A stroke in the night,
A splintering of the heart,
It was four in the morning,
But the sun already fell apart,
High past noon — 
You told me you would be here soon,
3pm and the moon stopped by,
Asked where you were, 
And I couldn’t offer anything but lies,
Eight in the evening,
Spilled into insanity,
By the cusp of midnight,
I was as healthy as I could ever be.

touch
touch
touch —
ache and don’t resuscitate
lost boys without a clue
of who they are or
what to do
strumming chaos through chewed fingernails
a ballad violence couldn’t bare.

a labyrinth. a maze. twists and turns and paths that won’t illuminate. spun into spools, threads that disorient. eye of the needle but i know only pinpricks. fog shines clearer than the future. i rather sink into the soil than dare take a step.

//and how much can you really know yourself?//
memories deceive and the soul retreats.
and how well can we know another?
(it’s so much easier.)
(it’s so much harder.)

store your memories and emotions between the chords and the motion
of waves that sync to our histories
better than anything words can beat
drown out the world in a lyrical tapestry
salve your wounds with the chorus

we all sing in sorrow
how melodious the sound.

who knows where the river takes us. who are we to know the inflections of routes set in stone.

all aboard, we must go now. into the mist, into the unknown.

sandpaper arms have roughened me up with bruises,
brushed and scraped and whittled down,
so i must stitch back together shavings and shards to recreate a new me,
discard this body and upgrade 2.0,
resilient and resolute — strength is not being impervious to pain but rather withstanding it.
can you stay soft and open when the world runs cold and cruel?
take off your armor if you want to wear the badge of bravery.

and what is even real? i am superimposed onto this world but drifting off in a different reality. and what is memory? we recall and recreate to a breaking point and the past is altered irrevocably. so who am i when i reside in a plane outside of here. and when the world ends we remain in the echoes of etched graffiti. caves in the mind and a chamber of perception. rest, we will board in the morning.

comparison is the thief of joy,

and we rejoice in envy,
pouring ourselves on scales to measure against everything we could never be,

barometer of change,
(i could never look the other way),

pluck feathers from the wind and hold your cap close,
there is a storm coming in,

and when lightning strikes,
we must blame our own evil eye.

play a tune on loop
record stuck on repeat
mind pulling receipts
balance the weight on your knees
ignorance is bliss
so write over these memories

I am seeking a calling,

Let me know if you have found one,
Because it is a wretched existence to be twisted up and wishing,
Though far preferable to living in the ignorance of it all,
For that is a deeper emptiness that compiles into poison,
And ruins all the bliss it seems to feed,

I am waiting for a call,
I sit by the phone watching for a ring,
As time passes, I become more desperate,
A buzz or a text even would do,

Purpose I have, but action I lack,
I wish to beat to a drum, but I cannot hear any music,
I don’t see any drummers,
When you call out and there is no call back,
Not even a voicemail or dial tone,
Where is there to go?

So we sit here restless by the phone,
Knowing that moving forward is no good,
Because forward is what needs illumination,

I wish to weave the fibers of the future,
Where is the pattern? Where is the thread?

Twelve rivers that form an ecosystem unfettered from yesterday’s woes,
Enveloped in another world, without any times to the old,
Bearing fruit eager and uncomposed,So that —
Curiosity can reign supreme,
Without the cumbersome beleaguering fatigue,
Of those who think they know,
But their experience is of the wrong sort,
Bringing upon the follies of those who did not have the eyes to see,
But are blind to their blindness,
The rivers flow without terrain,
Pooling at the end in oases,
With more robust roots than have ever been brought.

Sadness that swells into numbness,
Raking coals over all the visions of what life was supposed to be,
Grieve — but then have to carry on regardless,
Into the morning, with slightly less brightness,
A dull aura to move you through the day.

Dreamer, come by again to see me.

Hello how are you?
Trusty and dusty.
how are you?
Hello, how are you
Loving to dream and finding a way

How do we ever get out of this?
Love love and only love will save us.

