Dear Stranger,
I abandoned substack. This happened as a inevitable outcome while I wrestled with the unfortunate realisations that only come after you’ve left the belly of a few monsterous events. Today, on a whim, I opened my About to read through it and find myself typing away…
Shall we pick this journey up again?
Sincerely,
Bakhtawar
Almost teetering off the cliff of life, I turned 22 as though a fawl ready for slaughter. Instead, I held onto life with a single pinky finger curled around another. In 22 years, there are only 18 things that I can’t get rid of:
Life
Because as I finished writing the last of the letters, what were meant to be goodbyes turned into tiny victories of sorts. It was cold, and a friend with a friend made the night toasty with some sparklers. Never let anyone tell you a sandwich can’t save lives, especially ones from OPTP ordered at midnight on the roof of your dorm building.
Losing home
Like clockwork, every year, I learn to dismiss what home was to reconstruct what it has to be. Here, in the bathroom, with the smoke calming me, I realize home is malleable, home is fickle, home doesn't have to be fundamental. I've come out of the womb of abandonment crushing the systemic household, and the need for something that is this arbitrary in the first place.
And so I write of it:
When it happened this year, I was perched in a crook of room 122, where I turned 22. One of the best birthdays of my life. Green hallows and peach malt. Cigerretes and dance music. Love and bananas. It was the room I broke open in, tatters floating all around with the demise of my half glory. Rebirth after loss and derision. Escitalopram and fluoxetine and alprazolam. Rain, always before the important exams, and to stand in it until my clothes were sagging on my shoulders like the heart in grief. I witnessed the ebb of one season into the other, from winter to summer, where in the spring I blossomed. A compelling anchor, room 122, a grounding point. A space to unfold and express again, everything, everything.
from my grief notebook
Myself
Through thick and thin, unwillingly, in an arrangement of mind, body, and spirit, all unfortunately one, always. Throughout. And of this nothing more, nothing less.
Joy
Of which there is an importance. Because much of wanting to die happens not in the middle of the night within the sanctity of the dark, but in the day when there is an abundance of joy. And of this from my notebook essays;
It is one of those moments when words are bursting out of me. And so I was talking about stars to myself and about how they’re dying, and wondering if they witness the sparkle of their demise, or perhaps that they anticipate just that, and about how everything has been twinkling lately. And how twinkling is like snowflakes, or crystal ice, or in other words; fragile and raw and glittery in that untouchable, dying sort of way. Because when snowflakes land, they melt.
And of course about how I reach for that twinkle not because of life, but because of mortality. Of how i’m still trying to survive, and so, am not living. But also that I may always be just surviving because some people go years into life doing just that for decades before dying in its bossom anyways.
5. Grief
I was also somewhere somehow talking of catching hail in the palm of my hand, where it melts slowly, and catching sprinkles of feelings and photographing it for someone so individual he takes and sends countless pictures as a single body because he doesn’t have to deal with the interconnectedness of an AFAB individual.
And so the lack of everything I was unable to do, for no reason, but someone else’s feeble will. Someone just as indespensable, just as unique, and just as potent as myself, against myself.
Ideas
Because the tone is set so, like the birth of this article. Where I was talking about ideas bursting from me, like catching wildflowers from a rain of wildflowers, and about growing and losing these bursts of creativity, but more importantly of dropping wildflowers the moment they’re caught because of time.
Lost causes
Because some cases are better left unopened, and other tadpoles much muchier and intriguing to go after as they bloom, and some things are left unknown even after we give our all to them.
A loss of words
Because there will always be moments that leave you speechless. The highs can be higher than I could ever imagine, and the lows can get lower than the lowest low I can come up with. Which is to ultimately say, I have run out of imagination, or become frightened of it, or lost it all in my 22 years of this small life.
Optimism
Which dare I say, I am, with conviction, brimming with positive possibility even with this death wish that plagues my life.
Pessimism
Which I also possess, because life is not constant, or linear, just spontaneous, and chaotic.
And either way, I am both so wholly when they come up in this aporadic burst, with tunnel vision, destructively and constructively, at the expense of others.
Willpower
As you can infer, much like the horrors of life, I have persisted. Mostly by piggy backing on the life of others. Living vicariously to save them.
Friends
Whether you can tell in the moment or not, whether this is optimistic for the pessimist or not, in truth, there is always someone, if you just stop so fixedly projecting your ideals on them and let the relationship take its own course.
Parents
Swollen with pride, and bruised with might. Like pomegranates, infinite with a piece of heaven lodged into them.1 Always, forever, trying, trying, trying…
Hoarding
From this year, so far, I have collected the following:
Twine I wound around some fairy lights, fairy lights, a tree shaped lamp, two green mugs, a black bowl, a black plate, a white mug, a painting, two packs of dunhill, 2 shirts from her, 4 pretty notebooks, one of which I gave to her, cigerrete butts I salvaged from the important events, 3 lost homes, and flowers.
Hope
Because motivation rarely filters in, from the dregs of this mind, hidden deep in the void of the major depressive disorder, a sliver of hope for the people, and in the people. Tied deeply to the reality that to live like me is to sentence myself to death, and there is infinite courage in that, which I muster up a little more everyday. 2
Audacity
To continue despite myself, until the very moment I won’t be able to muster it, by which time I will expire. Because audacity generates life, on a whim, with no effort, every second, every minute, every hour, everyday, everyday.
Passion
Which comes in accordance to its will, with impulsive fervor, to take one step infront of the other, when I don’t want to. In the form of every new project, in spite of the previous one. Despite the numbing heavy of the brain in decay.
18. Love
For the third time, with ruthlessness, courage, and warmth. A love that smelled of sweet perfume and freshly laundered sheets. One that encompassed and spread through friends and her to beyond them both. Because there is just that everywhere, in the air particles, being breathed in every moment, finding itself in our bloodstream, painting us from the inside and outside, always, always, always
If the above post resonated with you, much more like these coming ahead :)
An islamic belief my south asian parents would insist on was to eat all the beads inside a pomegranate because apparently one of the beads in every pomegranate is from heaven.
Read Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton