High school, a place, a home, that does not seem much of importance up until the time when you can’t have it anymore. When you will be longing for the days and moments, the people-most importantly that made the high school a second home and you can’t have any of them no more. They are there but not like how they used to be is when you’ll realize that it was more than just a school, a place you had to go to everyday. It was home.

It’s not a magical fairytale of few people coming together and moving in the same direction but rather a prologue of a bigger story where everybody goes their own way to chase very different things. All the books, fairytales about such friend groups are unrealistic most of the time.

And when that phase of your life is over, all the memories and moments will come rushing to you. Not once, not twice, but every once in a while. The bittersweet nostalgia is like a dam that is let loose every season and is rushes down crushing everything beneath it. The same bittersweet nostalgia of high school will come rushing down carrying all the laughs you have shared, all the fights you have fought, all the tears you have shed. Funny isn’t it? Like a ‘too good for you’ ex’s memories it’s going to stay in your heart for the rest of your life.

Someday when you are happy and enjoying it will come to you reminding how it was so much better then, someday when you are crying and searching for someone to hold onto it will come reminding you how there were lots of things to hold onto back then, someday when you are struggling it will come reminding you how easy it was back then. There is going to be a reflection of it in everything, sometimes you are going to catch it, sometimes it’s going pass just like the phase.

Sudden tears might flow down your cheeks and your brain might not even comprehend where it is coming from but your heart will have the answer, it knows that your soul yearns for something it can’t reach anymore. That something, which never felt like surviving, which went by so fast that you couldn’t even take it all in while it lasted.

It went by soo fast.
Shouldn’t have.

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

It’s not like I have a lack of company, it’s the other way around—I’m surrounded by such kind hearted and good people who would do anything for me, my best friends, my parents, my cousins, my sister. Each one them have been there for me through thick and thin and i have always acknowledged their presence. For whole of my life i have never felt anything but love for me they have carried with themselves everywhere.

But even after all the love I have received, I find myself, standing with a void in my heart—for a person who is yet to come or maybe would never come. I feel an absence i can’t quite describe. I crave for that person in a room full of people, even when I am laughing a thought crosses my mind—they should have been here with me, even when I am crying—I think if that person would have been here it would have been better. Whatever I do, whatever I feel, has a trace of them—a them who i don’t know yet i feel like i know them more than myself, like I could read that person as if they were an open book. I feel that I would recogonise that person with just a glance.

It’s not about love or my other half. It’s just about the person who has my heart like no other even without their first appearance.

What do you call this? madness? delusion?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share

Tomorrow will come the drought,

The sun will still shine nice and bright,

For those with no fraught.

-

The rain still pours the day after,

Bright and red,

The soil barren and cleft,

With sorrows of it's inhabitats

Nice and dead.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

​Ticket to Heaven as a story depicts the suffering of those who dared to love the same gender despite of the cloudy and raging guilt of it being a sin hovering over them. I've finished five episodes of the beautiful drama and I write this as i wait for the 6th, and final one to find if in the end the god prevails or the love/sin.

​Being raised in a culture and country which thinks majority of it to be a ‘sin’, did influence me as a child into thinking that it was indeed a sin to love someone of the same gender. That it wasn't normal, you would have to be so out of your mind to fall for such a thing. That it’s ‘unnatural’-god hasn’t made humans to drift this way.

​What an odd thing to fill into someone's brain right?

And I'm thankful for the internet to bring to me to the fact that ‘it's just as normal as any boy and a girl loving each other.’

​Ticket to Heaven explores the clashing beliefs of two young men - one who served the god, and the other who left his protection, which he in fact never received. It's a beautiful and tragic story. The two boys who were tied by heavy and dreading chains of a religion which found their love to be a sin. A path full of thorns, of beliefs, that makes a servant of god doubt himself.

