That week.

I have felt my heart stop dead as I watched her wheeled out of the operation theatre, I have felt a thousand flutterings in my heartbeat and a surge of affection flood my being with all the force of a tsunami as I held him, just minutes old, so fragile and so beautiful.  I have shattered as I watched her in so much pain I could do absolutely nothing about. I have felt my strength break and tears well because of the cries of a three year old who missed his mother, I have tried to comfort someone touched by the pain of death, I have felt the helplessness of being miles away from someone I loved who was grieving.  I have experienced a giddy level of happiness and the joy of a new life and the grief of a lost one all at once. I have confronted the fragility of life and learnt to accept its transient nature, I have begun to understand the written fate that spares no one.

I'm harsh and bitter and I let loose my tongue when my anger gets the better of me. I'm self righteous and arrogant and think I'm perfect but I'm not. I sin shamelessly and lecture others not to commit lesser sins. I'm a wreck most of the time and despicable too. I think I  ought to be pitied but I shouldn't. I'm a pathetic shell of who I used to be and there's still a part of my ego that claims I'm good enough. I have hurt people that I love enough to hate myself more than they do.I'm living on a shipwreck that used to be the titanic. People lie. You don't get used to change, you just get used to crying.

I tried to feel your physical presence, I tried to smell you in wafts of oncoming breezes, I pretended you were here while I skyped you and kissed the screen.

I tried to tell myself it will be okay, but the truth is life without you is stretching ahead of me like a vast empty expanse of nothing, a bleak world that spins in an orbit with no sun, with day and night intermingling and stretching into nothingness, meaningless infinite voids of nothing. Nothing virtual will ever replace the warmth of your hugs or the softness of your voice, and no comfort equals the strength your words give me.

I am lost, I admit in an ocean of humanity, nameless, faceless, directionless, and you gave me direction and faith and without you, I’m but a speck in the the billions of particles of this world.

Allow me to be a little pissed off at you, I want to rage, rant and explode in a fury of my own words and disappointment. I never meant to isolate you or drift away but watching you slowly slipping out of your own control and turning into what you used to despise is heartbreaking and infuriating all at once. All I ever asked was that you had a little common sense and stick to the basic moral values we shared as friends, all I ever asked was that those basics did not change.
But they did, and drastically so, and now all I have is nothing, nothing I care to remember, nothing for us I look forward to, and I cannot begin to comprehend how fast and how irreversibly things changed. Have I turned into an inhuman piece of nothingness that distances itself from everything that annoys it, zero tolerance, zero anything? I'm too tired to care, too afraid to ask, too terrified to open my eyes and realise you've changed, and that nothing will ever be the same again, too hopeful to disappoint the part of me that's living in denial. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Your words still hurt like glass shards long after I pulled them out of my maimed and broken body

I waited an eternity for somebody to fix me

and pray that I'll never be afraid again.

I waited eternity for the tears and the shaking to cease, and for the fear of you to leave

I waited in vain for death and its offerings in blissful sleep

I prayed though my faith was beginning to falter and fail

I prayed for an end to the darkness and for the sun to shine again

I prayed for light

and for the will to survive.

A while ago I told myself I wouldn't care and for some time, I didn't and to be honest, it was easy to live without   caring about you because it was living without dealing with you, without hurting. 

But truth, especially bitter ones can only be buried for so long before they snake their way out of the dirt into heat that melts tears beneath my closed eyelids and threatens to break me completely. Because the truth I try to run away from is that it hurts that after years of friendship and a million moments shared and countless jokes and laughter that bound us together, all you can remember is the bad phases and the fights and where I messed up. I know where I was wrong and where I let my temper get ahead of me and let myself speak what I didn't mean in the heat of the moment, but I've changed when you were gone and I've learnt to shut up before I hurt people I care about. 

But you won't understand and today all you could possibly think of me is the person I once was and you refuse to change that frame of mind and you refuse to believe I do care, so much that the notion has gained momentum and a lot of people have ended up telling me I don't care as much I should about you, and some days I wonder if it's people's opinion that hurts me or the voices inside my own head. I did try, not to care to save myself from being hurt by the resentment you hold for me, but you can't bottle up and forget feelings, I do care and it does hurt and I wish it wasn't like this and I wish I could rewind and change what I did or make you forget where I failed as a friend. Some days I wish you wouldn't dismiss so easily what we had, I wish you would forgive me because I was a kid like you, and still had so much to learn, even though I thought I didn't. I wish people would think before they judged me and our friendship so easily and sometimes  I wish I had an outlet for this frustration that builds inside me for all the things I can never change.

Only evolution

Am I doing this wrong? Was I meant to be doing something more? Something else? Am I hurting you? Have I changed in ways I cannot see? Has my faith fallen? Have I become unbearable? Or have I always been this way? Is there an answer to anything? Am I so lost I cannot see where I've failed? As a person, a friend, a sister, a human? Does it matter that I do not understand? Do I not deserve a second chance? Why doesn't anyone deserve a second chance? Why is everything I know about me, that is solid and secure fading? Would it change anything if I apologized? I want you to apologize, is that wrong? Am I wrong? Why do I not know? Why is my sense of judgment failing? Why am I failing people I love? Do my tears mean nothing? Do I mean nothing to you? I want to matter, I hope I'm not wrong, I hope I find a way, before I fade, before I fail again, before it's too late.

