I used to write…

I used to write. I might have battled with things internally and externally but all of that became one as I became one when the words spilled out. Spilled, puked, coerced, flowed…watered…emerged as flowers from concrete. No thought was irrelevant, no feeling dismissed, no past was present and no present was future. I was there and here and everywhere and I decided what mattered. I set the tone to what was to be. I created movement and momentum and the common denominator was me.

I don’t know why or where or when the common denominator became things other than myself. So in love was I with the idea of bringing things to life…that I buried myself ten feet deep in my own world. Now that I’ve hit all fours, cried a river or two of miseries…most self-imposed…Now that I have stretched myself thin, erased myself, and tried to bring a thing or two back to life…I am trying to wrap myself around the idea that the common denominator is still me. I can believe the best in all the tiny specs that make up the universe yet can’t…swallow…the fact that…the best in me still breathes.

I used to write unashamed on pain. After all, it still flows through my veins, this time golden. Its rays unaware of beauty still tender, still raw. How could I do this to myself? Burden my own burden because of what they said? I am the force that flows through this skin and there is no greater power vested in me than this owning of what I am. I used to look at myself through my own eyes. After all, after the storm, it was I that picked my own slack. How could I do this to myself? Even my own feet testify to all I’ve walked, tread, ran, crawled…these scars are the most beautiful parts of me. How could I deny myself the honour of what it’s like to live with a head held high? I own every fall…I swear…I laugh at how foolishly I’ve slipped through some cracks. I saw the sun shine and the rain clearly tell me where not to step and still step did I…”what’s the worst that could happen?” I asked…and soon enough…I had stories to live, didn’t I? I didn’t have time to write. I was too busy trying to make sense of things. Ah, silly me…didn’t realise I’d be asking myself questions till the day I died.

I used to write the unfiltered. The words chose me in the greatest choosing there ever is…to be seen, felt, read, licked from bottom to top. It was the image that I held and the vision I had that pushed me through the worst times. It’s true I admit I didn’t much ask “what’s the best that could happen?”. Now that I have, I’m certain the best there is will reveal itself to me as well. The way you are before, during, and after the storm is worlds apart. I no longer oscillate between deciding where I am to decide where I’m going. I may be many things but a hypocrite I can never be. And so I no longer hold myself hostage to things that need to leave.

All canvas start with being white. Then a calling brings you to express. No one else can even point a finger to what you’re in the process of making. Even the mess is for you to make sense of. Over and over until you’re satisfied with bleeding and sucking the venom out. I know I have, countless times. Only then can things blossom. Right now I’m raw again and I’m loving it. I picked on a wound and it’s gushing red. I’ve tended to the parts of me you now read. Don’t worry. I’ve alphabetised, scheduled, numbered, inspected, all the ways there are to walk in, and all the ways there are to walk out of my doom. I am not worried about the aftermath. My darling, you are free to leave if you can’t get through this part. This is the part of me I hold the dearest to my heart and I have no space whatsoever for in-betweeners, jugglers, smugglers of my light. May they kindly fuck off.

Sincerely yours,

The parts of me that asks what else?

Follow my page on Instagram

Hello y’all

Here’s a little update on this WordPress page I miss very much.

Lately I’ve been posting my writing on Instagram. Please follow me at @sadiakhanwrites

Link: https://instagram.com/sadiakhanwrites?utm_medium=copy_link

With love,

Sadia.

The surface

Had I any other way to put this, I wouldn’t

Of all the ways one can embrace to be

The most impactful is our necessity

Of eachother, of no one outside of ourselves

The more the words, the less concentrated the meaning

What good is expression? If it narrows down doors that should’ve welcomed, all minds, all sorts

Of integration, in this disintegration

Call me. I probably won’t pick up

The danger isn’t in disagreement, it lies in our bereavement

Would you walk with me till your feet are sore?

What if I told you the journey has nothing to do with physicality?

