. it’s the oldest language we have—older than shame, older than rules carved into stone or habit. it is the language of the first breath, the first handprint on a cave wall, the first note hummed to ward off the dark.

in the traditions i knew, the divine was the ultimate artist, the origin of all form and rhythm. so isn’t there a holiness in the echo? in the desire to shape, to order, to find a pattern in the chaos? art is the fingerprint of that encounter, whether you name it god or the universe or simply the pulse in your own veins. music is the mathematics of longing. a painting is a wound turned to light. a poem is a map of a heart you didn’t know you had.

to forbid creation, in its purest form, is to forbid a kind of breathing. it is to tell the river not to flow because it didn’t create the rain. and yet—we learn to hold our breath. we learn to fold our drawings into tiny squares and tuck them under mattresses. we learn to sing only in the shower where the water drowns the sound. we learn to draw in the dust, knowing the next wind will carry it away.

but the impulse is a stubborn tide. it returns. and so, here we are, in the quiet aftermath of that teaching, stitching ourselves back together with every stolen moment of beauty. every line scribbled in a margin, every melody tapped on a steering wheel, every photo taken of a slant of light on a floor. these are quiet, defiant acts of remembrance. they are not a rejection of faith, but perhaps a reconciliation with a deeper one. a faith in the aliveness we were given.

because to create is not just to survive. it is to insist, with every fiber, against every silent edict: i am here. i feel. i witness. i matter.

and if you need proof, look up. i think of the sistine chapel. not as a religious symbol, but as a monument to human effort. to the physical, agonizing, glorious labor of creation. michelangelo on his back for years, pigment dripping into his eyes, muscles screaming. that ceiling is not just theology; it’s a testament of flesh and bone. to stand beneath it is to feel a dizzying awe, not first for god, but for the man. for the sheer, terrifying scale of what a single human can envision and then, stubbornly, make real with their hands.

this is what pictures can never teach you. you can see the composition in a book, but you cannot feel the weight of that history in the air. you cannot sense the echo of centuries of held breath. to be in the presence of such a thing is to understand: creation is not a thought. it is an act. a physical, messy, exhausting verb. it leaves its sweat in the plaster.

we are so small. and yet, we contain this capacity to reach beyond our own spines, our own lifetimes, and etch a message on the ceiling of the world. we were here. we saw beauty and we tried to answer it.

pause.
reflect.
what are we, if not creatures built to make? to take the chaos within and without and impose a temporary, aching order? a melody, a line, a chapel ceiling.

and this act—this stubborn, imperfect, glorious act of bringing something forth where there was nothing—isn’t that the holiest dialogue of all? a conversation between the self and the sublime, written in the language of making.

it is the amen we speak with our hands.

the steam from the mint tea rises in a fragrant cloud, catching the late afternoon sun that slices through my mother’s sitting room. her voice, a soft rhythm, recites a verse from the quran. the arabic words are liquid and melodic, a river of faith that has carved the landscape of her life. to her, this language is not just holy; it is the very definition of civilization, of purity.

she is, as i sometimes tell her, an arab enthusiast. it’s a title she wears with a quiet pride.

and yet.

my mind holds a memory i’ve never actually seen. my great-grandmother. i don’t know her village, the sound of her voice, or if she even spoke tamazigh. but i know her face was marked. i know there was a tattoo on her chin. a pattern of lines and dots, a code i can no longer decipher.

was it a ⵣ, the yaz, that bold declaration of ‘free man’? i don’t know. i’ll never know. but in my mind, it has become one. because the meaning is the same. it was a declaration etched into the skin of a woman. a story written in a language we have since been taught to forget.

this is the quiet hum beneath our lives. it is the paradox of my mother, who finds her entirety in a language from the east, while her own grandmother’s face was inscribed with a story from the very soil she was raised on.

my mother doesn’t just prefer arabic; she doesn’t see herself in that tattoo. it’s an erasure so complete it feels cinematic. as if we’re standing on a vibrant, ancient mosaic and she has chosen to cover it with a single, magnificent persian rug. the rug is beautiful. but beneath it, the untranslated mark lies silent.

i think of the needle that pierced her skin. was it a rite of passage? a simple beauty mark? to mark your face so permanently is a truth i can’t fathom. it says, this is who i am. this is my land. she carried that every day. and now, just two generations later, we have become silent. the language of the skin has been forgotten.