​Tanrak, the boy who was at the mercy of god after his parents’ death, didn't think he would be stuck in a situation where he has to choose between the god who provided him with a merciful shelter and Barth, the boy who entered his life like a breeze of warm wind teaching him how to love, the concept which the god preaches for. And the very same breeze of warmth lost his faith in god and ended up with the conclusion that he was not one of the god's favourite children but still had the courage to love.

​Their love was like the yearning legend that goes down in history yet untalked of, and the same love hung by a thread over a never-ending abyss because the same god who saved one of them and left the other on his own to suffer found it a ‘sin’.

​I can't say I understand their pain. I can't say I understand what they go through every day. But if I did, I would not want to be framed as the abnormal one. I would not want my feeling, my love, to be called a sin. I would refuse to walk the path paved by someone who teaches to love each other but calls my love a transgression. If the god stands between my love and I, he ceases to exist for me.

​But that's me, it's easy for me to write each word and sentence of this essay because I don't go through it. I don't have a tad bit of an idea what it’s like to be called an unnatural one in the society. I don’t have to go through the horrors of wondering if i should talk about my feelings publicly or not. I am not the closeted one.

​So this essay is my apology on behalf of the world to those who suffer from all of this, every day, every minute, every second, the daring 'un-natural' hearts who acted normal and dared to love despite everything but were called otherwise.

​YOU'RE AS NORMAL AS ANY OTHER PERSON ON THIS EARTH.

​A religion does not define who you are. A religion, a god, doesn't get to decide if you can love someone or not. YOU DO. YOUR HEART DOES.

​If being doomed is to love then be it so!

p.s. ; this is not meant to hurt anyone’s religious belief neither it is against it, it’s just my personal thoughts and raw opinions just as it is stated in my bio.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

I was born in a country which is often stereyotyped for being one of the dirtiest, uncivilised, and probably the bad things for most of the time with a rarity of being good at its cuisine and maths. I loved my country growing up but that is something I can’t relate to anymore, i don’t love it as it has taken away every reason for me to do so as a woman. There are far more atrocities here than benevolence for a woman. But at the same time I am grateful that I was born here, I am grateful that I am alive, I am grateful that I can have an opinion, I am grateful that I can have an education here, I am grateful that I can choose to not be forced into a closed room to rot my life away like my existence was a sin in itself. I am grateful and guilty for having it easy for myself while every woman in Afghanistan has her life taken out of her hands.

Across the world, a mere 1850 kilometers away, in Afghanistan, there are women just like me, who want to learn, live and let go of every restriction. They have the same abilities, same passion, same desire and love for their kin just like every other woman in the world. They would most likely make more of the opportunities that I’ve been given but the world has failed to pave the road that was going in their direction. There are boxers who can’t compete anymore, there are singers who have their voice locked away, there are students who yearn to learn only to have their books burned, there are patients who are left to die, there are women who want to go outside but are chained inside four walls. There are women as normal as every morning light, yet forced to vanish like the eerie night.

In 2026, when the women around the world are fighting for equal rights, women in Afghanistan are fighting for basic human rights.

In a speech, Meryl Streep points out these facts:-

1. “A female cat has more freedom than a woman’’- A cat can go on and sit on her front porch and feel the sun on her face, whereas on the other hand a woman, a human, is forced to cover herself from head to toe with every piece of skin being hidden away from the touch of light.

2. “A squirrel has more rights than a girl”- A squirrel can enter parks, roam and jump around, and enjoy it’s surroundings, whereas on the other hand a woman, a human, is not allowed

3. “A bird may sing in Kabul, but a girl cant’t”- While a bird sings to it’s heart’s content, on the other hand a woman, a human, under ‘morality’ laws is forbbiden from speaking, singing, or raising her voice in public.

Apart from the above-mentioned monstrosity, these are some of the cases I would like to bring light to:-

• Taliban used live fire to silence a rare protest against the detention of women accused of violating strict Islamic dress codes in the western Afghan city of Herat in which two were condemed dead and more than twenty were injured.