Kiss me — we know no bounds. Dream of me — I haven’t bothered to wake up tonight.
Tender, oh sweet fighter. Tender. Make a left turn at destiny.

Growing up on fantasy-adventure series and having a bit of a savior complex, I developed a penchant for 'Big Narratives,' trying to view the world in terms of stories. I understood my role as a knight, out to slay dragons and save damsels. Or in a more feminine version, as Wendy heading to Neverland to save Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. 

When those 'Big Narratives' failed me, it was easy to despair. To feel helpless and lost, confused why my good intentions didn't pan out or why the quest just faded away. 

After a particularly ravished 'Big Narrative,' I had to seriously reconsider my perspective. To that mission, I came up with the aforementioned, 'to not slay the dragon.' The typical fairy tale story is pretty simple: princess locked at the top of a tower, knight comes from a turbulent journey, slays the dragon, saves the damsel in distress. Happily ever after. But what if the girl doesn't want to be saved? What if the knight fails? What happens then? He probably gets scorched to bits. Yikes.

With a few burns on my skin, I wondered if there was a different way. And this is not The Solution. It doesn't work for me all the time, and definitely won't be right for everyone else. But it's subversive. And I like subversive. It creates a new narrative for me. And it mitigates the worst of my savior complex.

When the knight comes, he tames the dragon instead. Because, who in their right mind wants to kill a dragon? They're dope and most likely quite rare. You know what would be better than a dead dragon? A companion dragon. For me, taming the dragon is making the world a better place. A bit kinder, a bit more connected, a bit softer. While the knight is taming the dragon, the princess has to decide for herself to jump out the window. You can't save anyone who isn't willing to be saved, who isn't ready to try and fight for their own happiness. They have to take the leap of faith, to choose freedom. To close their eyes and jump. I don't think it's healthy to think of people as needing me to save them. It definitely doesn't work out well. Ultimately, I believe each person needs to save themselves. The best part of that though, is saving the world just becomes saving yourself ... if everyone does it. 

So the princess jumps. Even though it's a 100 feet drop to the ground, she takes that risk — this is where the dragon comes in. When she opens her eyes, she's on a tamed dragon with the knight. They have the world to explore and have a pretty amazing crib, as the castle seems to be uninhabited (squatter rights and all that) (though in hindsight, it may be a bit too traumatic for the princess). 

To not slay the dragon, beyond the personal alternative narrative it offers me, is a reminder to always challenge and criticize the way I've been taught to think. Especially when my world view collapses, to not become cynical and dismissive, but to find a meaningful and hopeful new lens, to pursue a better story.

A script for a visual film, exploring Montreal, an unnamed relationship, and the agency to make your own decisions.

A short film script of a guy trying to get his hoodies back.

My tongue stutters, stumbling to pronounce my own name,
The whispers of its syllables, soft and breathless,
Overtaken, by sharp winds, brought by winters,
Now almost two decades in the making.

My ancestors never felt this cold,
They wandered, instead, in the oasis of Asia,
With sweet aam, spicy tikka, and crispy makkai,
At lunch, I am given the choice between a hamburger or pizza,
I go with pizza. 
Cheese only, please.

So, we take pride in our new abodes,
But moving boxes that are never quite unpacked,
Rip out tendrils that just began to take root,
Fertilized soil with seeds plucked out,
Eventually, you learn not to bother planting at all.

Asia giving earthquakes of culture shock,
Magnitude 6 coming your way,
When you step out of the airport,
And see people who look like you,
More than people who don’t look like you at all,
And you breathe in the aroma of a country you began to forget,
And you wonder what life would have been like if you never left.

The sands of distance, however,
Erode with time, the link between home and birthplace,
Your history becomes a foreign land,
Drawing blanks as you try to translate,
The English that has spread into your veins,
Neither West nor East nor North nor South,
Tugging on your mother’s scarf to whisper what color churiyan you want,
Into her ear, too hesitant, too frightened to speak out loud,
The exposure of your voice, with the accent of she left saying quite plainly,
I’m not from here anymore.

