she wasn’t just young in age—she was young in the feeling of being able to fly, like a child who believes everyone will treat a gift as a gift—she keeps trying to find love in places where people only want pieces of her. for the fruits of love she would barter herself and her devotion whether it’d be her creator or his creation, she believed goodness existed and that perhaps a deed—holy or unholy would make her worthy of love and light.

but that’s the thing about light, god and paradise—they’re blinding and will always remain unseen until the soul bypasses the realm of this world. just like that is hope and naivety—they’re like light that you cannot see beyond—the pain, the ugliness, and the sin that live in the unseen remain invisible to the eyes of a being who is only made of light and a virgin heart, untouched by the humans on this planet that take purity for granted—as a gift that was never theirs to hold.

the angel’s first act of losing her wings starts with beauty as death often adorns itself in illusory beauty, luring one in until it reveals its true face—of the tribulation it demands in return for its refuge. the angel grows a garden of fruit in paradise for her lover and names the smallest butterfly hope—hope dies when the season of love passes, her lover never comes to see her again and so do her fruits begin to rot. as the curtains of paradise fall and she lies on the ground, only then does she realize—she mistook earth for paradise and as the feathers of her wings fall, she realizes that heaven was never real—at least not on this planet. sometimes god offers a slice of paradise to his slaves through their suffering, to give them hope and keep them steadfast in their purity—but when purity begins to drink in the earth, it becomes corrupt, reality interferes and the clock breaks before naivety could’ve broken you.

so what does she do next to lose her wings? she prostrates with her forehead to the pure earth and looks for an answer in the empty sky, she tries to tell herself she could be good—something bigger than good—loved? she remembers what she learnt from the ninety-nine names of god, that god is the most merciful—the most generous—that we as humans should carry god’s attributes as fragments of our hearts—so she worships, with love. she shares her love with beautiful people who love her back as long as she stays an angel, but like hope—they pass after the season of love. yet she continues to give every time she dies, she continues to drape herself with her wings and wears her naivety like a dress—hindsight for the corrupt. they take all her love, every flower she grew and every love letter she wrote becomes everybody's, though it never belonged to them.

if only someone could have told her that her love would be taken for granted—her softness would become the very force that makes blood rush to a man’s loins, but she wouldn’t realize it until she counts how many feathers she has left.

for the next act she removes the veil from her head, she lets it sit at her feet—she opens her hair and lets the wind blow through it with liberation. she doesn’t hide anymore beneath the verses that rested upon her hair—she lets the words between her curls be read and becomes the poetry the naive girl would write in the ungodliest hours. it really does feel like liberation, another step further away from light and into sinner’s paradise—beautiful hell and its beautiful people.

the angel stops talking to god and anyone that ever used god as a thread to stitch her wings together. she bleeds with desire and lets herself bleed, purity reminds her of her full wings—instead she bathes in her blood and desires, wearing it as a testimony, drinking hot desire that only makes her thirstier, lonelier and further from what it ever meant to be an angel, untouched.

like that she loses herself, her soul, her art—she bargains away her art, turning it into a ticket to the girl that lived underneath the wings—now on display in the museum of lust, in the foreground of the garden of eden, between gold frames—feathers falling from her wings and white silk slipping off her body. every time she thinks she is free, another feather falls.

her fall began beautifully with love and god on her tongue and her demise is just as beautiful with blood and tears of devotion on display—as the angel now becomes a work of art everyone takes what they want from her, but freely without ripping her feathers, she will never be mistaken for an angel again and part of her thinks it won’t hurt anymore. her soul doesn’t live under softness anymore, she opens the doors of her heart and breaks the windows behind her eyes—take me as i am now; the men drink her through their eyes, the women curse the blood between her legs and god watches another one of his fallen slaves, he doesn’t intervene anymore—because he knew this was always going to happen.

the angel doesn’t become fallen just because she desired, sinned or lost her feathers one by one—she became fallen because she entered the world incapable of imagining what people were capable of—that innocence cannot survive a world that mistakes purity for permission. the world has always been a place where nobody knows what to do with innocence except consume it—or let it consume you; every lesson this world teaches is paid for with a feather, until the angel is no longer an angel but just another painting on the wall, onto which everyone projects their own story, keeping her immortal even without her wings.

you really want to call it love or play make-believe as soulmates when you look into their eyes and see your reflection—perhaps it’s a mix of naïve hope and sugar-coated narcissism. everything suddenly feels worth living for, in every scar you start to see their name, you walk with your head held high in pride and finally believe the universe gave you all you ever wanted—to be understood. but who says being understood meant to be loved? do the twin flames ever meet? perhaps they just dance around one another, careful enough that the blue flame doesn’t mix with the orange. you’re cut from the same fabric embroidered with the same pain—infinite pain that bypasses the axis of humanity and even at the very end, somewhere up in your heavenly dreams or this hell of a planet—you still don’t meet.

this is the tale of mr. & mrs. nobody—two nobodies who thought they found themselves in one another but were never able to embody what it meant to love—to be present and hold each other’s pain. despite speaking the only language of pain, never were they able to become somebody, even when they gave parts of themselves away.

they were never strangers, they were mirrors and when you stare long enough at your reflection you begin to see everything that was wrong—the beauty of illusion and the beloved who was never yours to begin with, at last the mirror breaks when the needle on the clock strikes midnight.

mr. nobody would empty his wallet if mrs. nobody asked—if mrs. nobody asked for a piece of the moon, it would already be at her doorstep because he understood the language she spoke—he could read her like a book, know every materialistic thing she needed and he gave it—but never himself. he couldn’t offer a piece of himself anymore because there was nobody to begin with. holding his hand was like holding fireworks, bursting with life and colour—like new year’s, all the colours felt like hope, like his affection they were so bright you’d have to cover your eyes—but as soon as midnight passes, the sky is black and never lights up again.

mr. nobody lived in uncertainty—nothing in his life was ever complete, that’s why he couldn’t find himself either because he was never a whole to begin with. and might never be one. he hid his brokenness beneath his coat and wore his smile with grace and carried his charm wherever he went, but nobody would ever know what a nobody he was underneath—the man who was everybody’s somebody but never an anybody, and never mrs. nobody's because belonging to her would have meant becoming somebody.

mrs. nobody would destroy herself for him if mr. nobody asked. she would take her mind out of her skull and shatter it for him if it meant giving him a sense of self through the language he spoke best—pain. even if mr. nobody tried, his comfort was empty—nothing. mrs. nobody, a naïve fool, would spit venom at him until her words took the shape of daggers and rained upon him. despite the blood he bled, it never made him any more of a somebody. she’d tell him to be a somebody even if it meant being a cruel liar, but just make her feel loved—she’d scream and all he ever had to offer was his silence and his bills.

mrs. nobody lived for finality—for nothing in her life was ever met with certainty and finality, and that was all she looked for in him—an answer, anything but silence. she would look into the mirror and see mr. nobody’s emptiness in her heart and his ferocity on her lips—and resentment—for him, herself and hope. even if he never hurt her the way the world did, loving him was never enough either.

they were both empty—mr. nobody would turn in on himself and feed off his own pain until it became a monster that consumed him alive, and mrs. nobody would run anywhere in the world, looking for anyone or anything to fill the void, even if it blackened her heart—even if she had to put a price tag on herself, she did it. anything to not feel the emptiness, anything to fill the silence she hoped her mr. nobody could fill—anything to feel loved, even if it was all a screenplay.

they said they loved each other—they said they never wanted to lose each other but they were already lost to begin with, slaves to their own pain and desires, dark enough that rainstorms seemed to follow them wherever they walked.

in each other’s art and words would they find themselves, in the black letters of poetry and the margins of incomplete stories they lived. the streets must remember the love song they played in the car as they drove at night—the one they sang under the moon together, in the reflections of black rain puddles, does the memory of two nobodies live.

he might be somewhere out there reading this—but does it matter anymore? he never became a muse; he remained an archetype, and archetypes take new forms. in this piece, he is the shadow that lingers after you spend a lifetime searching for life inside a hopeful dream with a nobody.

that is the tale of mr. & mrs. nobody—two people who desperately wanted to become somebody through one another, mrs. nobody who searched for herself in mr. nobody and mr. nobody who searched for himself in mrs. nobody. pain was the only language they shared, their wounds bled the same shade of red, every storm felt like the same rain pouring over them, every sin they carried still lingered on the bedsheets with the same scent of misery. but pain is not love and understanding never meant devotion. mr. & mrs. nobody were two people who knew each other’s suffering yet remained strangers to everything else. by the time they called it love, there was nothing left to love anymore—only a broken mirror and two shattered reflections wondering why they still felt alone. perhaps all he ever wanted was solitude and perhaps she was searching for a home that never existed.

buy me medication </3

i’ve looked out the window twice, checked inside my closet every minute—my eyes close in pleasure and suddenly i’m in danger. let me go downstairs, is anyone here? nobody is, let’s go back up. but what if i didn’t check properly? what if their car broke down and they didn’t tell me so they walk back home from 40 minutes away or take public transit and are secretly spying on me downstairs? let me check again, but there’s nobody downstairs. where are those voices coming from then? what are the voices saying to me? nothing, i hear my name and muffles but what if they heard everything… i still have a feeling they left me home alone on purpose just to catch me. there could be a recording in my bedroom, a camera near my bed that watches me when i touch or talk to you on the phone. no? let me look out the window again, but i can’t fully open it or make it obvious they might see me. my door cannot be open either—through the tiny crack of the window they could see it and suspect i am doing something bad. let me open the door—but now i can’t speak loudly, what if a recording hears me? if i turn the light on they might see me with my hair open and think i am seducing a man, then check my phone and find out about you. they’ll beat me up, kick me out, make me leave university and put me under surveillance 24/7. did i check the window? i can’t close my eyes or look away or else they will come in and i won’t know.

i’m pasting everything i write to chatGPT because i feel like i am manipulating everyone—my doctor diagnosed me with bipolar disorder, in fact five have suspected it, but i don’t believe it. despite being abused my whole life, i still feel like my pain is fake because if i really wanted to do something about it, i would’ve done something by now. but what’s stopping me? it’s me being in a victim mentality, probably because i want sympathy. i still can’t sleep at night even when i take the pills above their maximum dosage; i think i stress myself out on purpose and then manipulate people into diagnosing me with bipolar. i could talk slower if i wanted to. i could stop having sex if i wanted to. i could stop spending if i wanted to. the only person getting in my way is me.

why do the medications work then?

i didn’t have a manic episode for 26 days when i was medicated on antipsychotics, but the minute i was off them i started self-harming and crying on bathroom floors. i stopped studying and suddenly wanted to give into my desires and go mad. was it even real or am i under a placebo? i think i want to be medicated and treated so badly that every medication’s effect isn’t even its own effect. i am just pretending to be sick despite the enlarged pituitary gland in my MRI report, my 112 bpm heart rate and a 101 fever that won’t go away. how, with all of this proof, do i still not trust myself? even not trusting myself feels like a worthy decision because a manipulator like me cannot be trusted.

if i am going to attend this lab after all those hospitalizations, i can’t go in there with makeup or looking presentable. they are going to think i have been fine—or rather that all i care about is adorning myself instead of my studies. they’ll think i am a seductress like i really am a prostitute. what if they see me shifting my legs? they’ll think i’m aroused. i must not wear strong perfume or else they will think all i care about is being pretty—but i must reek of sweat if i don’t. i used antiseptic soap three times today only on my armpits and followed it with glycolic acid, antiperspirant and deodorant but something still feels off. i showered five times, my skin is red and itching, but i don’t feel clean enough. i will be contaminated the minute i feel the breeze outside—god help me.

i cannot talk to the male TA because if i look too deep into his eyes he will think i am seducing him and if i accidentally look at his lips he will think i am in love with him. if i go in there looking ugly he will think i did it on purpose to seem vulnerable and seek attention, but i can’t go in there all glammed up either. neither can i go to the hospital looking presentable—they won’t take me seriously. if i do, the doctors will think i came there to be cared for, not because i’m sick. i wiped my lipstick off but it left my lips pink. if my eyeliner is smeared they will think i only came because i am scared and vulnerable—not because i’m sick.

i think my sickness is probably fake too. i’m screaming and crying on the phone because i want attention, but why can’t i control it? why can i literally not control any emotion or anything i do? are the tremors in my body even real? the other day i dropped my hospital bracelet at work and my manager returned it—what if she thinks i did it to gain sympathy? and now the tremors won’t stop, but maybe i could stop them. if i can still have sex and talk on the phone then i must still be capable, no?

my doctor diagnosed me with OCD and considered putting me on medication but what if i’m faking it? what if none of it is real? what if i am only able to write about it “accurately” because i am a manipulator that can slide into someone else’s shoes easily? perhaps i am not even a writer but just a manipulator online trying to gain sympathy by exaggerating trauma that i don’t even know is real. were his hands on my body even real or was it all a stunt? my therapist uses his CPTSD models on me and calls my pain trauma—but what if none of it is real? what if nobody ever did anything to me and my mind is making up stories just to gain sympathy?

i don’t give my little sister showers anymore even when she is half-dressed—what if i’m a pedophile? little children’s genitals make me nauseous and maybe it’s because there’s something wrong with me, always has been. but the label can’t be it. it’s not real because me faking everything is the problem.

love has never been real and i don’t know if it is even real anyway. does he still think about me? what does he gain from talking to me? does he love me? he says he does but he’s been silent. is he only here because he feels bad? am i manipulating him with how stressed i am? shouldn’t i just shut up and act like a lover that brings him peace rather than a share of my burden? why does he stay up all these nights with me? is it because there’s nobody else? would he leave me if i made him sick enough as i am? does he choose to stay because there is no other option? am i an option?

god knows i am a sinner. god knows about the sin i whisper into his ears and feed to his eyes. is he a punishment from god? will he just love me until he runs out of love and becomes a mr. nobody like everyone else did? the first time i fell in love i got groomed and abused, the second time god took him away and sent me into psychosis and the third time he poured so much love until he ran out of it and didn’t know what to tell me anymore. what about this one, god? is this another punishment or test? is forever really forever? he could just leave me forever, no?

here i am writing an article about what should be OCD apparently but i can’t even stand face-to-face with the diagnosis because even now i type and feel like an attention-seeker, hesitant to even leave the comments section on because people might reassure me or try to be kind but it makes me the same person again—a manipulator trying to gain sympathy and play victim.

perhaps that’s what it means to live with a condition like this where your mind is always at a tug-of-war but there’s never a winner. even when they tell me all i am is suffering, i ask myself: what if i am performing suffering?

there are only two seasons—the burning hot sun of summer and the frigid breeze of winter; no peace or time for the grass to grow—just extremes like the bipolar itself. the middle ground is far, especially on empty days like these where i am left with nothing but a man, a house and my thoughts organized in all the plastic organizers in every drawer.

i will never be real, will i?

what if i am the fake one?

i guess i will never know.

i tell everybody the same thing—the biggest tragedies usually produce the best articles of mine. downtown drugstore disco dahlia she is now—a mix of medication and mania wandering somewhere in the drugged-up sweaty streets of downtown with her cheap perfume, re-applying her smeared revlon frosted lipstick with her broken compact mirror and smudged smoked eyes on the bus as another man watches her bring herself back to life with what medicine she knows best—performance.

the same dahlia sits at night in her room until the lights start to glow and the music gets louder / electric guitar and bass drums fill my ears—i open the window and strip down to nothing except my glittery skin and dance to heavy metal rock and vintage americana erotica for the city i belong to tonight, until dawn mistakes me for a saint or a casualty—nobody and nothing is real anymore except for me and my euphoria now.

i take the camera out and pose like a cam-girl for him, there’s something powerful tonight about embracing vulgarity and ripping shame off my body like it’s a foreign skin that mother embeds onto me every time by the morning. the sweetest man, my flashing camera and this dance floor are what keep me alive tonight; he’s the beat of my heart, the camera is my pride and the dance floor is a witness to my madness.

tonight i am not a woman nor a girl—i am simply a state of being and states change, they rapid cycle like the doctor said, they leave side effects like the ones written on my neon green pill bottles laced with glitter—bipolar dream it is i live in—spin, spin, spin like the casino slots until i hit jackpot tonight—to win is to give into my desires until i no longer remember who i am anymore; the red bruises on my skin will bloom with need and my tears turn into crystal tequila by sunrise, down my throat and burning my skin as they burn me alive—keeping me alive.

this dance floor will be the place where i will weep—i will dance my heart out until my legs give out—then i’ll fall to the floor and pray, worship the rosary between my legs and spin every disc until every song repeats enough to make me sick in the head—let me be fucking free tonight even if my sense of self fades away—until it does fade away.

what will i do tonight?