• The ‘so-called’ de facto Ministry of Justice has published a Decree 18, titled ‘Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses’, which eliminates minimum age limit for marriage, reduces the consent rights for girls which was basically non existent to begin with and implements discriminatory legal barriers for women trying to leave abusive or forced marriages.

While the recent atrocities continue, the history isn’t any less:-

• The infamous case of poor Gulnaz- She was raped by her cousin’s husband and when the case was reported to the authorities, insted of punishing the rapist, she was held accountable for ‘zina’ (moral crimes) and was sentenced for 12 years in jail, and after massive international outrage she was eventually pardoned but was forced to marry the same man who violated her just to ‘legalize/legitimize’ the child born from rape.

  

• Elaha Dilawarazia case- Elaha, a medical student was arrested, abused, raped and forced to marry a Taliban spokesman, she posted a video exposing all of this stating ‘‘ it was better to die once than a thousand times”,and tried to flee to Pakistan in the process of which she was imprisoned by Taliban and was forced to kiss her abuser’s feet to beg for forgiveness.

• Story of Unnamed pregnant Hazara Woman- A pregnant woman was detained in Kabul simply for leaving her home to do routine shopping and the authorities refused to give her information to family and the whereabouts remain unknown.

These are just one of the few ‘stories’ we know about but there are thousands of such cases that go unheard. These women deserve to be free just like any other human being in the world. They shouldn’t be ‘allowed’ to exist but rather have the ‘rights’ to live. The women of Afghanistan are still resisting—against all odds. They are fighting for the same rights that we have and they don’t. They are fighting a society who sees its women as an object to be trampled over and controlled.

No woman is free until every woman is free.

Subscribe now

Share

For some people it was their whole livelihood, the only way to feed their mouths and their kids, only way to go on living. The hard, tiring, and almost unbearable work which required you to pull kilos an kilos of load whole day to earn a minimum of 10-20 rupees to a maximum of 100 rupees a ride was a way of earning a place in the society somehow. I have seen elderly as well as young teenagers who were left with nothing but a rickshaw, work hard to earn the minimum wage which would keep them alive somehow. I have had wholesome conversations with many of them, it is sometimes just a conversation about how the weather is not showing any mercy, sometimes its a life lore of theirs’ which led me to realize my privilage, sometimes its just them asking me what i do. It was alway short but never forgettable.

But, with the introduction of e-rickshaws or some may call it ‘hawa-hawai’ or something else as it has many names conversely to the previous one which doesn’t, it seems to just have disappered or become rare. All we see nowadays is those average grade materialistic battery rickshaws zooming past like they could crash into anything anytime. Its more convenient and fast, also many times unsafe. With its rising fame, the other one started dying of its credibility. It became more and more inconvinent as the time passed, and just as its inconvinence increased the livlihood for thousands saw its demise.

Yesterday, late at night I saw one and hailed it, and asked the driver ‘‘how’s work these days?”, he replied; and i quote “din ka do time khane ka bhi dikat hai, kya hi kaam rhega, muskhil se panch savari hota hoga”- which basically translates to a harsh reality: ‘‘It’s difficulte to even manage two meals a day, what work would I have?, barely manage to get five rides a day.’’ [ for those who don’t understand hindi ] In that moment it struck me how we’ve completely abandoned them alone to struggle for our own convenience.

To everyone reading this, I would like to request you to hail a rickshaw, old one, when you have a little extra time on your hand, it might be slow, it might be inconvinent, you might end up reaching your destination ten minutes late. But, you’ll be helping a person who is in a severe need of your time, you will be picking up the people again who we once almost abandoned as a society. Being empathetic sometimes just costs you few more minutes.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

Share

‘i mourn your death, but it’s my inspiration’

Inspiration is a wonderful thing, you can find it even in the tiniest thing-as small as pebble on a road you are lost on to a worm you saw a bird feeding her child, from a cat being surrounded by its litter of kittens jumping around to the smoke coming out of the grilled chicken at the local shop, from a couple breaking up upstairs to a side character of a movie, it’s fleeting, it’s short, if you caught it-you did, and if you didn’t-you just didn’t. It’s so fleeting and a matter of seconds that you might end up catching five in a span of 10 minutes or you might have to wait for even one, sitting on a bench for hours, days, months, even more if the universe is just pulling your leg. It’s never granted.