Sunday mornings you are woken up by the sounds of your parents,
Shouting into the phone hello hello can you hear me? in Urdu,
Desperate to sew oceans back together,
From calling cards found in ethnic enclaves to the green WhatsApp icon,
Pulling relatives close to close the distance,
I stay silent when they call me over,
I return to my room, and pull out my French assignment.
Je m’oublie.

History is discarded, replacing memories with legacy,
Turning ancestors into refugees,
Immigrants, under the weight of two worlds,
And without roots to latch onto,
Drown easily when flooded with change,
Assimilation shows up as a lifeguard,
But shakes the integrity of your spirit,
When it costs the sum of all you ever were.

I’ve become claustrophobic with conflicting identities,
Pressing against my skin,
The questions brought by past and present,
Cutting at my throat, and frustrating my future,
Pushing me further from the shore,
Adrift, drowning seems imminent, 
So you begin to look for anchors,
Just to sink.

The certainty of faith draws a believer a warm bath during frigid hardships,
But the task of believing crashed waves higher than tsunamis,
Pulling me under over and over,
I never learned how to swim,
Like the whispers that have left my name,
So had the possibility of peace.

The crisis of faith made robust by the paths of nomads,
Like friends and school, God comes and goes,
Ebbs and flows, without anything permanent to hold onto,
Sometimes you pray to God just to feel something,
Sometimes you pray to God just to feel nothing.
Sometimes you don’t pray at all.

But identity doesn’t leave you,
Your skin is marked, your passport is marked,
Reminded by the checkboxes of forms and the rhetoric of the news,
Belonging impossible, but escaping more impossible still.
Eventually, you hit the ocean floor, yet water has not flooded your lungs.
Somehow, I’m still breathing.

So you learn the paths of currents,
And the texture of coral,
Underwater, the voices from above are muddled,
And your soul begins to echo from shells,
Building buoyancy into your flesh,
Rising to the surface on your own island,
Is this what it feels like to be a native?

Boundaries of countries stratify with pigmentation,
But leave out homes for those lost in the spaces between continents,
So we must hunt for something to believe in,
When the desire to belong roars in our ears,
Easing the aches of our souls with the promise to find paradise,
And if all else fails, make within ourselves a sanctuary.

color.

When they ask me what is the meaning of life, I always say entropy and collision. Because we only exist in the universe because stars collided and space spread us out. Because humans bruised each other in every which way, proliferating their steps all over the world. I always thought I should be running hazardly through every place I’ve been, but Montreal tastes like beautiful city, ugly habits; and I have been indulging in discarding the people I’ve met. Causing craters, before looking for another person to turn into a shooting star. I know how many days I have been here, but all the times my aura changed color I can’t remember, I stopped measuring the effects of all these catalysts. I write their stories as if I have a right to them, as if I didn’t veer left away from the downpour, because everyone forgets about the disasters that proceed rainbows. Recognition feels like a heartfelt apology, and I have yet to figure out how colorblind I want to be when I revisit this year in my dreams.

red.

Red is the color of betrayal, because infidelity reigns in the liver toxic. And she pleads the fifth to avoid the eyes of the jury, because who gives a fuck about promises, when slurred words give an excuse to give a fuck? Yet, the guilt tainted hangovers incriminate the conscience —she could act as if she didn’t care at all, but then sobriety wouldn’t be a problem, and she wouldn’t have to pretend that she didn’t cross the lines of almost and what if. She is looking for a hero in her heroin. She put herself in rehab, but the system is corrupt, and they ran to each other over and over again.

orange.