Mind-fuck

And just as I’m about to rediscover the pieces of the puzzle

I am no longer intrigued by what I can’t shuffle, with my own hands

The lesser beings of a man, surround the profound errors of his ways

Concluding with the One and Only

The surface signals towards internal state, time and again

The hollower the guitar, the more the senses raise, in retrospect

None but ourselves can hit bull’s eye without first imagining the dartboard with our instincts

Euthanasia

I am here

Flesh and bone

But that one time keeps luring me back

To this state of timelessness that engulfs me away

 

Every house that I’ve ever lived in

The balcony is where I sit, in my mind

The outside looking in

All the places that I’ve been, animate now

 

It is your voice that gives all this meaning

Pointing the obvious, the red in the red

But somehow, without you saying it

All these shades, I wish I was colorblind just for them to burst

 

Reaching out through the inanimate

Stone cold, transitioned into this, we have adjusted

The moral dilemmas in our heads, have justified themselves

Mercy, mercy. While I’ve given in to one aspect of life, I have conquered another.

Honest mistake

It’s everywhere, it’s everywhere

I feel crowded in this empty room and alone in a crowded room

Paradoxical only when you haven’t been there

Only when you haven’t felt the same words mean different upon repetition

“LEAVE me alone” “Leave ME alone”

“STAY gone” “Stay GONE”

 

Serenity

Where have you abandoned me?

It happens everywhere now, did I tell you? It happens everywhere

Triggered

What theme do I fit you in? You were everything

I see a glimpse of you in every tangible, intangible only in these distorted memories

 

I’m doing it again, this little thing where I trace back my steps

To make sure I don’t step on the lines I’ve already stepped on

Mistake

noun

Definition 1: “an act or judgement that is misguided or wrong”

Definition 2: “something, especially a word, figure, or fact, which is not correct; an inaccuracy”

verb

Definition 3: “be wrong about”

Definition 4: “wrongly identify someone or something as”

 

I burnt every page, except the corner of the last one, last abstraction

Because every time you ended a thought, you pressed the ballpoint a bit too hard

Almost to the point where, the next page, inherited, the pain of the precedent

Your subtle ways a secret I have kept

You, on the other hand, have vanished

“Just because you’re around doesn’t mean that you’re around.”

Don’t dream about it

Undulating on our way to the finish line

At docks with ships waiting for nothing

I pace

You starve

We figure eachother out

 

The difference between your cunningness and his naivety

Is that one thread that holds the soul intact

Had you an art for it, rather than a way to get away

With it

I wouldn’t have to spell it out for you

 

Portions, fractions, ratios

To stigmatize the dog for being restless

For the night to be too demanding, on the loaded, rolling on it

Find a better way to say it, man. What does you in?

 

Do you, buddy.

Kindle on the flame that remains pure

After burning off all that you look for, about, like firewood

Lay it to rest. Don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, don’t dream about it.

Kudos

The fragility of it, the harshness with which you face it

All these patterns, we fall in love with

You have taught me to be gentle with myself

And for that, I am indebted to you, all these lives

Unaware

Of their own power

This is what I’m putting forth; sue me.

All these secrets, we’re butchered with

Time and again.

<<>>

I don’t know what’s worse, an explosion first thing

or little ‘coming togethers’ of complexities

that in retrospect, make less sense in isolation

It’s funny

Almost as if you could explain it

But I mean hey

Kudos to comedians and illusionists

Who make it seem effortless

while we all waste away in the trance of these happenings.

November, bleak midwinter

Raw

In the name of You for whom my blood bleeds

Its existence

This slight blizzard, teasing my weather to loosen up a bit

But what I found has been blurred and brought back to me

In this confusion

My limits outstretched, false hope dangles. Maybe these walls represent the bland, in us, in it all. Can I use this for my advantage? What is self-interest, but a dying man profiting from all the visits, all the crumbs left after tea for the floor to sweep. For the mop to clean frank dismay. It’s been a year. It’s been a fucking year.

Never contemplated it. Figured there’s way more to ruin in ourselves before ruin is brought to us. Pain exclusive. The boy kicked out of class for fidgeting too much with his pen, can now turn your world upside down, with just a blink.

But you’re still shameless. You rub the chalk before they sense the screech. You drag on the wood but it’s your burden that stays. A marble you toss on a moving staircase…path of pride, circular shapes sure are funny, ain’t they? No side to corner, every reflection: yours.

And then I think about what I just wrote and who’d read it. About how I can’t be bothered to edit.

Order such chaos. Would you fucking get it?