this is the poetic tragedy. to have a map of identity inscribed on your family’s flesh, but to have been given a compass that points steadfastly away from the mountains, away from the meaning of the mark.

i write this not in anger, but in mourning for the story we’ve lost. i write for the woman with the ink on her chin. i write to remember that before we learned to build minarets that scrape the sky, we knew how to write our belonging directly onto our skin.

the tea is cool now. my mother finishes her prayers and smiles at me. i smile back. the ghost in the room is no longer silent. she has a face, and on that face, a story.

perhaps the first step is not to learn a language, but to remember a mark. to trace the ghost of a pattern on the back of my hand with a finger. to feel the weight of its mystery, and to know that its meaning, lost as it is, is somehow a part of me.

~rjm

“Westernized.” I’ve heard it whispered about me my whole life. Growing up Moroccan in a Muslim community, it was the go-to insult for any girl who dared to want more. My parents, traditional, would sigh and say it with disappointment — “You’re too westernized” — when I questioned why men could stay out late but I couldn’t, when I wore pants instead of a dress, when I laughed too loud in public, when I said I didn’t want kids, when I asked why I had to cover my hair, when I argued that God wouldn’t punish me for having a mind of my own. It was never about geography, never about actually betraying my culture. It was about me embodying freedoms that made people uncomfortable. Because when a Moroccan girl prioritizes her own dreams, when she speaks her mind, when she refuses to shrink, someone will always call it “western.” As if wanting autonomy was invented in Europe, as if my own desires weren’t mine at all.

“Westernized” is such a loaded insult — it’s never actually about geography, but about women embodying freedoms that challenge male dominance. Think about how ‘modern’ women in Saudi Arabia driving was seen as ‘foreign influence’ (a shift documented by sociologists as fundamentally challenging patriarchal control), or how Japanese ‘office ladies’ in the 80s were criticized for adopting ‘western’ independence instead of marrying young (a phenomenon feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno analyzed as resistance to prescribed life courses).

Look closer to home: scroll through Muslim social media spaces today. Watch how a woman posting about solo travel, choosing to remain unmarried, or debating interpretations of hijab is instantly flooded with comments branding her “westernized,” her faith questioned, her cultural authenticity attacked. The label is a tool to shame women for claiming agency, framing their choices as external corruption rather than personal will. Even in the West, women who reject traditional roles get called ‘too masculine’ or ‘unnatural’ — same script, different costume. It’s always about control, not culture.

This is the core of the insult’s power: the theft of agency. When a woman steps outside the rigidly prescribed lane — whether it’s choosing her career over early marriage, dressing in a way that expresses her comfort and style rather than prescribed modesty norms, speaking her mind in public, demanding bodily autonomy, or simply existing without constant male oversight — the easiest way to shut her down is to declare her choices not her own. “She’s not choosing this,” the accusation implies. “She’s been corrupted. Duped. Colonized by foreign, degenerate ideas.” This mirrors what philosopher Simone de Beauvoir identified as the denial of women as sovereign subjects, rendering them the ‘Other.’ It frames her assertion of self as a passive receptacle for outside influence, stripping her of her intellect, her reasoning, and her inherent right to self-determination. Her rebellion isn’t authentic; it’s imported. Therefore, it can be dismissed, condemned, and punished without engaging with her actual desires or arguments.

It’s a deeply gendered pathology. How often do we hear men who wear suits, use smartphones, drive luxury cars, or work in multinational corporations derided as “westernized” for those choices? Rarely. Their adoption of globalized markers of success or modernity is often seen as progress, sophistication, or simply inevitable. Within many Muslim communities, this asymmetry is stark: men adopting global finance, technology, or fashion face minimal backlash, while women adopting global ideas of bodily autonomy or self-determination trigger moral panic.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘masculine domination’ explains this asymmetry: male appropriation of global power symbols reinforces status, while female adoption of autonomy symbols threatens the gendered order. But when a woman adopts behaviors associated with female empowerment — independence, self-ownership, sexual autonomy, public voice — that’s when the “westernized” siren blares. Why? Because those freedoms directly challenge the bedrock of patriarchal control: the idea that women’s lives, bodies, and choices belong first and foremost to the family, the community, or the male figurehead. Her “modernity” is threatening. His is aspirational.