Orange is the color of lights, because it takes seven painkillers to die, and she drowns in six, hoping to cut open and see the light at the end of the tunnel, in the way comatose patients feel when they stake their claim to the afterlife, but what do they know of PTSD? Orange runs in the oxygen-needing, oxygen-suffocating fire of the white lighter of black omens as he pulls smoke into his teeth. For his mouth is already stained by the lines he rehearses to get girls into bed, just to fulfill the craving of intimacy that exists nowhere else. He runs on cliches of good boy bad crowd. Because the twenty-seven club didn’t give a fuck about the eleven minutes each cigarette robbed. That sounds a lot like counting time, and no one needed those eleven minutes anyway.

black.

Black is the color of filth, because no matter how much time has passed, nothing hurts more than hearing her name on his lips. Don’t you know that best friends are off limits? Feeling like second best becomes second nature, and the search of validation permeates beyond the lines of attention, so when he promises that you were first pick and pulls your mouth onto his, the bitter taste of settling doesn’t leave your tongue, and the trapped air feels like suffocating into submission.

white.

White is the color of forgiveness, because I have spent too many nights watching the sunrise while guys pull me into their arms, whispering confessions into my ear. But I am not a priest. My body is not holy ground. I cannot save you from your sins. Maybe god is on both sides, because I tuck secrets into my lungs, becoming a collector to make up for the fact that when people realize I see them clearly, they run away. But it is so easy to reach ubiquitous truth through intimacy when the first thing a boy asks you is if kissing is passion or foreplay. In retrospect, I have always wished it was the latter, because it is much easier to rid names out of your memories when they fuck you instead of making you bite your lip.

green.

Green is the color of radiation, because people only change fifteen percent when they try, as souls disrupt any hope of interruption, and you learn to accept who you are. But I still believed we would spend decades shattering each other into glass shards. But you and I are a three bullet Russian roulette, and mutation seeps in when the shots are fired, and nothing breaks a mirror like I love you and goodbye. Still. Soul mates are the only ones who can change your eighty-five percent, and you have always been my favorite soulmate. When the bomb dropped, I doubted Hiroshima felt anything close to this, because the mushroom cloud didn’t hurt at all when compared to the silence we’ve been living in since. You used to call me your savior. You don’t call me that anymore. You don’t call me anything anymore. Are we anything anymore?

i.

Fractions have never been explained to children. They cannot fathom how quickly the future blurs past. Stuck in the present, every moment seems slow, for every year matters more. These moments that rip my sensibilities to shred flee from their crimes. Grass stains absorbed into the safety of recess. I refuse to step outside anymore. My knees crack in the cold; green summers frozen over by purple bruises and scars. I don’t bend. I don’t slide into the field to score a goal. Instead, I break. I collapse to the floor, skeleton shattered. I remembered thinking I would continue to darken under the afternoon sun, but the world shoved me indoors. I sit on sofas, knees curled up in a book, pale and frightened.

Pain presents itself as birthmarks. It eases you into the familiarity of seeing yourself crumpled. It scatters away certainty, never giving you proof that you existed before hurt. Pain has been ruinous to me. I have lost all sense of reality. I don’t remember this scar. I don’t remember the accident. I don’t remember a life of security. Each time someone asks, I reinvent. Skiing. Car. Fight. Dog. Game. I refuse to let my amnesia vandalize my life; I ignore all the lines that traverse my body — the language of my journey waiting to be translated. I stay away from glass. Unseen, unknown, unreal. I will imagine myself into the womb, even if through a casket. Perhaps, then, pain will be harmonious to me.

The cobblestone of a neglected birthplace. The one-acre by one-acre perfectly three-inch grass covered green lawns of small town suburbia. The rampant pace of cigarette stained sidewalks that trample through each intersection of bright lights, big city. These toes touched the riverbeds of every ocean, yet still seek to make a dust print on the moon. Once in awhile, I forget that it’s there, and so I crane my head through my legs and check the sole of my foot. Once in awhile, I am just looking for something consistent amongst the hazy lines of those who stay and those who leave. And so I check. Again, craning my head, checking the sole. I am constantly on the search for assurance that I am alive. I have spread the prints of my body on the flagpoles of the world, yet validation pulls me still. But if the Universe cannot fulfill me, I will keep craning my head to my foot, checking on my soul.

ii.