Spinning into infinity

Crater

A big black endless hole

Stars above, beckoning

Come out into the light

Deception

Because there's no rope

Falling

Shining above me, twinkling fireworks and promises

Liars

There is nothing good anymore, nothing happy

And there is no light

Not here

Still falling

There is no bottom, I realize

Just before the ground hits me,

breaking bones

Blood on my fingers

Tears on the sky

Blurring the stars

Everything is black

Violets will never bloom again.

 * * *

An hour passes

The bleeding stops

But not the burning

The skin is torn apart,

I can see the inside

I am alone

Oh but for you, I was never good enough

I was ugly before I was born

How did your heart turn to pebbles and grit?

Thrown together

So much ice and stone

So cold

Fingernails and fists 

Breaking my defense

It was still my fault

It was always my fault

Breaking my heart

Not that you care

Breaking my wings

But you'd already cut them off

Before hope could hope to be born

And all of them are dead

love and hope and prayers

and my plentiful worthless tears

Buried in a field of violets

But you shut off the sun, so the violets don’t grow anymore

Now it’s all black.

But I promised myself I would be happy so I smiled

Even though my tears ran a river

and your words swam in it

I took your hate and put it in a cardboard box

and then I taped it up so it could never get to me

Acid, dripping off your tongue, scarring

Your hate seeped out of the cardboard box

drop by drop like poison

Burning everything in its path, sucking oxygen and hope

while my tears are flowing down a valley

the streams are becoming a river, it merges, it is a sea

It is overflowing, overwhelming, I cannot breathe

It is seeping into the ground, giving back life to everything you destroyed

It is flowing into the field where the violets stand   

Nourishing their empty purple hearts

My faith is no longer shattered

Arise from the barren fields

Hope, no longer dead

My desperate prayers have been accepted

The cardboard box may be open

Your hate is free to roam

But your words mean nothing to me

But I am no longer in the black hole, no longer unhappy

No longer under your control

The stars are real, they were not lying

I am whole again, and perfect

But above all, I am happy

I can smile again, I am free

Tonight I will not cry myself to sleep

Tonight I will sleep in peace

Holding on to the belief

That to someone, I mean something

For them , I will live

And for them, I will breathe

Even after you take the light from every part of me

Even after you steal the sun from my violet field

For the best friend I've ever had

It’s on nights like these that I miss you the most, your quiet wisdom and your unfailingly right solutions to everything. It was what would comfort me the most when I was faced with what seemed like the hugest problems in life, that I could enter your door, always unlocked to me, five minutes away and find within a way to stop the flood of tears and answers to all my questions and probably, the truest home I’ve known. I miss talking about everything late into the night, and finishing your sentences, when everything was so right and so perfect. It’s times like those I want to preserve forever so I can revisit them when I’m in the darkest of places.

Most of the time, I make it through, though I’m confused if it’s others making judgments or just me judging myself. Lately I’ve just taken to crying it out, there’s pretty much no other way to deal with it, I don’t think anyone knows me as well as you do and no one could be of as much help. It’s ridiculously difficult not having someone to talk everything out to, someone who understands and has solutions and gets your jokes. It’s like missing a soulmate.

It is hard being the strong one, the sensible one and the dependable one all of the time. I see it now that you’re gone and that responsibility has naturally fallen to me, and sometimes I think I’m failing at it. Sometimes I think I’m not suited to the job even though I try very hard, I do. Most of the time, I wish you were here to tell me it was okay, and that I was good enough.

I have no idea how you did what you did for me, and probably for everyone you know, too. Your strength seems so infinite sometimes, it shocked me when you broke down once in front of me. It was so easy to forget you were human, and only a girl, although older than me. You probably had to swallow all your problems to make room for everyone else’s and it would just seem that you had none at all, when in actuality, you probably had the most. To put others before yourself is something I’m only truly beginning to understand when I stand in your shoes, even though I feel like I don’t deserve them. You are one of the most selfless and beautiful people I know, and I am truly lucky to have met you.

I miss you. Not all the time, not everyday, but when I realize I have to do everything on my own, and how much easier your presence made everything. When I do, it hits me hard. I pretty much remember everything about you and just the fact that your physical presence is far away makes me feel utterly alone, a deep and endless ache, because you are truly irreplaceable, in every possible way.

"Long live the magic we made! "

Let's stay up all night in the clothes we wore for the wedding, teasing endlessly and taking stupid pictures, laughing hysterically, drunk on no sleep and lots of food, an unfaltering flow to our conversation, cousins, united by the change in the life of one of us forever.
Ameena and Iqbal, declared husband and wife in one of the most beautiful weddings I have seen.
I hope you have a happily ever after, truly.
(Ameen)