It’s alright, I mean. I’m supposed to get it, write it, talk it, walk it. Screwed up by this order. Let’s just say I’ve walked it, gotten it till I lost it, could barely get my message across had I talked it, but whenever I write it

It’s as

I’m

I don’t know

This

One minute

I’m still. The world happens. But the world inside my head happens for me as I question my entire being and look like a lost, bent over, fleer of war for a word that’ll not make these bombs detonate as I stand on a landmine. Enduring every.single.fucking.day.pre.and.post.this.bloody.minute. Where I wait as it all comes back to me and I wonder why I ever signed up for this shit.

And no alpha infront or omega behind will get flustered for anything past his poor life to watch out for. Yesterday was for me and tomorrow will probably be for you but who’s got to explain as of today to someone who needs to wake up and see it for what it is?

And as a thousand images flash like a cassette stuck for being played in the wrong time. I pick the images that stuck and let my giddy gaze form a sentence or two, in this dim frame of mind. What I could’ve said, what it all meant.

And then a stranger takes on, and writes another sentence off of that, elsewhere. All individualistic, of course. Your pain does not precede mine. Your imagination is second hand.

Why so sour, honey? I have mended to your stretch marks, your shade, your scars. I have counted the spaces in your hair as the sun pierced through it and set my eyes ablaze, for wanting to, shelter you in me.

Two utility bottles tripped over some trivialities and bowed in the same 45 degree angle. Does that mean we look the same if struggling with, the exact same, catastrophe? Or should we finally give due credit to gravity, for letting us feel more than we should because the lighter the heart, the easier it is to flee to its whereabouts.

I can’t write more.

Maybe that’s why books have numberings and pages have word limits. Because. If you take all the trips it needs, to come to a conclusion of a final thought, you wouldn’t ever write it down.

You’d throw that draft out the window.

As of all the others that didn’t make the cut.

Because, who’d be insane enough to write this?

I can’t.

I fucking won’t.

Or I’ll break again.

“But it is in the breaking that you’ll find your strength, my friend”

Bury it all with me.

Make me the enemy, take your revenge.

I’ll be here.

All the way…

Places in faces

IMG_20171124_001725“Do they not think that their words have weight?”

There has got to be a face that is read for what it is
Should time really account for innocence lost?

I mean, to lose that which you left behind in childhood and go back to it again, aware

God knows how much I’ve stored, meaningful in its meaningless description
And how much I’ve discarded, only to be met with it again, in another form

A feather in the stream
Trying to regain in flight what shed it

“The mysterious weakness of men’s faces”

“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes.”

Had I expression enough, to walk you through it

It’d feel like I’ve robbed you of His revelation

My bones shiver, my voice trembles, as this thought becomes concrete

Pale as dusk, disillusionment; two-fold

Subjective and objective truths

are not enough

Fire

I am the last fibre of my being

There is a part of me that hides, and another that sings in birds’ ears

I sway and play and dare to talk to my dreams out loud and tell them “hey

I’ve made it to you, I’m here” yet all they do is smile back, because they knew

the shadows that hide with me know, they know because they’ve witnessed the snow

and the storm, and the blizzard, and the rain, and the spaces that made me think this was all in vain

they know the footsteps, bloodsheds, deaths, and blackness of this voice

this trembling voice

By God…if I could speak then I would’ve turned the world and everything in it on fire

but at the price of turning myself to ash too

and so I contained the poison so I could kill the parts of me that would not survive

but I swear I remember them like me and mine, I think of them from time to time

I visit them in dreams only, they recognise me firsthand, for I too, am a memory to all I once knew

I am being pulled back so hard, I could lose a limb or two

in the process

but I swear the minute I bounce back

this world will know the voice that spoke fire

My sanctuary

I’ve built around this pain a halo so forfeit

we are facing the sun and looking at the pond we once drew puddles in

with our steps

the mud and the simple and the rain

never in vain but lately I don’t know where to keep

the steps I take back and forth

everywhere I look I see a memory attached to another memory

all of it attached to the last fibre of my being

words such a curse when after everything still cant serve to find a way

a way through whatever took you away

all these books and words and findings dont help

nobody knows what they’re doing, never did

it is all a box within a box cuz’ if you get out nobody will be able to tell what you’re up to next

loneliness has always been the price i had to pay

to not conforming to what you say

i should and shouldn’t do

with what I’ve felt

I’ve been thinking about writing a book for so long

I have all the pieces, I’ve written everything I’ve ever wanted to say

and yet

putting it all together

for you to understand

makes me not know which version of me

represents

the trajectory

of me befriending someone’s pain again