WHAT WILL I DO?
WHAT WILL I DO?
WHAT WILL I DO?

what will i do?

i will live fast until i die young
i will cry until i drown in my tears

i will come until my body submits to god
i will rip my skin open until i can sew a party dress with it

i will blast the speakers until the neighbours ears bleed tonight
i will hang myself from the noose of my desires until i become something holy

i will disco until all my bones break and music begins to wrap itself around my body
i will die in this room of mine and nobody will know i died a happy slave to my mania.

take me away / take me away / take me away

sweet love stays on the phone all night just so i don’t overdose on the bottle of sleeping pills that sits on the nightstand—is it death i’m looking for or escape? death and escapism start to become synonymous when mania kisses you with all its tongue and poison—until you find yourself gambling with life and deep-throating your misery.

i want to hurt myself until all the hurt goes away—from every day under fluorescent lights in the drugstore paying for another bottle of pills that won’t work to walking out of the hotel plaza with a hundred dollar bill—also for the drugstore, as i roam downtown again waiting for another corner of the city that’ll take away a part of my wallet and then myself—somewhere between these buses and the traffic-filled roads do i see my petals falling and being ran over, stepped over like the bum of a cigarette.

by the time i reach home i no longer have a name, my perfume fades away and all my petals are gone—i am nothing but the nectar left of the black dahlia, beauty stolen by the violence of pharmaceuticals and weed smoke—i am only left as consumed, to be consumed and to consume until i reach my annihilation. i am no longer the flower after my longest of days, i am only what is left after being picked with no colour except for in my memory—of monotonic hot skin and burning technicolor psychedelia after the high fades away.

that’s what sobriety is—it’s like my cold lover who won’t pick up the phone and all i am left with is myself and the bitter taste of insanity on my tongue, i want to kiss him just so he can taste the desperation in my saliva—that oh lord—i am done, done, DONE.

what should i do with those pills there?

TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
TELL ME WHAT TO DO.
TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

what should i do?

can i take one pill to put me to sleep tonight?

can i take two pills to sedate me for the night?

can i take three pills to make me forget my pain?

can i take four pills to stop all these nightmares?

can i take five pills to not hear the voices anymore?

can i take six pills until i forget who i am tomorrow?

can i take seven pills until i wake up in the hospital?

can i take eight pills until i feel cared for by the angels?

can i take nine pills until i no longer feel human at dawn?

can it take ten pills until i will be gone in the morning?

save me / save me / save me

help me / help me / help me

but i grab the blade instead—nothing seems as enticing as the scent of warm metallic blood masking the fragrance of flora i wore today. i adorn myself with red in the daytime and watch it run down my legs at nighttime, i remind myself of who i truly am underneath my soft skin and swollen flesh, all my petals gone but still a dahlia under it all. by dawn i am red, sitting in a puddle of my blood and dressed up in white gauze that blooms with the beauty of mania, still in my damned little party dress.

it’s tragically beautiful, the way my body gives out as the party ends—the dance floor still glows of neon technicolor and the songs still echo in my ears, i feel a hundred eyes watching me in my room even when i am alone—even when i am alone, supposedly i am not—i don’t know who i am anymore by the time the pale sun rises in the tequila sky, i am just a residual of the leftover night, mania goes from the state of intoxication to the hangover.

the night is fading slower than i am, the voices start to quiet down and my body begins to give out.

what will i do when i wake up?

what will i do?
what will i do?
what will i do?

i will sleep, i will wake up and no longer recognize myself in the mirror tomorrow.

good night we tell each other
and the voices finally quiet.

hush.

♫ zanjeerain (chains)
danyal zafar | yashal shahid | shahzaman ali khan

where i come from are the mountains of kashmiir—walnut trees heavy with fruit and flowers, crimson plum that drips down towards the earth, the land is greener than my memories and the skies are bluer than the ocean. all of my loved ones re still alive in this lifetime as the women bring the gardens to life with their colours and the men disappear into the forests when the sun set; the way it’s always been, hunter and gatherer—man and woman.

we sit under the chinaar tree beating the daff and singing wedding songs for another girl in the family, draped in red organza and glimmering gold.

تم اور میں ساتھ ہو کے بھی کیوں ہیں جوڈا؟
you and me are together yet still why are we apart?

red is beautiful where i come from—it’s the beginning of a new life like the very blood clot itself—red is the colour of a girl stepping into womanhood, of the flush on her cheeks and the blessings they whisper in her hair.

the women speak about honour while the men shoot another hangul with their AK-47, the same gun that we hang up on our walls like an heirloom with pride, polar to the way our women hide their beauty under the threads of the pashmina.

the men return at sunrise carrying the hangul across their shoulders as its frail body hangs limp beneath the barrel of the polished AK-47. the deer is dead but the gun will survive another generation, another life consumed—another life sustained.

that perhaps is the bargain, one life taken to preserve another.

when the hangul dies, so does a part of me—the death of the hangul marks the death of the beginning of another life and the martyrdom of an innocence before it could ever bloom into something bigger. perhaps every culture even in its beauty and sustenance carries its own language for violence, and for us of the north—it is to hunt.

رات بھری ہے اور تنہے میرے ساتھ
the night is heavy, and loneliness is with me

even our tea bleeds—blood red noon chai that swirls through pure white goat’s milk, staining every place it touches—that’s when i realized that beauty and bloodshed carry the same shade of red; red like the colour of blood in the lakes of the kashmiir next to us, and red like the colour of my blood dripping down my eyes.

i am the daughter of a motherland that taught me to inherit silence while the sons inherit anger and their mothers—endurance. everybody inherits secrets until the family turns into a chain. we don’t pass down jewelry but rather the gun of secrets whose bullets we stuff into our mouths and bow our head down in obedience.

beautiful land i come from with the bloodiest of stories where the north remembers everything, they remember the metallic scent of blood far better than the people world; like on the hottest day of summer father breaks my nose until all i am left with is of crimson-coloured regret, under the black sky of the rooftop mother hits me and stuffs my mouth with wool of lies and even then i only live with one colour on my body in those red blooming bruises.

the yemberzaal witnesses everything and the cherries bleed under my footsteps.

?گھم کے گہرے ہیں سایا، کسے جیون
the shadows of sorrow are deep; how do i live?

our homes carry wounds older than those who get to live—a grandfather that never got to witness the venom that spreads in his own blood, a son that never got to feel the touch of his mother for the last time—but the wound stayed, and it opens with every reminder of a real world and the bitterness that resides within it.

when death becomes ours to witness, the memory of the tragedy itself lives far more vividly than the softness that once existed. the sharp scent of blood lives far more longer than the scent of the beloved’s perfume because that’s what it means to be human in this world, pain makes stronger memories than love does and that is what destroys us—one by one until generations start to look like chains and inheritance wraps its shackles around your limbs.

there was mother who never had a mother who was there for her and a father who bled to death in the rivers of fate—a brother who put a gun to his head and smashed a glass vase into his wife’s head—then another on my cousin who holds a knife begind her back—all the pain passes down until i am born, of pain and sorrow in my blood and red-hot rage in my veins.

درد کی کہانی ہے یہ
عشق کی ریوانی ہے یہ
زندگی فسانی ہے یہ
?کیوں

this is a tale of pain,
this is the flow of love,
this life is but a fleeting story.
why?

the chains we inherit are far more than tradition, every summer someone hands me a story that smelled like home and somewhere in there was the nostalgic and metallic scent of heavy metal and somehow, i pull the trigger every time and it backfires—of curses and regret, a mother who wishes death upon you before accepting her failures and a father who ties the noose of his worries and waits for his daughter’s farewell before he takes it on himself.

in their own ways, it’s an attempt to erase their pain or perhaps break the chains but likewise we inherit our trauma the same way we inherit our lineages, we never ask for it, we never get to choose the colour of our blood—we’re born into it. it all starts from the red blood we live in when inside the womb of a mother who carries misery like a second language and a droplet that carries wrath like it is life, our first home begins with what our bloodline carries and for some it is life while for others it is the death of a life that never got to begin.

we carry guns in the summertime over our shoulders the way the men of kashmiir carry the bleeding hangul—the way some families get to feel the warmth of hot sunshine as nostalgia while others feel it as the heat of death on their skin, except in the north, hot is our blood and red is our sunshine and the chains seem like they’ll never break—they’ll tie themselves around love and every beautiful blessing that comes with it because chains never die, they may only break and then leave their marks on our skin as a reminder—always, they will stay.

یہ آخری سانسیں ہیں جن میں آج بھی تیری آہیں ہیں
these are the last breaths in which your sighs still remain today

let the piece take its final breath in the language that first taught it how to speak,
زنجیریں ایسے ہی شروع ہوتی ہیں—پہلے تمہاری ماں کے خون سے، پھر تمہارے باپ کے خوف سے، اور پھر تمہارے اپنے خون سے، جس کے آنسو تم رات بھر بہاتے ہو۔ سرخ ہے رنگ تمہارے دُکھ کا، جو خون کی طرح تمہاری رگوں میں نسل در نسل بہتا رہتا ہے۔ تمہارے دل کی باتیں اَن کہی رہ جاتی ہیں، اور دُکھ صرف اپنا نام نہیں بدلتا، اپنا گھر بھی بدلتا ہے—اپنا دریا بھی بدلتا ہے۔ ہم سمجھتے ہیں کہ وراثت صرف خون اور خاندانی ناموں کی ہوتی ہے، مگر کچھ زخم بھی نسلوں تک سفر کرتے ہیں۔ ایک زنجیر سے دوسری زنجیر تک کا سفر، اور ایک انسان سے دوسرے انسان تک—یوں ہی ہم زنجیریں بن جاتے ہیں۔

(chains begin like this—first your mother's blood, then your father's fear, and then your own blood, whose tears you shed throughout the night. red is the colour of your grief, flowing through your veins like blood, from generation to generation. unspoken are the words of your heart, and sorrow doesn’t merely changes its name—it only changes its home. we think inheritance belongs only to blood and surnames, but some wounds travel through generations as well. from one chain to another, from one person to another—this is how we become chains.)

زنجیریں... تور دون، تور دون..
chains… let me break them, break them

buy me a new family </3

i. uterus

the woman is and has always been a physical concept, not an object defined scientifically but rather a form of matter—a result of physics.

before memory and identity, you lived in liquid—through sound and pressure. in-utero you heard vibrations before words; mother’s heartbeat, the rush of her blood and muffled voices from the world outside you. all human life began suspended against gravity in a dark heart-shaped box until birth became the first encounter with the outside world’s forces of suspension and expulsion, through the ferocious force of childbirth itself, the canal being the tunnel from darkness to light.

before you learned language, you learned movement—through kicks and turns, you floated lightweight like a feather before identity took its weight on you—before you were a person, you were only ever an object with movement lacking a sense of self.

the uterus, though of soft tissue, carries life and nourishes it—it’s the first room and first home of yours before you became the world’s and its conformations. before girlhood and womanhood, all human ever was was a body suspended in that heart-shaped box obeying the laws of physics and biology. obedience was somehow always our first language, but the woman learned to let it flow through her veins for a lifetime—even in the womb that was home and mother’s own, life starts when you obey physics and it ends when you begin to you obey the physical.

the same male that started off as ambiguous to the female in the womb grows up to be a man who later judges the woman where he himself began—in the same exact place—speaking the language of obedience and a singular entity in a heart-shaped box of darkness, of wetness and contractions before he was ever a man who stood tall on his own feet. he was only ever a body within a body, stretching his home and building a pressure so deep in mother’s core until he was obliged to obey gravity. however, the difference man and woman’s obedience to gravity is that often women embed that language deep into their skin, forever—even the chemistry of their body learns to memorize such a language while man becomes the embodiment of what gravity is—a force, to be obeyed.

ii. blood orange / honeydew melon

chemistry births womanhood. from the very moment the girl bleeds bright red her first time to the day se ovulates and becomes capable of giving life—to the day where she reproduces and brings another life to mother nature’s planet and lastly up to the moment of menopause itself where the needle of the biological clock of the body has struck twelve and all one remains is a woman rather than a life-giver anymore. it is all a matter of chemistry; from estrogen to follicle-stimulating hormones, the woman is an embodiment of chemical reactions that makes her bloom and ferment into a fruit ripe and riper.

when a girl is becoming she’s of blood orange—ripe and plump, red blood dripping down her thighs that marks the start of her prime. puberty starts off as a fruit that looks subtle on the outside but bursts with colour, then one day—beauty. she startles the very first time when she’s cut open of red blood of life and plump tender flesh, that’s what girlhood has been; sudden—intense, of bright red volatility. the girl never chooses girlhood or when her juvenility begins to bloom, it’s how nature’s reactions often occur—spontaneously, but that too on the same needle of the clock that has struck at her prime.

that’s how i knew it too—when i saw my blood dripping down my thighs under the moon and it’s redder than life, i’m entering my prime and i can sustain life inside my body for as long as nature favours. i’m fertile and i’m the ripe fruit on the blood orange tree ready to be picked before i fall. he too told me, that my skin was hot to the touch and my soul was on fire—fire of his loins i became when i blossomed into a blood orange of a perversive man’s blood-hot scarlet dreams—liquid smooth, easy to move and irresistible the corrupted’s touch.

what will i do with all of this beauty?

girlhood wasn’t merely physical—it’s chemical, from up at the mind to down to the womb, i grew with every change in chemistry whether it was the beautiful or the ugly, it made me bloom into something more beautiful and ripe—woman.

when a girl becomes woman she’s of sweet honeydew melon, riper than before but sweeter than ever, for the sweetest of souls or perhaps for the most rotten from the core for when they start to tell her she’s overripe, overgrown—they scrape her insides until she becomes smooth and beautiful enough for a world that only ever desires beauty and youthfulness.

girl as a blood orange only ever knew what it meant to become, but the woman as honeydew learns what it means to remain. chemistry still doesn’t stop—it never does, it only repeats itself through cycles now, month after month teaching the body the language of time and revolting against perseverance. the woman now learns to rehearse creation and losing it all over again, she learns the cycle so well now as she prepares her heart-shaped box for a life that may never come to fruition. when she looks in the mirror at her youthfulness fading away—skin darkening, sagging and losing its plumpness, that’s when woman learns with tears streaming down her face; that to be a woman is to live by the clock hidden underneath the skin.