To be inspired is the ultimate antidote to existential despair- Jason Silva

And as the great saying goes-“you realise the importance of something when you’ve already lost it”. These idle hands don’t have anything to scribble about anymore, they have stopped running for a while now as nothing has come this soul’s way to lighten up the bulb called ‘inspiration’. Everything that seemed to carry a meaning to it has disappeared or it might be these eyes I have that saw that meaning, worth, and beauty have just lost its ability. The world which was once filled with stories waiting to be written has gone silent like it has nothing to tell.

As if it’s dead.

And I have yet to give you a grave because these idle hands don’t know of losing hope as they have always written about keeping it. These hands have written fantasies of dragons and fairies, they sure can believe in a ‘coming back to life’ plot. Maybe the world will remain silent and angry with the eyes that long for them but one day it will melt against the yearning burning deep inside it.

Who knows where the inspiration comes from, perhaps it arises from desperation, perhaps from the flukes of the universe, the kindness of the muse- Amy Tan

Because the universe that has served me on my platter up until now, surely will not let me die of hunger. I believe the inspiration will rise from the dead before I build it a grave because inspiration itself goes beyond the laws of the universe, the same universe that has gone silent, it goes beyond that to write its own laws.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

For most of my time on earth, I’ve only associated death with a single word: end, or, perhaps, I have simply been influenced to do so.

​Death is an inherently sensitive topic for many—carrying the heavy, suffocating loss of loved ones. To die means there’s no more conversastion, no more random strolls with them, no more celebratations with them ever again, no more of anything you used to do before because they are simply no more in this world. It is profoundly sad, and I know nothing can ever truly fill that void.

​But beneath that genuine empathy and words of sorrow, I harbor a secret. I am intensely intrigued by the part that comes after.

​What happens after death? Does a person’s soul simply cease to exist? Does it slip away into a different dimension? Does it go to a heaven, a hell, or somewhere entirely beyond our comprehension?—to a place which is out of our capability to reach or imagine? What actually happens when the final breath slips by? I don’t know, and it is a mystery that sometimes keeps me awake at night.

​I haven’t lived long enough to know for myself, nor do I know any way to find out. But I wonder—is there any way at all? We live in an era where scientists and researchers have mapped the stars, decoded human DNA, and explained the mechanics of the universe. They can tell us exactly what happens to the physical vessel—how the heart stops, how the synapses fire their final spark, how biology inevitably surrenders back to the earth.

​Yet, when it comes to the soul, science falls utterly silent. All our brilliant researchers and endless data cannot tell us where the “I” goes when the body stops. Deep down, these unanswerable questions have slowly become the stimuli of my restlessness. The greatest minds in the world cannot solve the very destination we are all headed toward.

​With such relentless questions comes a profound fear—about desensitizing a topic so gruesome and heavy. Does being curious about the mechanics of mortality make me an insensitive person? Does it make me someone who simply hasn’t seen the world? Does it make me an ignorant girl who hasn’t experienced enough pain or loss to understand the gravity of it all?

​I ask myself these things in the quiet of the night, but eventually, I am met with an answer of consolation.

​Let your curiosity speak louder than your fears. You are not on earth to be bound by other people’s prescriptions of what the limit of curiosity should be. To wonder about the unknown isn’t to diminish the grief of death—it is simply to acknowledge the vast, terrifying, and beautiful mystery of what it means to exist at all.

So, what actually comes after death?

Share

Subscribe now

Friendships have to be one of the purest forms of human affection. It’s deep without the abyss of profundity, it's warm without the ache of burning, it's cool like a breeze and not like a storm, it's endless like the horizon and not like the loop, it's mesmerizing and not intoxicating–untill it isn't.