And crucially, the script isn’t confined to any one region. This is a global playbook. Flip to so-called “western” societies themselves. A woman is ambitious, assertive in the boardroom, prioritizes her career, chooses not to have children, or rejects “hyper-feminine” presentation? The insults fly, but they follow the same logic as “westernized,” just with different vocabulary: “too masculine.” “Cold.” “Unnatural.” “A ball-buster.” “Not a real woman.” Just as the label “westernized” polices women in Muslim contexts, terms like “haram” or “bad muslimah” are weaponized online and in communities to enforce conformity, silencing dissent by equating personal choice with cultural betrayal.

As historian Susan Faludi meticulously documented in Backlash, accusations of being ‘unnatural’ or betraying femininity are timeless tools used against women asserting independence. The underlying message is identical: you have violated the natural, sacred order. Your assertion of self is a deviation, a corruption of your true (submissive, nurturing, accommodating) feminine nature. It’s the same accusation — “you are not behaving according to the role assigned to your gender” — merely wrapped in different cultural paper.

It’s always about control, masquerading as concern. The guardians of “tradition” who wield this label rarely express genuine, nuanced worry about the complex impacts of globalization or cultural homogenization. Their focus is laser-sharp: the woman stepping out of line. The accusation of “westernization” becomes a convenient smoke screen. It allows them to avoid grappling with the uncomfortable reality that women might simply want freedom, equality, and self-determination because they are human. Anthropological studies consistently show that desires for autonomy and self-determination are human universals, not culturally specific imports. It frames resistance to female autonomy as noble cultural defense, rather than what it truly is: a desperate bid to maintain an unequal status quo.

The next time you hear “westernized” used as a slur, especially against a woman, peel back the layers. Ask yourself:

What is she actually doing? Is it driving a car? Earning her own money? Choosing her partner? Speaking freely? Wearing what she likes? Demanding respect?

Who does this really threaten? Her choices likely challenge someone else’s power, privilege, or sense of entitlement.

Is this genuinely about preserving culture? Or is it about preserving a specific, gendered power structure within that culture?

“Westernized” stands as patriarchy’s most insidious rhetorical weapon within conservative cultures and religions — a linguistic sleight-of-hand that pathologizes female autonomy. This calculated framing transforms a woman’s assertion of basic humanity into evidence of moral decay, her personal will into suspected foreign contamination. By denying the authenticity of her voice, it renders her own lived experience inadmissible as evidence.

This epistemic violence serves a singular purpose: to maintain gendered hierarchies by denying women’s capacity for self-determination. Yet this strategy contains its own fatal flaw — it cannot withstand scrutiny. For the desire for self-direction knows no cardinal direction; it is a fundamental human drive, recognized by thinkers from Aristotle discussing eudaimonia (flourishing) to modern psychologists studying intrinsic motivation.

It is neither Eastern patience nor Western impulse, but universal human yearning. No amount of linguistic manipulation can ultimately negate what every cell in a woman’s body knows to be true: that her choices belong to her by right of consciousness itself.

Beauvoir, S. de. (1949). The second sex (H. M. Parshley, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1949)

Bourdieu, P. (1998). Masculine domination. Stanford University Press.

Faludi, S. (1991). Backlash: The undeclared war against American women. Crown Publishing Group.

Ueno, C. (1994). The modern family in Japan: Its rise and fall. Trans Pacific Press.

there is a quiet apocalypse that does not arrive with fire or comet, but with a slow, chilling silence. it is the sound of a soul’s currency devaluing, the hollow ring of an empty treasury. this is spiritual bankruptcy: not the absence of ritual, but the evaporation of reverence. it occurs when the container of belief shatters the content of the divine. and while it can occur in any human heart, it finds a uniquely potent breeding ground within the fortified walls of organized religion when it forgets its own soul.

imagine a grand cathedral—gilded arches echoing with psalms, yet the beggar at its door is told his rags defile the sanctity. this is bankruptcy: the meticulous counting of dogma-coins while the vault of compassion lies empty. it is the sound of a thousand prayers rising while justice drowns in silence. it is the inversion jesus condemned in the money-changers’ temple, the hollow gong paul described without love.