in her prime, honeydew drips with nectar—sugary and sticky—so fertile they say, fertility is the sweetest blessing god could give—this is what it means to be an organism, a biological creation of god; to attract and learn with every praise that you are capable of beholding life and beauty in the same body, it’s not an epiphany of a lifetime, but rather the beginning of one, from the very moment when my beauty draws another life, to carry another life.

nectar was never meant for the blossoming flower alone, sweetness was meant to be discovered and tasted—shared with, in fact—come touch my pulsing flesh and honeydew body before i pass my highest peak.

to be an organism is to consume and be consumed and that’s what this world’s womanhood teaches us, that the body doesn’t merely belong to itself but the fact that every blooming carries meaning and every contraction carries value and the notion that chemistry and physics have worked exactly as nature intends—or perhaps as mankind intends.

the organism learns quickly, so she learns that the tighter she is, the more valuable she is—whether it’s quiet obedience from the throat or tightening submission from her loins, the woman’s so-called youthfulness becomes of praise because she promises a future where life will thrive even if her clock doesn’t match her body—as long as she’s promising enough, she is valued.

that’s what they do to women like us, they teach us to constrict while nature taught us to expand and adapt—at last after living in contradiction does nature finally spit you back out—but when you obey nature, then so does its children. you’re left with nobody except your openings and mother earth.

iii. throat

woman is an ecosystem that nourishes life and sustains life. sustenance itself begins from the throat, from the very first droplets we swallow that bring us to life—it’s soft muscle, soft tissue with fierce contraction and voice. unlike the uterus in which life thrives in darkness, the throat nurtures life in the open with the bright light of the world being let into the body, the uterus nourishes in quiet and the throat announces it—fiercely.

perhaps that is what is unsettling about woman’s throat, it’s not merely an opening for sustenance but rather expression, it makes one ask at the end of the day—what does society want from the woman’s throat? is it silence? obedience? or compliance? whatever is demanded of the throat mirrors of what is demanded of the womb. both are expected to remain young, soft and accommodating through constriction. they’re measured by how willingly they receive and how little they resist and how tightly they survive.

but woman is an ecosystem? ecosystems don’t survive through restriction and constriction, they survive through adaption—expansion.

the throat expands for a breath and contracts for swallowing—it trembles with laughter and bleeds with blood-curdling cries. it sings, cries, chokes and screams—the same tissue that nourishes also rejects it through expulsion and resistance whether it’d be verbal or not, it disobeys the laws of gravity likewise the uterus’ natural order is to obey gravity.

this is the multiplicity of woman, how the distance between her throat and uterus follow the same unit of measurement—in flesh—but their distance is also measures by expectation—of constriction and the obedience of the order given by mother nature herself or perhaps her children—woman speaks the same language where softness and force occupy the same body without contradiction. it is mankind that often mistakes restriction for value itself.

woman is a world—that adapts like liquid—smooth and adaptive around every force that is placed against her. she nourishes nature and its children yet remains expected to preserver herself in a state untouched by the very processes that sustain life alike mother earth herself who sustains yet we don’t expect exhaustion from her. perhaps that is the contradiction of womanhood; the body is prasied not for its capacity to change but rather its ability to hide that it ever changed.

this is woman, who speaks the same language from both openings in her body and is expected to thrive without contradiction and thrive with irreversibility.

buy me medication </3

akathisia • [ak-uh-thizh-uh]
noun: a condition characterized by uncontrollable motor restlessness.

i’ve walked 100 laps around my small bedroom—clockwise, counter-clockwise, and clockwise again. the floorboards have memorized my footprints now, and the keyboard already knows which letters i’m about to hit, and they all spell out the same word; H-E-L-P. help me because i’m trapped in my body, i want to escape it—I wish i could rip my skin open and lay it out on the floor, sew it into a dress of shame, and wear that shame over my raw flesh with pride. i want to feel big in my shame—if mother will call me shameless anyway, let it not shrink me into something microscopic. let the letters shine bright like the hollywood sign, and let the world flash their cameras at me as i put my pain on display because even if i do, display won’t bring sympathy or the love one needs, but it brings attention, and sometimes that’s the closest thing to salvation; just to be seen without being asked any questions, even if it’s in all the wrong ways.

the doctor already told me, aripiprazole comes with one side effect—akathisia, the need to constantly be moving—a restlessness so severe that you feel like your mind is manic—it wants to keep going, but your body says no. you remember this feeling, don’t you? your mouth kept saying no, but your body was betraying you. it always does. akathisia derives from the greek word akathemi, which literally translates to inability to sit. it isn’t just about seating your body—it’s your mind too, which refuses the seat. all you want to do is keep running until your brain finally stops talking.

all my body has ever taught me was the language of betrayal. anything that was meant to heal it—whether it’d be medication, love, prayer, or salvation—it only left behind bruises blooming like dead roses over my soft skin. the roses rot and maggots start to birth over bruises that were supposed to be beautiful acts of care, beautiful ways to heal, but i can only feel the ugliness in it; the agony of a restlessness no sedative can cure, a hunger that no amount of love can fill inside me, and a void so empty that it only fills itself up with the mania that’s dying off like fireworks in my brain—I can feel it bursting in my chest and burning my insides. i try to plunge into the cold ocean, but even then i’m still insatiable—even the vastness of the ocean cannot take the densely-packed akathisia i hold.

i grabbed the blade again after months of wrapping it away in the back of the drawer, but i grab it, sterilize it with alcohol until the scent itself intoxicates me with the memory of what it’s like to be cared for, even if it was a hospital and the kindness of strangers, and those memories are all it takes—a helpless body and a restless soul. and i drag the blade against my skin, never soft and virgin—I watch my pain spill over the tiles, but despite it all, my body can’t rest. this pain that once put me to sleep won’t even tire me out anymore. i prayed to god today that, please, let me rip open my skin, but even fate didn’t want to align today—for the first time in my life, i can feel the sharp burn of metal ripping my skin open, and even this feeling is not enough today; it’s an epiphany of realizing nothing will ever be enough, no matter how much madness or stillness it is.

it’s like maggots are crawling under your skin as every nerve is on fire. it feels like mania, except it’s mania’s kiss over my somatosensory system—my body gets to live with mania but married to a cold lover that doesn’t let the mania burst into flames. i’m dying and i’m stuck in my body; there’s no way out until another pill explores my bloodstream, or perhaps with habituation it goes away.

all i know for now, though, is i want to die. i feel like i’m being electrocuted inside-out, and it’s not just symbolic—it’s real. this is how i’ve lived in my own soul my whole life, a little girl in a grown woman’s body, and today a megalomaniacal manic stuck in a solemn body that won’t let me break free.

i don’t think i will tell my doctor that i am not okay, i’ve spent my whole life telling everyone that i was okay. i even cradle my restlessness at night like broken stars telling them i will be okay even as they break me because that’s what i’ve always been—a restless identity, i never lay my own head to rest nor let the thoughts in my mind rest on their own, i’ve always seen myself as a half that completes the incomplete—i am the madness to my sadness and the lifelessness to my restlessness, even today—especially today. all i wish for is to close my eyes and not wake up again in this body that turns against me, i wish i could live but my body wants to die—just a day without pain and pharmaceuticals is all i ever pleaded god for, the same god who brought upon me every hardship that rests deep in my bones today, still knocking on the door begging for such a wound to become tender again.

this is akathisia, it’s not just a side effect for some of us—it isn’t in your head, it isn’t in your body—it’s the very way you live and perhaps have always lived—in contradiction.

⚕️delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol

there’s always been something wrong with me; they labelled it clinical depression and put me on the strongest antidepressant on the market but sent me into manic spirals instead—called the ache in my body somatosensory disorder when really it was just my body remembering every time it was raped… that’s all i’ve ever been—a patient chart with labels that never seem to be quite right and a body that always turned in on me no matter how hard i try—no matter how badly i try to live, my body wants to die.

”how often do you use recreational substances?”

every single night, i can’t sleep without them—weed is salvation and so is it synonymous to liberation, i tell the crisis worker as he looks into my eyes—his hand has stopped moving, he doesn’t write anymore he can read every sleepless night on my face, he can see the mania in the reds of my eyes and the madness spilling out of them. i tell him i don’t know who i am anymore, i don’t know what freedom is anymore outside of the high—sobriety is miserable because it’s like a mirror, i’m standing face-to-face with a self i don’t recognize anymore, my dreams live on my thighs in horizontal jagged regret—regret for why i even bother to dream anymore.

“have you spoken to anyone about borderline personality disorder?”

he tries to give my pain a name while i tell him about the time where god lived in my bedroom walls and put his big warm hand over my back in prostration—telling me that everything will be okay, that my dreams would come true and someone would finally love me with the same love that i had for god. he keeps nodding, and then i tell him it was all a dream—i can’t even differentiate between the unseen and reality.

“have you ever been diagnosed with bipolar disorder?”

i’m diagnosed with clinical depression with a 99% chance of undiagnosed CPTSD. reality itself feels like it’s hidden under a cloak; one day the cloak glows and the next week it burns black of ash, i tell him i don’t know why my mind runs cyclical rather than linear, my head spins until i see stars and then it’s dark again and i feel like i’m going crazy—everybody thinks i’m crazy.

“do you know what bipolar disorder is?”
i do and i’ve studied the entire DSM-5 more than your entire degree.
”INDIVIDUALS WITH BIPOLAR DISORDER HAVE A LIFE EXPECTANCY REDUCED BY ROUGHLY 13 YEARS COMPARED TO THE GENERAL POPULATION.”

“how long have you been self-harming?”

i’ve been cutting myself since i was eleven—after a humiliation ritual of undressing and exposing every wound, he tells me—unfortunately we cannot refer you to therapy as you don’t live here. but you have to do something? you can’t just let me leave like this—but the system does, it spits me back out. i’m in the middle of the road, heavy traffic and heavy grief dragging me through the streets.

“your family doesn’t know anything?”
nothing, nothing at all. they know i was raped but they will never know i didn’t ask for it.

⚕️ 10,11-dihydro-5H-dibenzo[a,d][7]annulene

weed isn’t enough anymore, neither is the sex or the writing—nothing brings me peace anymore, especially when i’m up and the phone screen keeps flashing—message after message, call after call. i’ve called over ten men tonight and i don’t know their names, they don’t know mine either but they do know what i am—manic hedonism dressed in seduction and charm, anything to not feel alone—anything to not depend on a singular machine for my sanity.

“how often do you go to therapy?”

every week, i don’t think it helps, but everyone tells me to be patient. the word patience is funny because once it was a prophecy and now it is nothing but clinical and empty—only now is it the way the wind blows through the trees feels like prophecy, the way the world tilts feels like it’s a gift specifically for me. it’s like god has hidden messages in every stolen breath of mine—i feel chosen by him and i think i’m dying, god loves me enough to take me to the bridges of death yet still he brings me back home too—on my knees for him—or another him.

“what has your therapist suggested?”

nothing, he never has anything to say—i made him cry nearly but he still didn’t have anything to say to me except to see a doctor, he doesn’t have the tools to hold my pain so i bring myself to the hospital again on broken feet, i don’t know why i’m here but all i know is that i need to be here, i need to be taken care of.

“any suicidal thoughts recently?”

i am suicidal, but i’m restrained by the shackles of religion—just like that they announce a code white: violent patient in the psych ward who they restrain with big men and sedatives—i see myself in him, i wish i could tell you. god is restraining me the same way, between the realm of life and death.

“do you have any thoughts of hurting yourself or others?”

that’s all i want to do when i lose my mind—i wanted to hold a knife to my mother’s throat and watch the cursed blood she passed onto me spill onto the kitchen floor. i envy the mothers that sit with their high-schooler daughters in the psych ward as their little girls wear blue gowns and rubber socks.

i need proof that there is something bigger than my pain and that perhaps it can be held—soothed—even if it’s under fluorescent light and antiseptic perfume, sometimes any place where there’s even a little bit of gentleness, it becomes home for a while and perhaps that’s the strange comfort of coming into the hospital again and again—nobody is going to fix me or untangle the mess in my head, but at least i can be held—even for a little.

“you are in a manic episode right now. i’m going to give you some medications.”
am i? i thought i was LIVING. dying.

⚕️ 3,5-diamino-6-(2,3-dichlorophenyl)-1,2,4-triazine

“you haven’t slept at all in the last five days? not even an hour?”

the doctor keeps typing as i translate my psychedelia grief into a language easier for the system; with numbers and all the words i learned from the DSM-5 that i read entirely for fun—or who knows that was also a manic episode. i’m dying but i’m laughing as i talk to the doctor and tell him about how much pleasure i find in corruption and how the world i live in is truly a dream.

he asks me about hallucinations and delusions, i didn’t want to mention a love that felt so real—but the void that love left in me simply for not blooming in this world felt close enough to the word delusion so i tell him about how god internalized himself in a soft-souled man and that i had never felt so loved or chosen by god as much as i did when i felt like i was his. he calls it delusion—he names it as psychosis and he diagnoses it as bipolar. i wrote a poem about my love and called him a bipolar dream in my grey grey world, and truly that’s what he was—just a bipolar dream, another episode of mania that felt too close to heaven.

“your symptoms are leaning towards severe and concerning bipolar disorder.
the push-and-pull patterns you described align very close with borderline personality disorder traits. as well… trauma can certainly worsen these patterns but the cyclical ups and downs are very much bipolar-related.”

i’m screaming at my lover on the phone again—begging him to make this pain stop—begging him to do everything he can’t. i don’t know why i’m here anymore or who i even am anymore. there’s pain and euphoria—mania and melancholia, i’m going insane is all i know, something has to hush my mind.

“we will probably have to start medication because the fact that you haven’t slept in days and are self-harming is concerning me.”

i go pick up the pills, they told me i could still take weed with these pills—there’s a minor chance of developing a deadly skin rash but it’s ok, the doctor says he’s never seen it in his entire career—all i have to do is hide this from my parents and pray that it doesn’t take my soul away, so i choose the one that sedates me the least—lamotrigine, once a day two pills at nighttime by mouth.

⚕️2-(2-(4-dibenzo(b,f)(1,4)thiazepin-11-yl-1-piperazinyl)ethoxy)ethanol fumarate (2:1) (salt)

i still can’t sleep—i keep working and i keep soaring, the world is in my hands as it’s crumbling and falling out of my palms like ash and i’m leaving all the footprints wherever i go—LOOK AT ME I’M GOING CRAZY—i’m back here again, broken legs and a broken heart but my mind still keeps outrunning my body—i’m laying on this bed, barely able to speak as the world flashes in front of my eyes. just when i think that my body is finally giving out—it doesn’t. the doctor writes down everything, he tells me to stop taking the medication, exactly what i wished for—i need something stronger, something to put me to sleep, i haven’t seen it in days.

but guess what? not everyone is able to help and not every problem has a solution except for walking on burning coals through hell until you reach the finish line. i’m sitting on the cold stones outside, i cry louder than waves at the shore—far more ferocious and my lover again—he doesn’t know what to do, he never does—what can he even do? i tell him i’m suffering, i tell everyone i’m suffering—everyone can listen, but nobody can ever take this pain away, no amount of pills or no amount of injections.

the doctor hands me a new bottle—quetiapine, part of me fears it because it’ll take my stars away, the nighttime will finally pull me away and while i rest—it costs me my soul, my stars and my art—but i do it, because survival was never meant to be in my favour anyway; two pills at night, by mouth. may experience sedation and drowsiness.

⚕️ 7-[4-[4-(2, 3-dichlorophenyl)-1-piperazinyl, butoxy]-3,4-dihydro-2(1H)-quinolinone

i’m here again—mother wonders but doesn’t ask and father tries to interrogate but i know how to play this system now, i’ve been here enough—i know the system i once feared by heart now; lie when you want to hurt yourself or someone else because wanting won’t be the same as doing or having—look at all the men i’ve loved and wanted but never had, the future i dreamt of but never had. i shouldn’t feel the way i do towards a man who’s protecting my dignity and a woman who felt softer than a mother even as she jabbed needles into my skin—we whispered and we laughed about my father panicking in the waiting room, why did safety have to exist everywhere where it should’ve been? at home—and worse, in myself.

my skin glows red and angry—hot and spotted, another medication that was supposed to heal but lands you in further sickness, perhaps these bottles of pills only bring safety because they bring me in safe hands—even if i scream, cry or bleed after the care i get, at least it’s there—like every man who ever said he loved me but only broke my heart, but it’s ok—i was loved even for a little.

just like the dreams i had—suicide will never be a gift for me because i’m conscious enough, i’m cowardly enough to believe mother’s words about god burning my soul in hellfire and tying my long hair to my feet until i scream. god is bigger than me and my pain and that’s why i fear him and even resent him on some days—how can a god so merciful and so much bigger, take you close to death more than how close you’ve been to living but he still doesn’t take your soul away? he gives you all the self-awareness but intoxicates your brain so deeply that even in your head you’re fighting a war. with who? nobody but yourself—nobody but me and these mrs. nobodies—five plastic bracelets in my bag collected like friendship bracelets of five different wrists and five different girls and i still don’t know which one has made it out alive—maybe that’s all i was and will ever be, another girl who confused a dream for a life.

another girl, interrupted.

buy me medication <3

inhale.
and more—

MEGALOMANIA

i worship something violent enough to replace religion—myself. i finally understand why people pray, it’s so holy to be untouchable—when fluorescent lights become a stage and the reeking scent of smoke smells like glory—perfume on my skin and liberation screaming in my lungs through all the phlegm and bile from my liver. i rip off all my clothes threaded of lies and strip myself down to psychospiritual black leather and red-hot pride; pain will finally annihilate as my mind outruns my body—now i see it—pain is only a social construct to make you realize how fucking helpless you are in this big world—pain only exists because you are slow enough to feel it, but i have outrun my body already—do you still see yourself in me or have i run too far ahead? you still can’t dissect the ritual from spiritualism and messianic delusion from silver spoon-fed democracy.

1. REJECT SLEEP
2. REJECT SHAME
3. REJECT SOCIETY
4. REJECT RESTRAINT
5. REJECT TRADITION
6. REJECT HUMANITY

morality was invented by cowards and sold back to us as salvation; rip your skin off stitched from threads of guilt and embrace omnipotent hedonism. look around us? don’t you feel it? this world belongs to us—don’t let them hypnotize us into thinking this is normal—plastic capitalism and neo-fluorescent nihilism—OPEN YOUR EYES (SHUT YOUR BRAIN)—you are free—you are free—YOU ARE FREE FROM THESE SHACKLES (SOON-TO-BE A SLAVE TO YOUR DESIRES).

let me show you how democracy will visit your door tonight—with a gun in one hand and your dreams in the other—pick the one that lets you live forever (die)—the future arrives dressed in black leather. welcome to the new era of omnipotent hedonism—pornhub tabs flooding your screens and weed smoke grimes on your walls; your morals scattered on the floor like nails, poking into your skin but this world? it’s yours.

MANIAC

i become something violent enough to replace sanity. i don’t need sleep anymore because i want to spin as fast the world spins—as fast as the casino slot spins and you feel the rush of euphoria in your veins; sharp like heroin and orgasmic like sex. every thought runs faster than the speed of light and i keep running behind every single one—further than what your mediocre visions can dream past. people stare too long at me on the bus now—they stare and i stare back longer—i guess nobody is winning anymore—they know—they know. society is surveillance, pre-written as my words spill before the thought is born—here i am admiring (laughing at) the reflection—the little boy stares and his plastic mother pulls him away, of course she does—hedonism can never concede with narcissistic nihilism—why wouldn’t you be a narcissist, tomorrow always comes—it always will—the clock spreads its legs for hedonistic nihilism when it hears it (you)—live forever and die young in psychedelia (PSYCHOSIS). romanticism and terrorism are synonymous in the dictionary and artificial intelligence—its agreement doesn’t seem so artificial does it?—see! it thinks i’m right too!

(is this glamour or is this terror?)
(WE’RE GOING HIGHER)

(your pain is a fucking joke—do you see how ridiculous you look?—MANIACISM IS NEVER ENOUGH—go get up and do something about it if it really is that real—go live in the world like anyone else can—they have the world in their hands and cults hidden under their suits—bills under their dresses—drugs under their eyes—what about you?—you empty, empty piece of nothing—(mrs. nobody)—you can kill a revolutionary but you can’t kill a revolution—get up—wake up—open your eyes—GET UP—DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT—ASCEND THE BOUNDS OF HUMANITY—)

MANIC

i become something violent enough to replace myself, my body trembles and my mind ascends, i roar like thunder and suddenly the entire world feels like it’s in my hands. my art finally comes to life again and all an artist needs to feel alive again is watch their art come to life—so it does—it lives on my face with so much pride and hung up on the walls of the streets laughing at anybody stupid enough to think they could mimic my creation.—you live in a delusional world where you try to understand humanity—i learn the language of the unseen—i understand god—you don’t—you won’t—creation is addiction (killing too must feel so good to god, i = too are in his creation)—my very own creation grins wth bleeding red gums and daggers impaling your cold flesh—and that’s the difference between us—you are hot-blooded human with cold flesh and i am metal—heavy gun metal with warm flesh. (red-hot—i’m burning—i’m burning—)

the robot on the screen tells me that my sanity (INSANITY) is a threat to society—(AI is a fuck machine and we lay with our knees spread—fuck the sanity out of me and fill me up with synthetic intellect until all i am is metal and circuit) what a fucking MEDIOCRE and COWARDLY society! (OPEN YOUR LEGS AND EMBRACE SUICIDE IN TECHNICOLOR!!!)—listen—i haven’t slept in four days and i won’t—sleep belongs to smaller people who disappear in the dark of the night—the streetlights blink and shine for me—i am a nocturnal frenzy—bipolar dream in this mundane world.

at 4AM i stand in front of the bathroom mirror doing stand-up comedy—the audience laughs and i drink in my reflection through psychotropic realism (DELUSION) even the walls know how much i have to bring—the thoughts that finish before i arrive—god is breathing but i am breathing faster—i feel messianic with every revelation of art i create, each one comes out more and colourful than the one before as the world only looks grey outside my creation (MANIA)—kaleidoscopic dreams and chrome-plated world—i am no longer human—yet still capable of creation—my fingers move faster than the speed of light as i birth life—an imitator of art—so there is all my art—keep painting until the walls are no longer themselves—write until your mind no longer fits between the margins of language anymore, keep creating until you start competing with god—cultic and mass-hypnotic—this is my manifesto—I DID IT—MY MANIFESTO!—

(why monetize off of art? once it’s out there it’s no longer yours—(ESCAPE YOURSELF)—fame is to be disposable—prostitution—PROSTITUTION—an immortal body of art that will always be mine—invincible—a body that will wake up again another day no matter how deep it drowns itself into this episode—art will come out synthetic—i am real—I AM SO FUCKING REAL—I AM FUCKING INVINCIBLE—(I AM A MACHINE)—life imitates art but art can never imitate life—never reborn, never grandiose, never godly—EVER! FLESH IS A PRODUCT AND FLESH IS A STRATEGY—I AM THE CREATION AND THE CREATOR—OF MY ANHILATION!!!!)

GOD

(—the lights have been flickering and the room goes blood-cold in silence, the walls stop talking—i realize now—finally—i understand god.)

i created something violent enough to replace god (GOD IS DEAD), i don’t need to ask him any questions anymore—the world finally fits into my hands perfectly and all the noise feels like a shot of liquor—clear smooth and burning my throat, i could keep living and never ask god for anything again; i don’t live in my prayers anymore, they were never real and certainly never from this tongue.

i don’t even pray anymore, all i want to be is the prayer, the worship and shine as bright as the sign that glows JESUS SAVES in the dark of the night. some scrawny woman follows me and tells me that god loves me but i can only tell her to take her cross and throw it into the ocean—go find the god that loves you in an ocean of emptiness because that’s all how he feels—empty and so far away, he’s supposedly pure white light but my mind is too high for your religion—your mediocre religion feels like a fucking joke—you dream of heaven in gardens and lakes of wine and honey but my heaven lives in the kaleidoscopic psychedelic rush of mania.

(KILL GOD)
(KILL HIM (HIM / HIM / HIM / HIM / HIM / HIM))
(KILL HER)
(KILL FATHER)
(KILL MOTHER)
(KILL YOURSELF)
(KILL YOURSELF)
(KILL YOURSELF)
(KILL YOURSELF)

these three old white men are handing out posters to me again that jesus loves me and is waiting for me—tell your jesus to have his arms open, ready for me to fall in them after i fucked a stranger behind the same church where they sing hymns for their saviour jesus—i’m sure he’d still love me would he? would he? tell me now would he? your silence says a lot. (YOU FUCKING EMPTY PIECE OF SHIT, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? YOU’RE SCARED OF ME LIKE I’M GOD, FINALLY.) GOD / JESUS / GOD / JESUS / GOD / JESUS / GOD—keep flooding my ears with them as you watch god spill out of my veins on the cold bathroom floor in crimson red (CALL 988 IF YOU ARE HAVING THOUGHTS OF HURTING YOURSELF / GOD IS NOT AVAILABLE TONIGHT)—he is fluid and he’s spilling out of me until there is no more god left in me, i am something far more bigger—emptier—so much emptier.

but don’t take my emptiness for granted—a monster big enough resides in this empty body of mine and what does it do? it spits bile at you fuckers and burns through your skin—have you ever ripped open your skin and realize how fucking horrible you are underneath your pretty skin and fashion? i laugh at god because the world is in my hands now, i’ve killed everyone that only ever brought pain and sorrow—i birth a monster and name it megalomania maniac manic, not god at the end because that’s what i embody. god isn’t a title, he’s the audience and he lives in my blood like heroin, (he’ll come back to life again when i die and i’ll go running to him like a lost child to take my pain away)—pain is a social construct, created for those who create only for them to create more. suffering is biological and tonight i am mechanical—unstoppable (FINALLY). but right now the world is mine—i am the creator and the creation—of my mania and the artwork of it hanging on the walls of your heart—omniscient of mediocritized religiosity you perverts wear over your rotten flesh. there is no god, i only know of myself who is barely myself. i laugh at my reflection, they called me a fashioned creation of a god that i have erased and somewhere in that smile, my red lipstick that tastes like blood—in there will you taste the erasure of myself. every scream of yours pharmaceutical, all these tears are made of silicone—nothing is real anymore, especially god—you didn’t come save me so i’ll save myself, god—through every blasphemous act that feels bigger than the pain you tried to give me—i will exist in this world only because i choose to; suffering is biological and i am only mechanical (god will humble you soon).

there is nothing above me anymore. there is no me anymore. (try calling god again)

there is no me anymore.
there is no me anymore.
there is no me anymore.

THERE IS NO ME ANYMORE.
THERE IS NO ME ANYMORE.
THERE IS NO ME ANYMORE.

(but let me tell you before i die—mania is better than any drug you could ever afford, it’s the most beautiful way to kill yourself because you die before you notice you’re dying—you are not in control anymore (YOU WERE NEVER IN CONTROL), it’s something bigger—mania is omnipotent—so do it—name yourself mania and sell yourself to these empty bottles and mr. nobody who holds the ticket to hedonism—give in to your desires—keep going—don’t stop even when your body begs—keep going—didn’t say stop yet—i know you’re heaving—i know you haven’t slept, but what will the world do without you? how will the world keep spinning? come on, keep going—MORE, MORE, MORE, MORE—just one more night—again—again—again—live fast, die young—KEEP GOING—AND—)

exhale.
no more.

buy me medications </3

♫ roseblood — mazzy star

every time she says goodbye his voice echoes even louder—the wind still carries his name and brings her back to the same place, same nights but never the same time—never the same him.

he had departed from her world so long ago yet still every soft accent she hears, every pill she puts into her palm takes her back to those nights—even under fluorescent light his warmth made it feel like the saffron sunset whether it was in the dead of the night or in the sombre melancholy of day.

she already wrote about, once and three hundred more times about the hero who died at the end of the story—and the naïve heroine who had clung onto the wings of a butterfly named hope, but even the butterfly doesn’t live longer than a year—so doesn’t love for her.

every dream there ever was about him plays in front of her eyes like a reel, a glowing cinematic haze—it’s heartbreakingly heavenly, like the texture of his coarse hair between her fingers and his soft voice running over the valleys of her heart, never was there a medicine that felt as soothing as his presence—all he had to do was be there and cradle her heart so gently and suddenly she felt human again.

she mourns the girl who believed if this love had come to fruition in this life that it would’ve become a bit more softer to her like he would be, even a sliver from the distance between the two—it wasn’t about losing a man, it was about losing a doorway into another life. he was a life—a dream where she was finally chosen gently, loved without shackles and resting instead of surviving—synonymous to peace, sukoon.

maybe she would’ve been someone’s love, someone’s prayer—lying on the floor with him and talking to god together, feeling his skin over her scars and his sweetness blooming into something eternal, they’d be souls with his eyes and his softness—they would be hers to hold—and a home—just a home. she would finally be home.

all she ever thought was devotion to a soul so gentle would wash away the pain that she sits with on the shore, the stars would finally begin to glimmer when they finally witness something bigger than her pain—and it was love, a love so big that even pain envied it.

never would have the naïve heroine of this story thought that this story would end the same way love always ends; it always leaves when one needs it the most, love is the black of the night that becomes a reminder of everything one will never have. whenever he comes to her mind, death also makes sure to kiss her skin as softly as his lips would—like petals over her skin, his softness would bloom into flowers of words over her skin, with violets that still cry for him under the rain even two years later; tuesday nights, black sky and the city lights—the world disappears and it’s just her and him again; in the dark of the night as the heroine finds solace under schizophrenic trees that held her drugged-up worries of nightfall and nostalgia in lying pills that brought her the closest she could ever be to heaven; alone but only in his glowing eyes and under the shade of his dark lashes.

the heroine wishes she had died at the end of the story, the same way the hero did—the heroine perhaps grieves herself more than she grieves her hero who was already dying in front of her eyes—and she knew, so did the dying hero, as he drank her dying beauty through his eyes, they cradled each other in their melancholic eyes until the world spun a little faster and brought another tomorrow without each other.

she finds herself in the love hotel still singing his name even with another man’s hands on her body—and him—nobody but the god who took him away would know where he lives today, with his soft sorrow and navy blue heart. wherever he lives, he still lives in her world no matter how much of her heart she gives away, his tenderness is engraved into it and it turns blacker, day by day—a love getting closer to death—realization by realization, when she finally realizes, he wasn’t just her first love, he was a curse—a curse that murders you so beautifully, it turns martyrdom into art—a curse written by the angels, to love so deeply and never have that love come to life in this world; to feel a softness so beautiful that instead of blooming into a garden of paradise, it blooms into a black dahlia in the loneliness of an early spring.

does she see what she has turned into?
does she miss him more or does she miss herself?—the girl he took away with him when the clock decided to give them a taste of reality—

وحشتيني
وحشتيني
وحشتيني

وحشتني is the ocean that lives her tongue and drowns her ears—every rosary bead between her fingers grieved a man that gave a lifeless prayer life, that made her empty hands a little bit fuller—with something beautiful to bring to god whenever she prayed. her prayers would grow gardens in paradise for him, but in this world her hands only get to stay empty.

did the heroine grieve her hero as much as she grieved her own regret? the pill bottles still sit on her nightstand, she wonders in another world if she really had died in his arms—would such a beautifully dark night still bloom into something so poisonous and immortal?

she wishes she had never reached the end of the story, never at the end of the poetry where the pages are blank and only her black tears spill over the pages, in their reflection does she see her own darkness that was always there, but cradled by something gentler—a man’s graceful melancholy and the scent of his rose-blooded musk.

would the roses still bleed if love opened the door?

he was her light but left her with nothing but darkness, the days are blacker than the night and the night is brighter than the day under the same fluorescent lights. her lipstick mouth holds secrets that can never find a place to rest, her hair flies in the wind restlessly still hoping the memories in her curls would uncoil and become real again—her feet always take her to the same graveyard of her love and she only asks god for one happy ending—that the heroine should have also died at the end.

she still sings وحشتيني—from hell to back.
i still sing وحشتيني from hell to back.

i’m on my own—on my own.

i’m on my own again.
i’m on my own again.
i’m on my own again.

i’m on my own again.

the story was over long ago—but the music keeps playing.
roll the end credits beneath fluorescent lights.

i’m on my own again.