From being complete strangers to casual classmates and then friends who end up becoming more like soulmates. The friendship came a long way–through sulking, fights, cursing, it stood strong. It was just the perfect blend of everything one could ever ask for. It was not ‘I want to spend the rest of my life with you’ yet ‘I want to spend a lifetime with you’.

You knew everything about me or I thought you did? From my favorite food to my favorite songs, I thought you knew me from my head to toe, I thought you knew me well enough to know that my ‘I'm alright’ didn't actually mean ‘I'm alright’, I thought you knew me enough to know that it was more of an invitation for you to come running and ask me forcefully about what happened?, who hurt me?, what went wrong with me that day?. But you didn't and that made me think maybe I'm too dramatic and sensitive. It hurt me but I deluded myself that it did not. But I never thought of a possibility that ‘you didn't care’. When you were going through the worst I set my own world aside–just to be haven for you, just to be of use to you in any way whether it be emotional availability you needed or just a listener. I never did it to owe you anything, I did it out of love and I thought you would do the same for me.

I've heard a lot about how people change, how friends drift apart, how bad friendship breakups are–all of it is brutal and few months back I would've never thought that everything that I've heard about untill then could happen to me, that you would change–never in my wildest nightmares I would've imagined that I would be relating to stories that I told you about which always ended up with the conclusion that it will never be us. But life has a very strange way of teaching a person, the conclusion that we ended with ended up being proven wrong. That's us now. Even worse.

I know you have changed and you don't.

I see how you don't text for days untill I'm the one to reach out first, I notice how you've stopped sharing those random jokes, I notice how you don't call anymore, I notice how you aren't there to hype me up, I notice how my absence doesn't seems to affect you anymore, I notice how you prefer to just let me be instead of bothering me, I notice what you don't.

You changed, and I didn't.

Which is worse than any friendship breakup out there because that's the end and I'm not brave enough to accept that so I just let it be, I just subsist on the fragments I get from you, it hurts–I've lived with the pain for few months now but I am not aware if I can handle the pain I'll go through with the former, if I can move on from it, if I can face the reality that you won't be my best friend anymore, if I am mature enough to forget the thousands of plans we made–I'm very well aware that those plans won't come to life though, I can't.

So I just live with the pain, I live with the ghost of you which I thought would never die to begin with, I shoulder the suffering you don't know you're putting me through and i don't think you'll ever realize either. I grieve the ‘friendship’ which once was and never will be.

I lost you, platonically.

I lost myself, ironically.

Admist of all the hustle and bustle of life- from the constant chasing after exams, deadlines, jobs, employment, goals to unrealistic dreams of penthouses, luxury cars, branded clothes, responsibilities of a daughter, a sister, a friend, a human–a person.

A time when everyone is running after the crowded cities bustling with ambitious people of all kind with dreams reaching as high as skyscrapers spread all around the them, few going even higher as much as touching the sky. A time when the motto 'go big or go home' thrives just well as a cafe around the corner of a law firm. The flow of life which is taken ideal by the society, the flow–in which going with the current seems like right thing to do.

In this time, sometimes all I want to do is go against this flow. Go uphill from the waterfall which everyone wants to jump right into, swim against the strong current, the ideal, just to do what my soul calls for, without worrying about the future.

I want to move away from the tall buildings, away from the cities that never sleep, away the work that calls me every morning at 9 and let's me return at 5 around the dusk, away from the world that asks me– ‘which university i go to?’, ‘which position in which company I am achieving or aiming for?’, away from the world where how much credits you have gained over the year shows how much you have done in life.

I want to drive down the road that takes me to a serene countryside where in the name of ‘walls’ and ‘apartments’ all you get is lanes of small local shops and a big enough house for me and my pet probably, to live in with a big enough lawn to have a few flowers around. A place where everyone knows each other like family, where evenings aren’t evenings without a cup of tea with neighbors gathered together in someone's lawn. A place where night echoes–in the sound of crickets and hooting of owls instead of honking cars and the the moonlight along with the stars bathe the whole sky and town, a place where morning starts with chirping of birds and the cold breeze of air entering through the windows rustling through the curtains disturbing the wind-chime filling the house with tinkling sound, the rooster's cry being my wake up call instead of an army of alarm.