the easiest way to diagnose this decay in any system is to witness what flourishes when we turn away from the fundamental oneness of humanity—when we ignore kindness, justice, pluralism, tolerance, and cooperation. without these, we fall into moral insolvency. and into this void, the gatekeepers and the psychopaths ascend. they offer a potent, seductive alternative to the terrifying work of genuine seeking: the comfort of closure. they trade the boundless sky for a beautifully painted ceiling and call it the entire firmament. they swap the messy, unpredictable journey of faith for a pristine, narrow map and forbid you from ever wondering what lies beyond its edges.

this is the great tragedy of institution-over-inspiration: it often breeds a sanctified closed-mindedness. it mistakes the container for the content, the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. and when you question the finger—its angle, its necessity, its very existence—the system, in its fragility, interprets it as an attack on the moon. it gets mad. it whispers of heresy, of danger, of exile. this is why so many weary seekers now whisper, "i am not religious, i am spiritual." it is a declaration of independence from the middle-managers of the divine. it is a yearning to speak directly to the universe without a script, to question everything without fear of excommunication, to understand that the divine is too vast to be copyrighted by any single franchise.

because let us speak plainly: when a structure demands obedience over inquiry, when it values conformity over compassion, when it polices boundaries instead of expanding them—it begins to mirror the mechanics of a cult. it builds a self-reinforcing reality. us vs. them. the pure vs. the polluted. the saved vs. the damned. it teaches you to fear the outside world as a corrupting influence, to distrust your own inner voice if it whispers a doubt, and to see the questioning mind as a flaw to be corrected, rather than a gift to be engaged. your identity becomes inextricably linked to the group; to leave is not to simply change your mind, but to annihilate your self. this is how love is weaponized. this is how belonging becomes a cage.

and we tread upon landscapes scarred by this very insolvency. history is a ledger of these bankruptcies:

• the crusades: crosses stitched onto breastplates plundering Constantinople, turning “Christ’s love” into a currency of conquest.

• caste’s calcified curse: the varna system, once perhaps a fluid description of societal roles in ancient india, petrified by priestly elites into an architecture of untouchability—spiritual worth measured by birth, not being.

• scripture as shackle: verses on liberation (Exodus, the Buddha’s teachings on ending suffering, the Qur’an’s “la ikraha fid-deen” – no compulsion in religion) twisted to justify slavery, subjugation, silencing the artist, the queer, the questioning mind.

• the library of alexandria aflame: knowledge, that sacred emanation of the divine mind, consumed by the fire of ideological purity—a bankruptcy of curiosity, an arson of collective soul.

from this single toxic seed of separation, a thousand bitter fruits grow. bankrupt spirituality metastasizes. it becomes the idolatry of identity, mistaking tribe (nation, sect, race) for the totality of the sacred. it becomes the commodification of the cosmos, reducing animals, rivers, forests, even human bodies to mere resources, stripping them of inherent kami (Shinto spirit). it is the atrophy of awe, replacing wonder with certainty, mystery with manifesto. it is an economy of exclusion, building gates where bridges belong, barring the “unclean,” the “sinner,” the “infidel” from the marketplace of mercy.

this is the precise mechanics of collapse. it is a chaos that begins in the sanctioned silencing of a question, an injustice that is first practiced in our doctrines before it is codified into our laws, a spiritual ruin that topples our temples from the inside out.

the truth, when we finally still the noise to hear it, is devastatingly simple: any path that divides us cannot be divine. any god that is threatened by a human question is an idol of our own making, an effigy of our own fear.

therefore, true faith is not the absence of questions. it is the courage to live within them. it is the alchemy that turns seeking into sacredness. it is:

• empathy as enlightenment: the buddhist karuna (compassion), the christian agape, the islamic rahmah (mercy), all converging on the realization: “tat tvam asi” (thou art that). your suffering is mine. your liberation is my breath.

• justice as liturgy: amos’s roar (“let justice roll down like waters!”), the hindu concept of dharma as cosmic order upheld through righteous action—not passive prayer.

• creation as co-participation: the artist’s brushstroke, the musician’s note—not hubris, but humble collaboration with the unfolding universe. meister eckhart’s “eye with which god sees you is the eye with which you see god, my eye and god's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.” reflected in the act of making.