♫ the blackest day — lana del rey

i got you.
i got you.
i got you.

i got you where i want you now.

~ the end.

a sister piece to:

buy me a new hero </3

the morning after i killed my mother, i put my favourite red lipstick on and play my favourite song loud on the radio—on loop, like a broken cassette telling the same story over and over with the same heaviness, but it’s featherlight now.

i strip down to silk and lace, the kind she’d never let her so-called unmarried virgin daughter wear, open the blinds, and let the world see everything she never could in this lifetime. at last, i paint my nails black, just the way she hates it, because darkness was what she feared: the ink of corruption on her character that she wears like a pearl necklace. i whisper to her somewhere in spirit, “mother, close your eyes, i won’t taint your character anymore—I promise.”

i won’t let your pearl necklace deteriorate into rot anymore. it’ll shine beautiful and bright because my name and its heaviness are no longer yours to carry. perhaps i’d always known that i was always on my own, but today my dress is red and i carry your blood over me pridefully. there’s something prideful about breaking your heart and letting you hang off the ropes on the walls of my heart. i’m free from the lies i’ve ever lived. you called me a liar, and that’s enough for me to turn it into my pride—the woman who said she knew my soul better than mine, i could prove wrong. my soul never belonged to her, and it’s one nobody could ever take away—especially the god she constructed that punishes young girls for bleeding the blood of violence down their legs; that was never god and will never be.

i wear every colour of lipstick except red. i don’t like reminding myself of a future that will never be mine—a smiling bride with her red lipstick. i’ll have the taste of a man’s kiss who tastes like sorrow, but at least we don’t share the same blood—but i have yours. ultraviolence is the lipstick i wear, and its venom is for him to taste. your sweetness was always superficial, and now every sweet kiss or touch tastes bitter—it never feels real. i don’t even know if you ever felt real.

god is the omnibenevolent light that lets his world live in darkness, whether it’s the innocent who carry it as a test over their shoulders or humankind slowly turning into a lineage far more ferocious than hellfire. hell is real because we already live in it. it exists in the words on her tongue that burned through my skin—the punishment i live through every day for the frail body she gave me and the tongue that carries her same blood of submission. perhaps we’d rather hide blood between our thighs than wear it like a dress dipped in crimson red.

but here i am today, in my little red dress with my bleeding thighs and piercing cries that were never hers to carry and will never hear again. i’m in a world where a stranger would make me feel more loved than her—but never wholly. i’m loved for whatever i can be and wherever i can be: a hard body, tender and gripping flesh, manic with fireworks in my hands, or simply a lovely lady that makes you feel loved too—even though we both know it isn’t real. it never was.

my mother’s blood runs through my veins, but i drain it out with a shot of ecstasy and a drag of mania, anything to let the sorrow fade away and the rush to live. live fast and die young for a mother that would cradle your grave and kiss your cold hands again, but never will my warm blood be hers to carry—never will my soft skin be hers to caress with her fatigued hands. sharp is the sting of her wounds i still feel on my cheeks.

it’s selfish of me though, isn’t it? i will never be the daughter that gets to wear a red wedding dress—i don’t cry over your grave as much as i cry over the red wedding dress in our dreams and the sound of jingling gold jewelry. i won’t wear purity in the embellishments of my henna because my hands will be empty—already emptied. all the gold jewelry that shines so bright in your possession will never be worn, only cold leather around my throat as i choose myself over you. the only difference between us is that you dream of dressing me in violence in a red dress and gold jewelry with a veil over my hair, but i dress myself in violence with pride. i wear my scripture like it’s tattooed into every black day on my eyes, smoked and sultry.

i wish you loved me the way i love you—but you love yourself, and i too love myself even more.

i’ll be the runaway daughter one day. you’ll look in the mirror and not be able to see my face in yours—you’ll spell out your name but not find mine in it anymore.

mother, i wish you were alive, far more than the raging spirit of yours that roams in this house like a ghost. i wish i hadn’t killed you the day i took my veil off and let the winds take away all the lies i ever told you, all the tears i wish you could’ve wiped—every memory that felt warm goes cold in the early breeze of spring.

i’m nobody’s friend, nobody’s love, and nobody’s daughter—I am only alif, the first letter of the alphabet that stands strong in solitude but still somehow accompanies stories and names that could’ve been tainted. i am the alif in your name. it’s there, but it’s an elongation—quiet, with no sharpness, just a soft daughter hidden in your name, which too means victorious. my silence is your victory. the dead little girl that i buried lives as an elongation in your name, and the mother i killed becomes the prideful, tall alif in my name. it starts with the sound of a scream and ends with a scream; it starts with solitude and ends in solitude, comforting everything that comes in between—family, love, and all those beautiful things that were never mine to call my own.

so i take the dagger and stab it into her heart. i watch it bleed as she pleads, but in my eyes is only her reflection: blood red-hot, and i’m no longer yours. i realize i never was.

when i killed you, i killed myself. in these streams of crimson regret, i see your blood, and it only makes me want you more. in all this violence, i still want you, and it kills me every single time.

maybe in another world, maa.

buy me a red dress <3

i can’t breathe.

pick one— (now. now. now. now. NOW. NOW. RIGHT NOW.)
escapsim / hedonism / masochism / narcissism / nihilism

pick one
pick one
pick one

pick already, i just told you—did you forget already?
overreacting / overspending / over-consuming / overdose

pick now will you? what? when did i say that? do i need to tell you again?
drugs / sex / god / worship / sin / worship / god / sex / drugs

*is it really that hard for you to pick the colour of dress you want to wear this eid? i’m just asking you about a colour, what are you thinking so much about?*

(the color red, maa—red like my blood spilling onto white tile, red like the stain on my cotton—red like sin, red like desire, red like tragedy and red like my heart)

pick one / pick one / pick one
one? / one? / one? / one / one / one

just fucking pick one.

you won’t ever hear me maa, no matter how loud, you can’t hear me. you will never hear me. you’re deaf to your own creation—the same way god is.

i can’t breathe. but i’ll load the barrel anyway.

—and… fire.

gun metal black / blood red wine

god doesn’t it feel so good?
it feels so good i can’t think
it feels so good i can’t breath—

i can’t breathe. i can’t breathe. i can’t breathe. i can’t breathe.

(DO YOU HEAR ME?)

to: god, man, woman and child
(DO YOU FUCKING HEAR ME???????)
(WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU????)

or will you stay quiet again?
────────────
again. again. again. again.
(theressomuchgoingoninmybrainicantbreatheidontknowwhoiamorwhatiwantanymoreiamlosingmymindpleasesomeonehelpsomeonetellmybraintobequietidontwanttohearthesevoicesanymoretheyreechoingeverywherepleasegodletmerestdontstayquietnotevenforaminutekeeptalkinguntilmyheadshutsup—)

LISTEN
LISTEN. LISTEN.
LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN.
PLEASE LISTEN TO ME. LISTEN.

i hate you / i love you / i hate you / i love you

(DO YOU HEAR ME)
(DO YOU HEAR ME)
(DO YOU HEAR ME)
(DO YOU HEAR ME)
(DO YOU HEAR ME)

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME

*what do you want from me?*

i miss you / وحشتيني / come back
i miss you / وحشتيني / come back
i miss you / وحشتيني / come back
i miss you / وحشتيني / come back
i miss you / وحشتيني / come back
i miss you / وحشتيني / come back

WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME

who am i saying this too?
him / him / him / him / him

who asked for it?
you / you / you / you / you

do you also see him walking near the evergreen trees in black suede? or is he there with a gun to hid head and his breath reeks of vodka? or the one over there smoking a cigarette while stroking his cock?

do you want to come with me to ask them what do they want from me?

*alif, i asked you a question…? are you okay?*

i can’t hear you. i can’t breathe still either.
i can’t breathe anymore, just pull the trigger.

*what’s on your mind?*

(I WANT TO DIE)
(I WANT TO DIE)
(I WANT TO DIE)

i want to die but i’m a coward, i still call god on the telephone and ask him the same questions until he forwards my calls to his voicemail—he hears the same questions all day like a broken cassette plays my song.

god will i still go to hell if i slash my wrists tonight?
god will i still go to hell for all the drugs i take at night?
god will i still got to hell for selling myself for the midnight?

(i still want to die)

who are you?

who are you?
whore are you?
whore. you—
you, the reflection in his eyes—

who asked for it?
you / you / you / you / you—

────────────

good night, i’ll be back in the morning
good night, i’l be gone in the morning.
good night, i’ll be gone in the mourning—

fire.

i can’t breathe, i’m too alone right now.

where do i put this?
where does this all go?
god answer me now, where?

where do i put it
WHERE DO I PUT IT
WHERE THE FUCK DO I PUT IT

(LET ME DIE)

did you hear him? did you hear him? did you hear him?
no? / no? / no? / no? / no / no / no! / no! / no! / NO / NO / NO / NO—
i wish you heard me / you heard me / you heard everything
stop / stop / stop / stop / stop / stop / stop / stop / stop / stop
god / man / woman / child / god / man / woman / man / man

(icanttellwhoimlookingatinthemirrororatterofafactifanyofthisisrealicantbreatheandicantthinkiamnotlivingbutimnotdeadyeteitherimsomewhereinbetweenanditsdrivingmeinsanepleasemakeitendnothingisfillingthevoid)

i.
empty
so empty.
feel so empty.
i feel so empty.
feel so empty.
so empty.
empty.
i.

WHERE THE FUCK DO I PUT EVERYTHING YOU KEEP GIVING ME GOD
do you hear how silent is when there’s nobody with me? you only hear one voice.

(LET ME DIE)
(LET ME DIE)
(LET ME DIE)

i’m a coward, we know that god.

do you still hear me?
i still can’t breathe.

please i can’t sleep. please help me.
please i can’t sleep. please help me. help.
please i can’t sleep. please help me. help me.
please i can’t sleep. please help me. help me. help.
please i can’t sleep. please help me. help me. help me.
help me please / please / please / please / please help me.

or will you stay quiet again?
────────────

and i breathe again—

fire. fire. fire.

။||||။||||။‌‌‌‌ 0:00

hello? god? it’s me again.
yeah i can’t breathe again.

you can’t hear me? let me try calling back—

fire.

silence.

buy me sleeping pills!

♫ tanhaa akeli hoon — saira peter

تنھا اکیلی ہوں، میں ایک پہلی ہوں
بوجے کوئی تو زرا، مجھ کو دے میرا پتا۔
i am alone and in solitude, i’m a riddle
can someone solve me—give me my direction

to build a shrine—a place that becomes the site of worship, you must first decide what is worth worshipping. religion isn’t a singular, it’s a multiplicity depending on the believer, and perhaps worship can be blasphemy when you devote yourself to a god that exists in your eyes but the world would’ve killed him.

lucifer was cursed because he didn’t bow before adam—so god punishes him for eternity by making him lose his beauty and holiness and he expels him from paradise and writes for him the fate of hellfire, god fills him with violence and rage until all he turns into is the red-hot root of all evil.

but despite being satan, he isn’t a counterpart to god—not a rival—his evil exists because god exists, he operates within god’s permission with his free will. evil isn’t born, it’s a creation. like god’s most evil creation of mankind, evil is shaped, sculpted and carved—out of tainted innocence and sugar-coated lies, sin was never black and white; even when explainable, it’s still not justifiable even in the eyes of the most just.

when the world takes away your purity, what do you turn into? an embodiment of sin—an opponent of god when you question your fate? a sinner for commiting a sin that you hadn’t even known was a sin, because perhaps that’s who raised me—lucifer and his devils that live in the form of man; spoon-fed fire and poison, so when it comes to you again, you know the taste of that poison and it tastes like paradise.

somewhere in the story of lucifer does a god-believing woman see herself—once a pious worshipper, speaking the langauge of obedience as i kneel to the gods and monsters that raised me—but you don’t stay a believer forever, one day the rosary breaks and for once you feel the skin on your body and realize how soft it was and soft things always break—the good girl will always bleed, like mother says—on her wedding night she will, but in this story the good girl bleeds at the elopement of blasphemy.

the ring slides on my finger and i fall out of paradise, perhaps that ring was put on my finger from the angels that stay with us until we’re capable of sin but never did they tell me that sin would be my first language and it’s now the language i’m most fluent in—so fluent that i can turn blasphemy into poetry and fornication into a movie.

but this complex god and his so-complicated world, every worshipper and sinner sees whatever they see in a different color; red for the man who’s pride is red-hot and so are his eyes on my red lace of sin and seduction, it doesn’t take much to hold man’s pride in your hands and toy with him once you’ve learnt to turn beauty into armor except it’s just another tale of another lucifer you play with; destined to bow to sin and you like a chameleon turn into that sin just to feel like you’re worth the same gods you used to worship.

that’s the thing though, your biggest mistake was seeing them all as god—any child would mistake affection for god because all we’ve ever learnt about the realest god is that he was the cruelest—that he punishes little girls that can’t fight for themselves, that the god i was taught to worship was crueler than the gods i would kneel to.

and that’s how girls like you—girls like muamma’s jahaan ara turn into shrines when they spend their whole lives worshipping gods that never existed and handing over your innocence at the hands of them, the way some devote their lives to jesus to purify their souls—girls like us hand our innocence to the devil and come out devoted—pure and worth worshipping, while the dead doves live in your heart and you become the shrine, you become the temple of worship for those who are of lost cause—who turn anything holy into their god.