I want to live somewhere where my routine for the first half of the year is just filled with walking to the farm from house, planting, watering, and growing crops, then walking back home–watching the sky turn orange as the sun goes down the horizon slowly and steadily. And the second half of the year is filled with resting and slacking off after the harvest, trying new recipes, sharing it with the people around me, who never asked about my past, nor ask ‘where I came from?’, but just knew be good enough to know that I am no runaway convict.

Sometimes I want to live for myself.

to live in cities you will never see on screen,

not very pretty,

but sure know how to run things.

​In the midst of life, she forgets how to express her feelings through words. It's not that she cannot speak; it's just that she has been bottling it up for so long that even the cork won't let go of such a fragile thing, fearing it might break.

The tragedy is that no one knows she is breaking, because she has spent her whole life making sure she looks unbreakable– “nothing can affect her”, “she is so reliable”, “so mature”, “so understanding”, they say– as a compliment to be proud of, as if it wasn't her last resort.

​The responsibility of being the eldest daughter comes with navigating things alone, never asking anyone for help or for advice, as asking for it was never in her dictionary to begin with, she never thought it was even an option she could choose. She figures out everything herself—a source of praise and compliments to them, which eventually became a dread to her. She is there for her family, for her siblings, and for her friends. She is present. But when she faces her own catastrophe, she is met with nothing but an empty hallway that echoes with her cries for help.

​She has forgotten what she desires, what she longs for, in the midst of checking the boxes of everyone elses’ quite wants and expectations. And when she finally perceives what it is that she desires, somehow the world—which wasn't there to answer her cries—is now there to criticize her wants, as if it's a sin to finally do something for herself. She faces the consequence that having a desire perhaps comes at the cost of a perfect image.

​All her life, there have been only a few things she has ever desired or wanted to hear: "It's okay to just be," and, "Are you okay?" But the words she yearns for never came, and might never come in the future either. Over time, she comes to the conclusion that nobody is going to save her. The years of waiting, neglect, and lack of presence won't be followed by the apology she has expected. The only person who will ever ask about her or sympathize with her is herself.

​She has learned to do it alone before; she can definitely learn to do it again. The voice she never allowed to escape her throat, she learns to let break free and be counted. She learns that people's reception of her isn't her responsibility to maintain.

She's done it alone before, and she can do it again, but this time, it will be in solitude.

Parents being the most precious people to be loved by one, Some have changed the meaning of the word love. It’s now something you’ve to earn at the cost of your happiness, sometimes passion, sometimes even your life. You’re not worthy of this love, unless you’re a certain someone they want you to be. and most of the time “that someone” is what you would rather die than become. Just for the so called love.

So the rest of your life, you live, but you’re not alive. You commit the murder of your own self — Someone you really wanted to become. You kill that person, and along with person you kill their passion . You commit the gravest sin one could — against yourself . Just for their love, just for the validation that could vanish into the thin air just like the hues after a dewy morning as if it never existed — as if it was never their to beign with.

For someone who could’ve died for the passion burning inside themselves, you have become so shallow from within to understand what even the word passion is. It has become such an unfamiliar word to you just like the unfmiliar clouds — whom you have only seen from afar without knowing what it’s touch feels like.

With every passing year, every season fades, every month slips by, every week rolls down, and every day comes to an end , you see the ghost — of someone whose blood has stained your hand forever.

Just like the falling leaves during the autumn, you fall deeper into the grief of leaving your heart behind . But guess what? — even the autumn leaves come back every year , to try again, to try to be on tree — to try. To try for what it desires. Which you don’t, proving the fact that even the leaves has more courage than you.

They die trying, you lived dying — just for a word called love.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now