• doubt as devotion: the jewish tradition of wrestling with god (israel), rumi’s field “out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,” where awakening grows through inquiry, not extinguishes it.

to escape bankruptcy demands investment in the only currency that appreciates eternally: the golden rule as global reserve. it is pluralism as profound wealth, the joyous recognition celebrated in the rig veda: “ekam sat, vipra bahudha vadanti” (truth is one, sages call it by many names). it is sacred activism: dorothy day’s catholic worker feeding the poor, thich nhat hanh’s engaged buddhism. it is recognizing the imago dei (image of god), the buddha-nature, the divine spark in every form—celebrated, protected, cherished.

bankruptcy notices are served daily—in the scapegoated migrant, the poisoned river, the silenced song. yet, resurrection whispers:
in the artist painting murals on apartheid walls.
in the priest sheltering the lgbtq youth cast out by family.
in the land back movement restoring stolen earth.
in the simple, revolutionary act of pronouncing “they” with reverence.

this is the faith that needs no name. it is the unspoken creed of the heart that has broken open, not apart, and in its breaking, has found itself at home in the magnificent, aching, questioning, beautiful whole of everything else.

spiritual abundance isn’t found in vaults of gold or scrolls of law.
it overflows from cracked vessels,
the cup shared with the thirsty,
the hand extended across the rubble of ruined creeds,
the defiant human heart beating a rhythm older than babel:
one breath. one blood. one becoming.

i don’t want your love because my body looks good under streetlights.
i don’t want your hands reaching for me before they’ve ever held my anger.
i don’t want your romance resume—all polished lines and perfect dates—when you don’t even know my silence.

when you slide into my dms with “you’re gorgeous” as your opening line?
i already feel reduced.
like you’ve written me into your fantasy before asking my name.
like i’m a painting you want to own, not a person you want to know.

and that intention? that ulterior motive humming under every “good morning” text?
it stains everything.
suddenly, every laugh feels rehearsed.
every question feels like data mining for your attraction algorithm.
every moment we share gets twisted into audition material for the role of your person.

no.

give me the slow unravel.
the friendship that starts in the messy middle—no pretense, no performance.

give me someone who falls for me at 2am when my hair’s a nest and my eyes are puffy from crying over a dead plant.
someone who memorizes the way i rant about parking tickets before they ever call me “beautiful”.
someone who knows why i put syrup on scrambled eggs or why i talk to my plants.

fall for the way i fight for people who can’t fight for themselves.
fall for my obsession with peeling stickers off fruit.
fall for how i talk to stray cats like they’re old friends.
fall for my stubborn refusal to watch movie trailers because “they spoil the magic”.

fall for the unphotographed parts:
the anxiety that knots my shoulders,
the way i snort when i laugh too hard,
the anger i carry like a stone in my shoe sometimes.

love me because you know me—not because you want me.

because here’s the sacred thing about starting as friends:
there’s no script.
no third-act confession waiting to drop.
just two humans saying, “you? i like how you exist.”

we build something real in the in-between spaces:
in the texts about your toxic coworker,
in sharing fries when we’re both broke,
in you seeing my sweatpants hole and saying “same.”

that’s where trust digs roots.
in the boring tuesdays.
the tired wednesdays.
the nights we sit in silence because words would just get in the way.

and if love grows there?
it’s not because you forced it.
not because you targeted me like a mission.
but because you woke up one day and realized—
“oh. home isn’t a place. it’s this person.”

so yeah.
skip the flowers. skip the smooth pick-up lines.
come sit in the dirt with me.
let’s get grass stains on our knees.
let’s know each other so deep that “attraction” becomes an afterthought—
a quiet hum beneath the symphony of seeing each other.

because i don’t need to be wanted.
i need to be understood.
then loved.
in that order.