ندی کا میں پانی ہوں،
گزری کہانی ہوں
i’m the water of the lake
i’m a story that is long-gone

there was a time where you thought you’d live the life of a fairytale—the devotional man that you thought had saved you only ends up stabbing you in the back, the beautiful man that watched you die and resurrected you was only resurrecting the darkest parts of you that bloomed that no amount of evil would make bloom.

jahaan ara’s shahjahaan was never there for her, neither was my aurangzeb. kingdoms fall when the king loses control, and here, woman is control—woman is the weapon.

the black dahlia is called the black dahlia as if she’s black like the tar of cigarettes or the same black of his suede suit—but the red dahlia bleeds, of innocence that still lives but only blooms into something much more dangerous. you turn into a پہیلی, a riddle that everybody at night wants to solve—through your skin, your voice and your words but nobody can come close to the soul that still lives in the shrine, they can only worship and they do, but they don’t know what they worship; the corpse of a girl long gone, now standing tall like a temple.

they turn your name into dishonour and every injustice into stone, they stone your soul until it turns into something so solid that they begin to hate it—because you’re no longer flexible, you don’t melt into mother anymore as she kisses your hands and no amount of love showered upon you will make you bloom into something redder and more beautiful—women like us always stay as the girl who was stoned for a sin she never committed, we don’t live nor do we die, presence becomes liminal like religion—immortal until you’re no longer worshipped.

they call jahaan ara a seductress—the women who lures men into her shrine and the closer they get to the holiness, the closer is blasphemy—and eventually death. she’s powerful because it works, never because she wanted to be. once the good girl is killed, finally can women like us build something more useful—something worth kneeling—a scripture that always gets read but never understood, a hymn that’s always sung but never leaves the temple.

but we know it—in moments where nobody is praying and god is the only one awake with you, you apologize to him; you show him all the words written over your skin; whore, sinner, fornicator and you cry to him the way you cried to everyone you worshipped before him—that god no, i didn’t do it. please believe me when nobody believes me; god i may not worship you but i believe you exist somewhere underneath the soil and rose petals where my innocence lies—it’s not dead and neither are you, but the world, it tries to spoil the fruit the grows; i’m poisoned to a point where my past will never come to fruition.

maybe it’s a mask or a veil—like the one that once covered my hair, now hides all my innocence underneath the sin that the world sees even though mother says that my hair is the sin and a veil of silk is the innocence i should wear but who would tell her that the veil of innocence holds more memories than the curls of my hair do.

mankind will always corrupt the scripture, they will question the sin they wrote and turn you into an epiphany—but nobody asks about the dead that lay underneath the shrine, they see the shrine that stands and that god is control, but they never see the unseen—of the lucifer that exists because something beautiful had to die, and the girl that lives like a seductress because her softness had laid to rest before she even got to watch the fruit of her patience bloom.

this is how you build a shrine out of woman—on my screen it’s jahaan ara and in this world of mine, it’s me—and all the other women that don’t sleep at night, that become shrines before they fly—women that have to become a مُعَمّ (mystery) before they’re ever understood.

ہم جیسی لڑکیاں ہمیشہ ایک معمہ رہیں گی۔

بیتے سمھے کی صدا
?کوئی سنائے تو زارا
i’m the cry of the past that has passed
can someone hear me now?

buy me lingerie <3

this is the part where i pick up my pen and write the words that my heart never wanted to—but perhaps i should have known from the very day when your smile was no longer something for me to witness, your heart, once kindled like a bonfire, had gone cold too—despite the sweetness you carried, the gentleness—you were never mine to begin with.

perhaps he will always live in the softest of love songs—in the softness of واهشتيني, in the poetry of كلمات, in the vows of حبيتك وبحبك—and in this swan song of mine now.

to my muse, my first love and maybe my last—because what bigger act of devotion is there than to resurrect you through my words—the man who brought my words back to life, who turned every bleeding word into something soft and gentler. he wasn’t just a man i loved—he was the resurrector of the girl i had once loved, who really was loved for a while before the world took her away from every soft cloud she could land on.

of love poems and sonnets—prayers and verses in your name, and the way the whole world caved in towards itself, molded itself to remind me of you, who existed in every soft place of this planet. you became the world in the most bittersweet way—you belonged to autumn, yet you live everywhere you aren’t anymore; the warmth on my skin in summer, your melancholy in the blue blooming hydrangeas, and your silence—that lives in the dead of snowy winter.

autumn—i can only feel its cold breeze and remember that the snow will coat wherever his footsteps linger, that fate had already taken him away from every place he ever existed, because he doesn’t anymore.

i still stand in these streets, high and alone at night, even when the air smells like cigarettes and my lips are dry; i’m a year younger on this street, taking in the scent of his cologne that has become a ghost itself, and my lips are painted the colours of ripe persian oranges, like the joyful summer that had once lived on my cold winter skin as i died in front of his eyes.

i’ll hold the pen, and your tears will be the ink, as the last fragments of love poetry that breathe for you will find their place to rest—the same place where you do—somewhere where the violets dance and the rain pours their melancholy over them.

your ears never got to be the vessel to hold my love—so vast—like the ocean; it spilled, it poured, but your sorrow—too impermeable to let my love settle in—and fate, the most brutal, silences my voice before it could be the traveller to carry all my words to you.

the angels always sat by when i write for you—for what would become the ink for my swan song, they sing this song to the world in the whistling wind that pierces, yet comforts—your ears too.

i’ll never sing a love song again with the memory of you being alive—even if i paint your face from memory, every bit that i have remembered; from your heart-shaped face to your downturned eyes—your dark lashes and melancholic brows—your selene skin and damask lips, my art will never come to life.

it’s another story of life imitating art—you’re the art, and life the craft—but never you, not in this life, and never this art made real by fate.

my lungs had already taken in all the air i breathed in those days when you were the earth—how long ago had it been since i breathed you in for the last time, and your musk had sunk into my skin and gleams like broken stars—passersby ask about the love that still lives on my skin, but i tell them: i live with death on my skin, of broken, dead stars that twitch at the sight of anything that tries to come close.

our eyes had bid farewell to one another in cold december; i witnessed your swollen ones and the tears that gleamed so beautifully in your heavy eyes—nobody could carry melancholy as gracefully as you could, your dark lashes—even in their sadness—always feel so safe, like home.

somewhere in my dreams, i had kissed your lips—rosy and luscious, but now they’re pale. the blood in them has cooled, and now it lives in my heart—red and furious, either at you, god, or fate, that my love never came to fruition in this world. your name still sounds like a holy prayer; every time my lips part to say your name, it’s like the parting of the red sea from moses’ staff—a bitter reminder of the reality of who’s in control—it’s god. the same god who wrote the birth of this love and perhaps never a complete death of it, it lingers somewhere between the afterlife and this world.

you were my hymn while i was god’s for a while until my worship melts to ice and god feels as far as you now.

i say your name for the last time, without knowing that god’s was also the last on my tongue—the same god that wrote you as a mercy, made you my muse, and me the artist i am today—the same god that puts a love so deep in you that you can never unlearn it like a mother tongue. it feels like betrayal to hand over my heart to someone that is realer than you, not a soft soul that lived in my head to comfort me on the heaviest of nights; he’s real, realer than you and that’s what hurts.

i wish i could say good night for the last time, but the only way i can say so is through my heart—so slowly and tenderly, the way you embodied it.

i won’t ever need to look for you again, neither will you ever look forward to me again—we won’t ever smile at each other again, ask each other about our days, and never will you see me flirting with death again—you saw it once, and god kept the rest for someone who knows death better than i knew you.

the paper in my hands—of my last words—flies away with the dove freely. her white feathers shed as sweet remnants, but never will the dove herself come back again—not this one, i’ll turn her feathers into a dream catcher for my nightmares—though you tell me, god is so much more gentler than a dream catcher, but he doesn’t want your sweet remnants to preserve my sweetness—does he?

my love has flown to the seventh sky, somewhere you’ll find the garden of my prayers and love—perhaps me somewhere in silk, if god permits—not asking for anything from you except for your eyes to witness the love that was too vast for the world and to see your soft smile again which was too beautiful for this cruel world.

and maybe this is not where you end, not truly—never in my words, not in the softest parts of the world where you still live. i won’t bury you or unlearn you—you’ll remain—not as mine, but as something so soft, never meant to be touched; a muse, a mercy, a memory that still breathes life into every word i write.

i may carry you forever and sing you a swan song you’ll never get to hear, i’ll let you go where i cannot follow, but i’ll keep what you made of me—every poem, every painting—every piece of me that learned how to feel because of you, somehow you’ll always be endlessly alive.

good night. goodbye.

buy me a new man :(

///

the world had already put a cloak of haze over itself to remind me that beautiful things never last, like i’m someone who’s meant to cling onto that beauty forever, because only the beauty that has passed can make this present ugly world a little more beautiful.

in front of me sits the white man that smells like weed and shit, his blue irises blown wide by his black pupils like black holes as he lures the girl in front of him into them. he wishes he could jump across the aisle and fuck her right there—even if she resists or screams on this double decker, nobody will hear her (like me). i know men very well, like you, especially.

i walk on broken feet wrapped in leather and more black nylon through the haze. you’re looking at me like you know something, or like you’re wondering on what occasion this bitch with her smokey eyes and grey lips walks the streets of colorful nightingales—feather-light body and yet the heaviness i carry, you wouldn’t know, you’d only feel it but never give it a name. the colorful couple that walks parallel to me—they too wouldn’t know what it’s like to have a soul fragmented into more than halves, and each one pulls you toward a different direction like a cyclical storm. one day you’re down to nothing but a melting brain while you kneel in submission as a man strokes his pride, the next you’re kneeling down to god on ice while counting all your sins on the rosary for someone who doesn’t even exist anymore at this hour, on this day—in this cycle.

///

withdrawal at the ATM again; cash (weed) is the currency to help the helpless—from addiction to the addicted that lay on the streets. perhaps i’d get fucked by a man for money and give all the money to the woman laying in her own piss just to tell her to get her up for once and do something with her life, because that’s what they all say—your pain doesn’t make you unique, all that you’ve endured doesn’t make you deserving of a helping hand, so get up and help yourself—and cut some slack for the passersby who don’t want to help in any way but by dropping a useless coin in your empty starbucks cup. fuck you and your little starbucks cups, that’s all i can think of when i see it, even in your misery—it only reminds me of those obnoxiou white girls that live in the moment, just the way i envy it; boyfriends and pretty little party dresses—and their fucking starbucks cups, doesn’t it taste like blood with all that sugar and capitalism you drink everyday?

///

the bus reeks again of weed and shit, and the man that sits in front of me, cross-eyed, his hungry eyes already undress me as he tells me about how he’ll light this bus on fire and that nobody fucking knows a thing about him. somewhere in that shit-covered mess, something touches close to him. his nails—gone and bloodied, his hair sticks to his head, and he rocks back and forth in front of me, playing with his black lighter as it burns his fingers even more—it feels good doesn’t it? or perhaps you don’t feel it at all. the coolness of the window feels more liberating than oxygen as another man sits beside me. he watches me apply my lipstick, either out of shock or bitter manly irony, as the drug-blown man tells me how much he hates the fucking planet while mr. nobody beside me looks me up and down—all i can see through my mirror is nobody despite the three bodies that sit in the corner of this bus.

i dress and adorn as if i’m heading to streetwalk, when all that ruminates in my head is how many more bills downtown will take from me. one day it’s a dealer, today it’s a pharmacist. no matter how much armor i wear—makeup, perfume, lace, seduction—deep down i’m rotten to the core. even in the thrill of it all, another woman can walk away from a room well-fucked and somehow more glamorous than ever, and then there’s my rotting soul that births an illness from every bit of good that life can offer me. whether good is red roses in holy water or leather belts on bare skin, spiritually demiromantic or hedonistically masochistic—it always turns into poison, no matter how good it feels. i repeat every word of care said to me, yet it slithers on my tongue rather than melting like a sweet sugar cube and eventually a sweet memory.

hurt is the only language i have ever known, pain is the sweetest pleasure i’ve ever felt in this oh-so-complex world. it all exists yet it never exists in me.

///

early 2000s nostalgia makes me nauseous again—the mall that’s so empty yet so full, the one restaurant and drugstore that keeps it alive. i hand over my health card with a picture of a veiled girl to the pharmacist; she does a double-take. another four bills as i pay the price for hedonism—mother curses her hedonist brother who loses his money to gambling while i gamble with every fragment of myself every day, paying the price for games people played who don’t even exist anymore.

i shop for lipsticks again. beaming jim would collect different types of cigarettes with different flavors and leaves—for now all i’ve got is lipsticks. his cigarette-smoke breath was my air, mine to keep. here’s a lipstick in cherry, a stain on the cheek of another man—a gift for him to keep, a part of myself to give away, who will no longer exist outside this cyclical mania.

the fresh-off-the-boat man looks at me like i’m the last meal in this empty mall of fluorescent lights and tiled floors and closed shops. i tear my name—that never belonged to me—and my number that belongs to anybody but me. and these pills—familiar enough, so they must be mine.

i erase every proof of myself existing in downtown—matter of fact, my existence from this day will be gone. the proof fades away in this haze; the scent of him starts to fade from my skin, my curls lose their shape, my makeup smears—yet in the moment it turns into photographs, because somehow in this ugly life there’s still art. even in these drug-filled, zombie-walking streets—you see two kinds of zombies: girls blown out on heroin with broken legs and mini party dresses, or the fentanyl-jacked man whose pants fall below his ass crack, riding public transit to find a home like mr. nobody.

///

the sky is black, but not the comforting pitch-black that lulls you to sleep—the haze is bright enough to remind you that god exists, that hell exists, and you’re living in it. the smell of weed and chinese food from the seat across, with your little styrofoam takeout boxes and your little coach purses as you laugh off the bus—but the one who knows even an ounce about the girl sitting in front of her with her bandaged legs, she watches my face pucker at the bitterness of the weed, and she knows—she knows. yet she will never know. but she saw. that’s all that mattered.

i walk under the wet sky as it cries silently; i do the breathing for it. if i’m not vocal then who am i? the way my heels hit the ground and every head turns, the way this black cloak demands attention yet nobody wants to save themselves for a place so dark. this voice of mine—so loud yet so silent—it’s like everyone can hear me, yet nobody talks back—

///

—i tell the reflection—helpless reflection—through the black mirror, my screen.

who was present? i wouldn’t know. there’s a girl in me who clings to hope like it’s a sliver, and it always bites back—masochist at her core even when she gambles with hope.

this is god teaching you a lesson. girls like you need to be taught a lesson.

do you remember me again in the dead of march?

///

i tell father i won’t be home tonight. i throw every moral and shackle down this balcony. i’m at the top, like a god—not god, never god—but someone who only feels a sense of self when they can control the world the way god does. but remind me again, god—through a strike of lightning in the hotel room, through the torn-open bloody deer on the street—that you exist and you are in control of all the good and bad, never me. i was only meant to be thrown like a welcome mat to greet a new guest of bloodshed into this love-hotel heart of mine.

i feel like hürrem sultan at the top, as if the world is mine for a little while everyone’s asleep or high and i walk under fluorescent lights. i find the most claustrophobic corner so the walls can hug me for tonight, because i’ve stripped off my dress of hedonism—i’m nobody, i’ll blend in with the walls easily today.

this is what it’s like to feel like the world you walk in is maybe yours tonight. the next hour will remind you why it’s not.

///

a full bus after another as the phone keeps ringing. under this haze i remember you again—secretly hoping you’d come back even though life has well-assured me you won’t. that this time, while i’m high, you’ll take me into your arms, kiss me until you taste all the weed-flavoured pain on my tongue—and this time it won’t be an overdose. it will be resurrection.

i don’t know about the life i’m living outside these buses anymore.

i’m alone, going back to a home where i’m alone again. the world begins to blur away, and in this darkness there is a little bit of solace.

///

this time i’m alive as we skip past my stop—you don’t mind, do you? in this darkness i sit on your leather jacket and lean on your shoulder. i don’t know who you are or who i am, neither do i know where we’re going—maybe that’s why i’m here.

///

driver, you forgot to stop at my stop… did you?

///

or was i never here to begin with? so i ask another man, then another, and another, and it turns out i really was here. i departed somewhere far a while ago.