The heart yearns for love in the most foolish of senses. Its valves will pull away from blood if love betrays. It scoffs at users who draw syringes into their surfaces, yet it craves the rush of dopamine in the most unreliable and dangerous of ways. The heart will always be either unsatisfied or broken. Why do we deny the safety of other emotions? Why we repel from the idea of settling for companionship? Our addictions have driven us insane; we become beggars on the street screaming, the heart wants what the heart wants. That is the problem with sadness — it comforts us, it soothes us in its despair. It loves us. Like a guardian angel, but even the Devil once had wings.

Bones strung us together, our knuckles and knees knocked against each other, bodies unaware where one's limbs ended and the other's began. We believed in the eternity between dusk and dawn. Our voices crept out of our throats and into the night, speaking secrets only exhaustion could coax out. Infinity ended too soon. But I am not writing this for him, I am writing this for you. Why is it so easy to touch a stranger from the streets, yet so hard to look you in the eyes? Screams tied to bedposts and sheets, but none of it felt like it mattered. I am stuck in the brushstrokes of us that we left in arms that could not close the distance. There’s nothing to worry about with someone you do not love. Yet freedom is a luxury I cannot afford. Even without a cage, you trap me over and over.

I told you I had a disease that was trapped in my lungs. That my body built a fortress around it and kept guard through all the years. I told you I was dying. I remember every detail of you — but my memories have forgotten your response to my deterioration. Then again, I have never trusted you to say the right words. There’s heaviness on my ribs that never went away since you stole my breath. I guess it makes sense; my lungs have never been healthy. I should have never expected to be able to inhale around you and not fall in love. I should have never expected to be able to exhale around you and not give my heart away.

iii.

Latex gloves pull out tradition from its roots, douse the body in dip-dye chemicals, promise longevity in artificiality. I know nothing of holy solemnity. I swallow the red as if it could bring back memories. Once again, I run through the birches, and let the cuts ring me deep. But I am not a child anymore, and so black waits patiently for the Darkest Days. It taints me utterly: the abyss without anchors. But I am not gone anymore, and so I learn something of hopeful salvagery. I am slipping into my skin, and the night ends. People slice ink into their bones, but my tattoos are in the strands that shelter me. Then again, hair has a tendency to fall, and sometimes I am afraid to lose it all.

Age poisons youth, my mother consoles, as she wraps her fingers through my scalp. The years have rushed toward me, bringing white pencils to etch their intent. My fingers shook as they grasped silver chains, my body shivered as it moved to the mirror, my mind unraveled out of lucidity — I ached to be young. Dyes hide my decay, but their illusions are only ever temporary, and the grey washes back to the shore. My grandmother watches me wistfully, her own black long gone. It’s almost as if every generation grows up earlier, she wonders out loud. She was twenty-one when it began, my mother eighteen, me twelve. I’ve begun to feel older than must, and I can’t figure out if my hair reflects my soul, or if I am running through the years in an attempt to match my appearance. I yearn for innocence, but I have been guilty for so long. The DNA in my veins has prophesized my fall from purity. Oracles have attempted to save me from the demons, but none can deny that I have been marked by Hades.

Every seven years, I carve a tally in the wall, each time I grow into the world anew. Spending hours in the shower to scrub away death did nothing but rip away my skin. I lacked the patience that survival requires; I am always being taught by time to wait. I could scratch away all traces of myself, but my memories will be stuck in the nerves of my mind, and brain cells take seven years to die. I am two and a half lives older, but still so far from when I can prove with a pen in my hand and a slit in the crevices of plaster, when I can finally say that I have a body you have not touched. I will no longer have reason to remember, I will convince this novel chemistry to forget. But I have a prolific interest in shortcuts — I will rush toward that moment. And so, the locks fall to the ground.