~rjm

you used to sing to me.

i don’t remember the words, only the vibration in your throat, the way your breath warmed the crown of my head when you rocked me. before the silence. before the men came and carved their anger into your bones like initials on a tree, marking what they thought they owned.

i wonder: if i slipped through time and found you at twenty - your laugh still loose, your eyes still soft - would you let me rest my head on your shoulder? or would you already be learning how to turn tenderness into armor?

the first man watched you drown and called it love. you scrubbed his shirts until your knuckles split like overripe fruit. he watched. he always watched, motionless as a stone at the bottom of a river. when you finally dragged yourself ashore, gasping, you must have thought the next one would hand you a towel.

instead, he handed you a knife and asked you to carve yourself smaller.

he kept God in his pocket like spare change. halal this, haram that - i watched him fence you in, verse by verse, until your voice became a whisper, then a ghost. he vanished for months and returned smelling of other women’s perfume, his piety clinging to him like cheap cologne.

when he struck you, he called it correction.
when he lied, he called it necessity.
when he broke you, he called it marriage.

and you - you turned those shattered pieces toward me.

we were two wounded animals then, weren’t we?
circling each other in the dark.

you’d lash out with hands that once cradled me,
how strange, the way love mutates.
how quickly a caress becomes a claw,
a lullaby twists into a war cry.

i’d flinch from the very fingers that wiped my tears,
our bodies, traitors to memory.
my skin remembered your tenderness,
but my bones knew to brace for the blow.

we didn’t know how to love without drawing blood,
our affection always wore teeth.
you taught me to kiss with my guard up,
to mistake hunger for holiness.

the broom handle snapping across my back,
the sound of a spine refusing to break.
you swung like you were splitting firewood,
like you could splinter the wild out of me.

the diary ripped open like a wound,
my secrets spilled like viscera,
my private ink suddenly public,
my heart splayed for your forensic gaze.

the camera’s red eye blinking in the dark,
a mechanical vulture perched in our sanctuary.
even God turned away from that footage,
but the lens never blinked.

we were a museum of hurt,
you, the curator,
me, the exhibit,
both of us aching behind the glass.

(how do you say "i love you" in the language of scars?)

yet still, still:
i remember you pressing cool cloths to my forehead when I burned with fever.
your voice weaving stories while rain lashed the windows.
the way you’d hum - just under your breath - when you thought no one was listening.

if i met you in your home country, Morocco, the place you yearned for since you came to America. the place where dreams still tacked to the walls of your house, would you recognize what we’d become? would you clutch my face and whisper, "don’t let them harden you"?

or would you already feel the chill in your veins?
the first frost of bitterness settling in your heart?

i don’t blame you.
not anymore.

how could i curse the river for flooding when the rain never stopped?
you were drowning.
you grabbed the nearest thing to stay afloat.
even if it was me.
especially if it was me.

now when you raise your hand, i catch your wrist.
"No," i say, gentle as closing a grave.
your eyes widen - not with rage, but recognition.
you see your own mother’s fists reflected in my irises.
you see his sneer in the set of my jaw.
you see the generations of hurt we carry like heirlooms.

we are a gallery of ghosts, you and i.

so yes -
if i could time travel, i’d find you.
not to ask if we’d be friends.

but to kneel beside you at the kitchen sink,
your raw hands submerged in soapy water,
and wash the blood from your knuckles
before it ever dried.
before it ever became mine.

i’d press my forehead to your damp shoulder.
"It doesn’t have to be this way," i’d murmur.
and for a moment - just a moment -
you’d lean into me.
two wounded animals not circling,
but sharing the same den,
licking salt from each other’s fur.

~~
when the wound outlives the wounder.
when the bruise lingers long after the fist un-clenches.
when your mother’s scream lives in your throat.
when you inherit the battle without knowing the war.

~rjm

Home is a place I long to know—
but where does my home begin?
I trace the room, its walls of doom,
a prison painted in sorrow’s hue.
Did I brush this pain of aching blue,
or did the walls instead paint me,
staining my bones with a truth I flee?

I stumble outside where the wild winds plead—
a meadow unfolds, an emerald sea.
The air hums, “Run, darling, run and breathe,
let the earth unravel what you believe.”
But what is left for me to bear?
This wound of blue? This ghost-filled air?

I chase the breeze through tears and thorns,
past shadows where the heart is torn,
until a cottage blooms, meek and worn,
its wooden arms to the storm still sworn.
No poison seeps from its humble frame—
just honey-light cracks that whisper my name.

The door sighs, “Child, you’ve wandered enough.”
Firelight kneads the cold from my lungs.
Kittens tangle the dusk into song;
the wind croons, “Here, you’ll always belong.
When the world gnaws and the skies undo,
these walls will rise—not to cage, but to hold you.”