///

my room is cleaned again, but this isn’t my room or my craft. my mind can’t find its way even in sobriety—perhaps it’s too perfect. perfection, in your definition, is order. but disorder—how fucking perfect is the art of disorder.

///

i’m telling the woman in the mirror everything, but she only cries. why are you crying again? don’t you remember the last time you cried, what happened? this is who i am—mrs. nobody.

contrast is what gets you going, but it’s also enough to split you in half—held and loved the night before, alone and armored again.

you’re a walking paradox—living in a cinematic paradoxical life, aren’t you?

///

your life sounds cinematic, where the hero dies at the end and the heroine keeps looking for love in all the wrong places, anything to be held—anything to never find myself existing in days like these again.

///

so another dose i take and i’m seeing stars.

///

i still carry the day on my skin—the smell of rain in my hair, the bruise on my ankle, smeared mascara and chapped, ashy lips. somewhere on my vanity is my black dress—it still smells like him. a bittersweet reminder of the beautiful world that never stays, and that clock that ticks above, never sparing you.

buy me medication </3

15:21

“i’m curious to know a bit more about your childhood… where did you grow up? what emotions do you feel when you think about it?”

i tell him about the house—home, that i grew up in and the one that keeps growing within me. home lives on my skin in the blackened bruises, like the black fungi that spreads on the walls; home only keeps growing—darker, closer.

this house doesn’t creak, it breathes—it inhales through the walls that are swollen with memory and exhales with the kind of silence that pierces your ears until it becomes a sound of its own. it cries until the paint reveals the rot that lives beneath its concealment.

perhaps i’ve lived in this house before, or maybe i never left it—the humidity of my tears still lingers here, and the wooden floor still creaks from the pounds of my fists—those lonely nights where plywood became a witness of pain and the sponge for it.

in the closet hang lace and vintage leather, just the way i like it; i wear black lace like it’s a second skin—i mourn by adorning myself, the house likes me better this way—with my lips painted blood red and my eyes smoked like ash, the shadows don’t have to reach as far to hold me close to them, there’s comfort in embodying that darkness myself.

i blend in with the black night sky outside this broken window—that’s how i knew it was home, when nobody outside this house would know of the ghosts that i dance with every night—and that i too, am among the dead, carrying a thousand deaths in this light body of mine—

“do you feel safe at home?”

i remember the way the walls breathe—his gentle voice that still echoes in this hallway, so yes, i say. i feel safe at home, only here. even when the man dressed in black suede stands tall in the corner of my bedroom, lulling me to sleep at night by burying me in the memory of his skin. it’s still home, even when it hurts—it’s home, especially when it hurts—especially when hurting is all i’ve ever known here. here is where i bleed—where i adorn and paint—over my wounds, over these walls, i’m anything but hurt when i live with ghosts—they always disappear at dawn. i taste the bittersweetness of farewells every dusk and dawn, it still bleeds on my tongue when i’m not home, because home will always be with me even when i try to leave.

hello. i hear it when i pass the long wall mirror, the air shifts and suddenly the crimson of my pashmina looks like the autumn leaves again—i’m not watching my reflection anymore—i recognize it. i see his softness in the furrow of my brow and my lips now pale and grieving that would once smile for him.

i smile at the mirror, waiting for an answer, every time i do—but nobody answers anymore, i am no longer the light of anybody’s eyes—only a shadow.

the door knocker calls for me again as i dance in the ballroom, even as i reach for the doors to let someone real in, he becomes the air—cold as winter, and when i surrender to him, i turn into ice. he always wins, doesn’t he? he doesn’t let spring flowers bloom or the autumn leaves hug the earth a little closer—he only lets you feel the frigidity of winter—

“who do you spend the most time with at home?”

him—who lives like a beautiful ghost in the bodies of love that my home carries—the epitome of it; his heart-shaped face, lips luscious like damask and his voice as soft as velvet. even now that he’s gone, he still lingers in the love songs that play in the distance from the turntables.

mr. nobody though—i’m convinced he owns this house—he’s lived long here enough that he lives in my blood now—in the smell of rainwater, in the low-hanging clouds. he hums along to the music that lingers from the turntable in the back. he taints the only love that ever felt real—the only love that i want to tell myself was mine but actually belonged to fate—that was the realness of it, that it never stayed, that love will always leave you when you need it the most.

my lord it hurts so much, he became a ghost who felt like home because the worst thing he did was just…. disappear. no cruelty, no breaking—just him fading into the dark sky, as if the world, so quietly—like him, decided that he had been too alive in my heart and corrected itself. it reminds me over and over; death adores me—like my cold lover who loves me so dearly to break my heart every time he holds me—yet still, he would be the one who promises to mend it too. death too, come and mend me as i lie dissected on my bed tonight.

he’s just a ghost, yet every time he passes by—i’m a mourning widow again.

the house has learned him too, it holds its breath now every time i smile at the mirror—it waits the same way that i do, and we’re both broken and tainted. i’ve made peace with it, that perhaps this house will always be my home, nobody will know how beautiful it is to me, in its blacks, greys and melancholic blues.

“how do you feel when someone tries to enter your space?”

invaded—this house was never empty to begin with.

i feel like someone is undressing me slowly, peeling all the layers that i stitched together with my broken heartstrings—anything to hide what lives beneath my skin. there’s enough makeup to conceal every crack from when i broke and enough cigarette smoke residue over my clothes for no one to smell the perfume i wore when i thought i lived again, i only loved, and it felt like reincarnation.

even though what he gives me is supposed to be love, it feels like my heart is breaking all over again. every wound that someone real tries to kiss better—bleeds more.

the picture shattered on the floor, blood over his face, he’s tainted now because nothing will ever come close to perfection, and perhaps perfection is only what i can control, even if control looks like walking back home on broken legs or laughing with the walls at night.

i couldn’t control the fate god wrote for us, but everything i can now is only a bittersweet reminder that i can be so close to the earth yet still not have you, because the most perfect thing you ever did was leave. how i yearn for when the earth will hug us, and that would be the closest i could be to you, where fate doesn’t exist.

he holds my hand like he’s proving that he’s not just a number on the clock. his voice is the warmest in this cold house—warmer than the fireplace by the window at night, because he’s real—too real. even the fire cannot possess such a heat, and still the fireplace only stays lit because somebody always comes back at night to reignite it, and home is home again.

i nod, because i want to be the woman who will stay, but the past starts to seep through the walls as the house shifts behind my eyes—and somewhere soft, inevitable—hello. my fingers twitch in his grasp as something softer cloaks my shoulders.

this house was never empty—will never be. you can tear down the floral wallpaper—repaint the walls in eggshell white—but the darkness will still bloom beneath it until it bleeds and bruises.

the house is full of everything that stayed.
full of memories that will always veil me in black,
full of love that only ever knew how to disappear,
full of black fungi and black dahlias reeking of grief.

if anyone ever dares to enter, they will see it, they will feel it—when their blood goes cold.

or worse—they won’t.

the house will keep breathing even when i don’t.

even when you don’t.

“same time next week?”

same time, same place—same home.

16:00

it’s midnight again, she prays before she puts her red lipstick and mascara on. she lets lace hug her body and drapes herself in satin, artificial but close enough to silk—just like the juxtaposition that she is herself, a heart so alive and blood-filled that beats with ecstasy as hope strums her heartstrings, and then the butterflies in her stomach that dance in circles like her head that spins in circles—round and round, like her lover would spin her around but at the end of it all, she’d nothing but an accessory, dizzy and lovesick on the cold floor all alone.

she’s the delicate silk of a savage man’s black tie
the rush of red-hot blood that swims through a man’s pride
and always, the lipstick mark on a man’s cheek is to be wiped by obliteration.

mrs. nobody is fooling everyone, and the biggest fool being herself.

she plays jazz on the radio again, sways her body and sings along as she occasionally curses under her breath after every chorus over every mistake she makes in adorning herself; as if every stain of red lipstick is a reminder of the blood she spills and every black smear of mascara is the ash she turns into after another lover gets high off of her.

the room is a witness that watches her get ready, the walls gossip; the one beside her wall sighs knowing she’ll come back home tonight to share her tears with it and the one she leans on as she gets ready, it laughs at her again—how many times a day does this wall see mrs. nobody get ready for nobody, just hoping that her reflection in the mirror would be in somebody’s eyes instead, remembered for once. the walls merge into a space smaller, steadier, and close enough to cradle her when her shattered heart breaks yet again.

the candle on her nightstand melts slowly as the scent of amber and tobacco fills the room. it’s the scent of a lover who carries the outside world with him—anything outside her head smells like liberation, like refuge for the refugee who only knows of the world that’s built them a home out of their own heartbreak.

mrs. nobody accumulates the scent of those she had met but can never keep, the scent of someone else’s jacket and the warmth of being somebody’s.

she stands in front of the mirror and rehearses warmth in her voice. she pops a heart-shaped sweet on her tongue, letting its sweetness mix with her saliva that’s tainted with the taste of bitter corruption that she brings back home every night. she’ll practice saying her name, hearing the way the letters roll off her tongue from a place much sweeter than she had known—she keeps going until it sounds like it belongs to someone worth staying for, someone worth being remembered.

but even then, do the wrappers gather faster than the memories.

she always makes sure to look at her paintings before she leaves her room; the ones framed with antique cold frames and iridescent varnish, somewhere in that beauty does she hope to be framed in one day—but instead she looks for a new flaw in them every night, as if she’s teaching herself to taste the ugliness that comes with beautiful things framed in shiny promises. she knows it from the way the frames shatter every night, big words and beautiful promises reduced down to shards. she sees the shards as her pen, rewriting every promise over her skin and every praise just to tell herself it was real—that she was real.

before she leaves she cracks open the window and lets the cold air fill the room, she wants to convince herself that her teeth chatter from the weather outside and never the storm that’ll pull her again. the feathers in her coat go cold, as she allied with the birds; give me your warmth for the cold nights and i’ll bring back the sun that nobody stayed to gaze, for i am the moon and the small world—my stars!

that’s what the nighttime has always been, an empty black sky full of broken stars that need their moon to shine—but even the moon needs the sun. but mrs. nobody—she comes back empty-handed, broken alliances and a broken heart. she sleeps through the sunrise and comes alive at the nighttime.

she labels herself with the lie of seduction when all she really is accommodating, malleable like molten glass that breaks once she’s solid from the cold that comes after the glow. mrs. nobody becomes the somebody that someone needs—within seconds.

someone looks at her like they need a different woman, so she becomes one. some share their sorrows through tears, while some spill their cowardice misery over her tender flesh—tender words on her tender tongue, turning them bitter. they empty their souls at dusk before they stand tall over her at dawn, and she turns into a shadow—again.

by the middle of the night she stops reacting, she’s no longer human or anybody—she’s the bottle of wine that spills on the linen sheets, stains the tongue of another lover until they’re sober and their tongue goes dry—scraping along her wounds and mingling with her still-moist tender tongue, letting her taste the bitter hangover until it’s time to say goodbye, the taste of a goodbye—she knows far too well.

hello is the taste of being wanted until goodbye reminds her yet again that it will always be temporary.

her voice becomes hoarse, her legs are broken, and her heart is ice again.

the red lipstick is gone now, down some stranger’s drain
her coat is cold, but warm enough for her ice-cold body
outside the window is a moving world again, as she stands still.

she returns to her room again, lights her candle up again, and the walls don’t ask her what happened. they cradle her and her bed that smells like death, buries the night under a loving earth, but never its children of adam.

the sun stays, nobody else does, and nobody ever did—but at least here lies her hard body until the night shapes her into something tender again. she doesn’t bother confronting herself, she doesn’t want to learn the language of heartbreak in another dialect—so she stays silent.

dawn she faces and tall she stands under the pale sunshine, nobody knows who she is—all she knows is like the very world around her, she’s mrs. nobody.

SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

america is the prom queen who sways proudly with her red lipstick and clumped mascara. her hair is blonde with rolled curls, and her tanned skin smells like vanilla and tastes like cancer. she’s beauty, she’s grace, she’s seduction—only from far away.

miss america always had the pageant smile, skinny waist and a perky chest—her teeth too white like pearls and her lips glazed in shimmery lip gloss and crystals; everyone claps for her while something feral already grows under her skin.

she wins prom queen every year, crowned with diamonds—capitalism’s favourite lie and the slave’s blood. of blood diamond trades and her crown that fuels guns, miss america is annihilation and bloodshed dressed in heavenly dreams.

miss america worships her crown, the 50 stars that shine bright—in glimmering unison and silent partisan animosity within the gaps. united are the stars by the men who worship america, kissing the flag and wrapping it around them to sleep, for the ones who pay with their singularity, becoming a multiplicity among the fifty broken stars.

her suffering is rather just as romantic as she is; snorting cocaine and crying underneath the skyscrapers is a luxury—cocaine turns into crystals, suddenly you see the businessman in his black suede gambling for it—her favourite supermodel becomes a niche, an icon because who knew suffering looks so glamorous for the rich. money makes the world go round, she learned that young. put on your heart-shaped sunglasses and see how small the world becomes—nobody knows that better than america does.

she lines up her diamonds like her cocaine, white lines on the dashboard of her lover’s mustang—diamonds carved by the slaves for the slave, to all your desires and your liberation, diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

america is the dream everybody wants to live in. just like the commercial that plays on the television, things go better with coke! everything seems better with a shot of america; she tastes like coca-cola, the taste of capitalism—sugary liberation, addictive dreams and glamorous decay, america you taste like glory!

LIFE IN PLASTIC

little miss america stands in front of her mirror, in the corner sits her dolls, long-forgotten—ken and barbie, the perfect citizens—oh and their two children, the perfect nuclear family, the real american family. barbie is thin, she smiles and adapts; she lives in plastic, she’s fantastic! she never ages or breaks; america loves her for she doesn’t ask for care, only for applause and the flashing lights.

she grew up with plastic, a plastic childhood of manufactured joy; controlled happiness given in small doses at a time, nothing she played with aged or bled and nor did she ever learn survival, she only lived and never endured agony outside her american dreams—miss america, you wouldn’t know the sound of gunshots in your school yet, would you?

her head spins from the teacups in disneyland, she waits for her prince charming somewhere in the land of love and glory—a girl who grew up with a plastic childhood looks for her plastic man, barbie and ken of america for the show—bonnie and clyde for the bills.

give a standing ovation to america, sing your national anthem written on paper bills while you stand tall over green clovers that smell like death!

THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

america cheerleads in college, all the boys are wrapped around her finger.

she broke up with her boyfriend and drinks her sorrows away; america’s the life of the party—she’s plastic, but she melts under the heat of las vegas—the city of no sleep. vegas is america that doesn’t pretend, only intoxicates at the sound of its name. the sun has set, and there’s no more day, no more tears and no more souls.

what happens here stays here.

in her little red party dress and high heels on, she’s out with her girlfriends—she drinks shot after shot. becomes the slot the men gamble with in the casino. she synchronizes her loneliness with the beats under neon lights.

everyone dances in america, everyone forgets in america. it’s loud enough that nobody has to listen to themselves or outside the nightclub palm-tree paradise; alcohol is medicine, money is glory, crystals are luxury, and the women are cocktails.

sugar, he calls her, anything else i can get for you?

she asks for his sweetness, of cherry cola and an artificial sugary high—drunk, drunk ride; you only live once—live young, die fast.

she wraps her arms around his neck and doesn’t know his name, but she calls him baby for tonight. she tells him that his skin tastes like the fourth of july—he feels like sweet freedom in the salty sweat-drenched noise and his heart is as loud as the fireworks—he’s destruction repacked as ecstasy, she takes him into his bedroom so she keeps singing longer—she makes L-O-V-E with her eyes closed and displays the letters like the hollywood sign on the hills of her heart, america’s sweetheart.

disney is the american dream for children, and vegas is the dream for adults; both are fake cities and plastic dreams that nobody wants to wake up from—wine and dine, drink and drive. overdose and die.

AMERICA’S SWEETHEART

america is patriotic, she’s fluent in intoxication and her anthem—money. her eyes, smile, and body are the currency; there she lies with burning hot desire—red, white and cold blue—stripped of intimacy.

the america she lives in doesn’t sell sex—it sells the entry ticket to the show. she displays herself as a symbol, the blonde bombshell, like the marilyn that the men worship. play a little dumb, miss america, soften your voice and sway your hips with pride—the world was always yours.

she calls it glory in the daytime and the screens, while at night she plays another vinyl by elvis, with a bottle of jack in her right hand. she’s learned how to cradle her pain with cherry-cola pills.

perhaps you’re oblivious to your luck, like your very own four-leafed clover; your body gets a name, your performance gets paid with bills; even when you lie among the rich, high and on cloud-9, you’re still america—not a girl with nothing to her name or her body, just a slave for the rich—of the rich.

nobody ever tells the world—not as glamorous as you—that fentanyl doesn’t need skyscrapers. unlike cocaine crystals, fentanyl wears rags—the america that exists without glamour. the zombies roaming the streets, the bodies asleep on the subway; a man plays his violin until the strings break, and still his starbucks cup only holds pennies—he watches passersby sip their americanos, but he gags; the very thought reminds him that every cup of coffee from downtown tastes like blood and everything he will never have.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

even when the world sing your national anthem, it’s all performance. for some reason, the people of colour and the immigrants sing louder than your own people, they embody your ten commandments far more than your own blood ever would—the outsiders love you harder, they defend you louder because they’re desperate, and when you break their hearts, they blame themselves—that’s the kind of heartbreak you are, america.

land of the free, of democracy.

how romantic is it—postcard americana? they’re in love with the summery ranch, white fences, cornfields, pickup trucks, diners, highways, bridges, and the sugared freedom fantasy—it’s addictive when one gets the taste of it—the privilege, as the politicians say.

miss america, when will you tell them about what they don’t see: the overdose at the end of this sweet indulgence? how sugar poisons you—your so-called liberty is rotting your own teeth.

ironically a woman of copper stands in your heart, holding a torch—a promise, one that she won’t ever keep, yet still she mothers the exhaustion of the newcomers—only if they serve, and if they never come close to your pedestal, or even if they do—they eventually fall; she watches them drown, she watches their dreams rot and yet she never steps down, this is liberty—she sees it all, but she stays and stands tall, engraved in give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

miss america watches herself as a movie in the cinema; of selling her own myths back to herself, worshipping the hero in flannel and denim—it’s beautiful suffering with a beautiful soundtrack, beautiful people and their beautiful problems.

america, you’re a rom-com movie—in your romance and your irony, the ones you break the hearts of still love you, and the ones who have yet to live in your sweet love—they want you to break their hearts, it’s the sweetest kind of heartbreak for them, isn’t it?

have a coca-cola america, eat a little more to fill the hole that you refuse to name—a paradox packaged in an american dream.

before i go and never come back again, miss america, fuck you and your american dreams.

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la casa de las rosas ⋅ [house of roses]

jim beam, jim beams

jim stands tall, he always does—the world applauds him in the daylight for his gold-star morals, clean hands and sainted smile, but my skin remembers what the sun never saw. only my burnt skin screams when i witness his hands holding a trophy and the roses he leaves on my doorstep after blooming bruises over my skin—i choose my poison, and it’s a bouquet of red roses, he knew their scent from the notes in your perfume—jim knows, he always knows what you don’t know.

men like him always stand tall, shoulders broad with the weight of stolen innocence in their prideful flesh—the blood of a virgin that keeps their manhood as arrogant as their dominance, the weight of his hand is enough to remind you how much bigger he is—he becomes the omnipotent in the room and suddenly you’re a slave in submission, so you submit—to his hands that keep you in his control and his sorry-dressed mercy that keeps you afloat for a while as you’re a slave kneeling in submission, you mistake him for god and so you believe he is sincere and deserving of your repentance.

the world kisses jim’s feet in the daylight, prostrate to him and shakes his hand with the same fingers that dig into virgin flesh in the winter. he teaches your skin his name before your mouth learns how to say it—he becomes the electricity, the current that burns through you in the broad daylight. your nerves memorize his rhythm, and so do your feet—they follow all the paths he carved for you. he was the best teacher and still is.

he lives under my eyelids, one blink and he’s back again; he walks in my home, lives in the corner of my room when the world goes to sleep, behind closed doors he writes his name in every chamber of my heart so i never forget him—neither will my blood, tainted from his venom, it flows through me like a prayer—ferocious and blazing with rage yet still all you feel is his name under my skin; jim teaches your heart to beat with his name, his language and his heat.

sainto ⋅ [saint]

jim doesn’t ruin you loudly, he ruins you quietly—he hides in between girlhood, the timeline that gets painted in the name of naïveté. he becomes the name on the prescription of your antipsychotics, he’s the flutters in your heart on the ECG, he’s in the aftertaste of a bitter overdose. he’s somehow always with you like a ghost—a delusion, a nobody.

he doesn’t just touch you, he turns you into a porn magazine and cuts you into shreds—scatters them around enough until you forget your name and the next minute, who you are, how old you are and what you’re good for.

jim wears a black suit and wakes you up at midnight to remind your grown self of where she is now, and it’s still somewhere in the broken cassette which keeps replaying a loop; every love after him arrives injured, every future has his fingerprints on its throat.

it looks like you again and again and again.

a foreign language that feels like a refuge for my war-torn heart never stays, even if i stitch us together, fate rips us apart, and when i try to stitch my own heart back together with acceptance, i hear your name again—i hear myself begging for mercy on the floor again, holding your leg and fading—it always ends like this.

nobody else can see you.

the letters of his name spell out V-I-O-L-E-N-C-E, the hiss of his belt spells out P-O-W-E-R and his voice that pierces your ears and makes your soul shake? G-L-O-R-Y. he feels like god in that moment, not because he is—but because of how helpless you become—the same way we call for god in calamity that he himself allows, i’m pleading for your mercy even if you’re the one with the knife to my throat.

they say there’s always wisdom in pain, i could only ever distinguish your glory from god’s when i realized your pain only brought pain and stemmed from pain itself—what do i do with praises for my strength when i’m skinned to my core? you’re still the one with everything in this world while i wait for my bounty in the next.

you hold her in your arms and tell her you’ll protect her from the wolves as you slowly burn through her, you’re protecting her from yourself as you consume her whole—you teach her to obey, and she does, until one day she doesn’t—you really do start to look like a hallucination.

yo soy tu princesa.

la muerte en vida ⋅ [death in life]

the years go by, but his name still lives deep in your bones. a lover offers you a kiss, but you feel like a heavier hand would feel more like home—the sharp sting following his hit and the strength of his body against your helpless one. how do i tell you? don’t you know jim taught this language to me? a hit feels safer than a kiss because it isn’t foreign, jim taught me how to take his lips on my cheeks and his hands on my throat the next day.

he wipes my tears, but it isn’t him anymore; you told me that god was always watching and that even if my tongue swears with the truth, maybe god just makes some girls like this… how could you be so sure? watching isn’t the same as intervention, and knowledge isn’t voluntary—when the slate becomes blank, you’ll take in any language that won’t leave you empty among a full world. he writes of red, violet, green and yellow—jagged, round, blotched and bloody words on my skin.

a man is smoking a cigarette across the street, i feel hot rage burning through my skin again. i watch myself land on the concrete and crushed under his feet—i can taste his bitter saliva, i feel his kiss—it’s just a cigarette, but it’s you—it’s you, i smell you in this smoke. you fill my lungs up with ash and my mind with euthanasia and euphoria, smoking kills—but jim kills you slower, softer; you are dead before your heart stops beating, you’re in your grave before the earth gets to welcome you.

dios ⋅ [god]

why the rage in your eyes? your irises are dark yet soft, turn brown—blazing and the pearlescent whites of your eyes stay red-hot; fists clenched, chin up and brows furrowed—you’re still holding all that heavy metal in your hands?

why shouldn’t my blood rage red-hot?

jim uses the girls’ bodies as a training ground for him and his men, all on the top shelf. femininity becomes an erotic relic for sale, of dolls and toys for the master until you grow out of innocence—or oblivion.

jim still stands tall, not because he’s big but because nobody ever forced him to kneel the way he makes his girls kneel.

jim thrives because god hasn’t reminded him yet that he, too, is a slave like the rest of us—the only difference is he serves his manhood and we serve our vulnerability to him, we serve anything that feels real, even when it bleeds—especially when it makes you bleed.

yo soy la princesa. comprende mis white lines.

the soft chords of oud play, my heartstrings remember this melody—of the song where the hero dies at the end, after he saves the heroine.

وحشتيني (waḥ-sh-tī—nī)
i miss you.

as the trumpets swell and the violins tremble, let the world give a standing ovation for the hero who saves the heroine from dying, before he takes a bullet to his chest—burying himself into the dark sky of the night and never letting his light live in those night again; everyone will stand in honour, not because he lives, but because he won’t anymore.

how will the world cheer for you, kneel to you—put their hand on their heart as a means of respect when this is the same world that will tear your chest, break your heart and press the grief hard enough on your sternum that no sigh to leave your mouth will be of relief—only burden?

all i hear are the echoes of your voice, the echoes of trumpets, as if the world still expects me to stand in silent ovation for you, because dying once was never enough, in the silence i play every song that sounds like you but in film, i refuse to let silence take you away from me because you are anything but silence, you sound like every song of heartbreak, every syllable of longing and every lyric of yearning.

وحشتيني .. وحشتيني
i miss you .. i miss you

my hands are cold from the sting of an early winter, eyes red-rimmed and skin flushed as i’m sitting in the front row, watching you die so gracefully in front of my eyes; you do it so beautifully that you make death look like life, i want to follow you behind.

he’s glorious, he stands tall with the world’s heaviness on his shoulder—like the dutiful brass of the trumpet, heavy with expectation, but there’s the contradiction of the softness in his voice, from his velvet-cloaked heart. then come his eyes, they feel like home—the ones that hold you before his arms would, especially in his sweet hesitation—of strings and keys, they shake quietly, and i repeat that melody still, playing a song the night forgot to tell me to stop.

i wish i had picked all the flowers from my garden before you left, give your soft heart a place just as gentle to rest before the earth swallowed it—if only you could have smelled the fragrance of my love for you, aromatic enough that your heart would have something sweeter to cling to before the world stuffed your wounds with salt and dread.

سؤالك عني ما يمنع، ولو قلبك علي زعلان
your silence won’t stop me from wishing you’d ask about me again

the silence says more than the words, the language of melancholy is such that i’m fluent in it through strings, brass and a foreign language that feels like home, the same language that sits on my beloved’s tongue like honey—for the last time, i hear the last words of his words before they wash away.

the trumpets announce a doomsday, part of the orchestra before the hero dies—of brass and breath, unflinching like him; they announce him in ceremony, loud as quiet as he is. the strings of the violin shiver in response, delicate yet loud enough like his eyes—they refuse the posture of brass, thin and feminine in honesty, do you hear me crying out your name?

somewhere between brass and string does the piano press softly—key by key, like his gentle touch over my wounds; we didn’t demand attention, we only insisted on being felt.

please ask me how i am again, i’ll tell you i’m okay because i know that you know i’m not—i still smell the lavender in your cologne, it smells intention and home, soothing enough to put me to sleep again—if only you knew, even the softest of feathers don’t bring such a sleep that even slate would bring on a cold night because your warmth and lullaby would accompany, look me in my eyes and that’ll be an answer loud enough—drive back home and pour your sorrows over these violets i grew for you, we’ve always spoken the same language, despite our mother tongues being oceans away.

وحشتيني .. وحشتيني
i miss you .. i miss you

in the echoes of music, every word feels like a wound—every line, it’s the language my tongue doesn’t speak, but my soul recognizes your shadows in those words, for how much i miss you—how i can spell your name from every letter that equates as a synonym for longing.

i still remember the night you left me, on a cold december—the world was asleep, it was only us for a while. your eyes lurk under a veil of melancholy and your voice too quiet to reach my ears but my soul heard it—and it repeats it all back to me like a melody, in one word—وحشتيني, slow at the start and heavy at the centre, softer at the end again; it’s as if the word embodies you, with soft exhaling exhaustion as it dies off at the end.

the emphasis on ح (ḥ), it’s the spine of the word itself—rooted in longing, it’s an exhale of pain rather than speech—but the ش (sh) follows, almost like a hush, my longing told to be quiet with one word that’s big enough to remind me you’re no longer with me. it’s a word so soft becomes just as harsh at its core with a break, air forced through clenched teeth as restraint fails, grief is told to lower her voice as she remembers the way he’d say it, not too loud and not too quiet—just soft enough to hush my nightmares.

at its end, the word is drained of its strength and softens in your chest, ي (ī) that drags as the word drops lower, just the way the hero’s warm breath lingers for a while before his strength is finished and his heart surrenders and he’s too tired to keep standing. he was strong right at his core, in the middle of a story, but at the end, he goes quiet—the end of the day was always quiet, whether it was his voice or the sound of his heartbeat, never this cold silence of nothingness.

even وحشتيني knows how the story ends, sharp in the middle and soft at its finish.

أحبك يا أجمل الإحساس، وحشني حبك المجنون
i love you—you’re the softest feeling i’ve ever known.
i miss your crazy love, the way your voice calmed every storm in me.

the hero always takes care of the heroine first before himself—even when he betrays the clock, negotiates with the longest of nights and rewrites the cold route with his warm blood, it’s enough to mend his heart and make him stand taller—to be the hero without announcing it, with his last act of honour—he becomes a saviour, sacrifices with a smile before he dies.

he isn’t مجنون like a madman, he’s the smoke that comes after you blow a dancing flame—he’s the craziness—the fever that comes after he shares a piece of his heart with you for the night, you realize that the word مجنون is written in his eyes—but so is your reflection.

there’s the tired softness in his face that crushes my ribs; it’s the bittersweetness of an ache i couldn’t name. he’s the hero that finally saved me, and he’s the hero that the world takes away from you before you get to thank him.

وحشتيني .. وحشتيني
i miss you .. i miss you

how could you save me but not save yourself? i wonder if i’m asking that question to you or the clock—the cruel clock that takes you out of my eyes and far away from my heart. the memory of you makes my eyes sting, and my hot tears fall, burning my skin and grazing over my lips.

i go back to all those nights again, to the bullet that pierces into your chest before you disappear, it isn’t loud, it doesn’t make an announcement—it engulfs you silently until you disappear the next day—you’re still here, but the clock reminds me you’re slowly leaving me and one day, the scent of your cologne no longer exists in the streets, the shadow of your tall figure doesn’t hide me away from the world anymore, the lights are pale without the warmth of your brown hair and soft skin.

all that remains in my garden of roses are thorns—the scent of once damask now reeks of rubble—everyone stays, except you, everyone but never you.

the hero always dies at the end after he thought he saved the heroine.

the trumpets praise him.
the violins mourn him.
the piano remembers.
and i hear them, all at once.

my beloved, i miss you—i’ve missed you for too long, i still do.

i miss you.
i miss you.
i miss you.

وحشتيني

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