My mother asks me what happened when I was nineteen, to make me realize I was different.

Nothing, I say. Nothing except that I was nineteen.

My mother says, I am sorry you suffered.

I tell her I only suffered her suffering. My life is a joy I wish I could have shared with her sooner. I am glad I didn’t.

My mother's uncle was the first in his family to come to America. He came by way of Chicago, but he ended up in Southern California, and when he had a house with a backyard, he put down roots. Specifically, guava tree roots, cherimoya, pomegranate. Whatever could grow he grew. When the rest of his family followed him here, he brought them fruit from his garden, but he hated (still hates) being trapped in conversation, so he left it in grocery bags piled on their doorsteps and drove back home before anyone could come out and talk to him.

In kindergarten we were asked to list something we admired about our family members, and I said: I love the way my grandfather cuts fruit. No one knew what to make of that, but even then I knew that the way he cut fruit was spectacular. In his hands he would slice an apple the size of a softball into neat segments, decoring it cleanly, not a single bite of flesh wasted, not a seed left where it should not be. He had an eye for fruit. Pears, watermelon, lychee, cherries, strawberries, oranges, persimmon, papaya, honeydew, grapes.

He loved mangoes most of all. In Pakistan, he used to visit the orchards himself, bringing home every kind of variety as soon as they were in season. In California, vastly limited, he would still bring home crates of Kent from the Indian grocery store as soon as they came in, would menace us into eating at least three slices before we got sick of it. No one else was allowed to cut fruit in the house, or use his knife. This was his realm, and his alone. He was a painter, and a musician, and to this day I still think his greatest art was cutting fruit.

My father's parents lived in our house, and I rarely saw them show each other affection. That was how it was. They hardly knew each other when they were married. They were together for more than sixty years, and I only saw their love if one of them was hurt, and when they cut fruit together together at the dining table. My grandmother didn't cut the fruit, but she made things out of the fruit my grandfather cut for her. She pickled the lemons, made lassi and balai out of the mangoes, and in Ramadan she made fruit chaat.

Keeping a journal really saved my beef. I never thought of myself as a person with, like, thoughts until it was time to write them all down. I thought, after a month, I'll have found the end of it, and I'll have written myself empty. But it turns out that I'm not as vacant as I think, and now I've kept a journal for almost two and a half years. Of course, whether any of it is any good is another matter — most of it is quite bad! But oh the joy of it. And the best part is, it's mine, it all came from me, so I can plunder it all I want and no one is the wiser! So here I am. I've discovered narcissism in myself and it's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.

In related news, I have an essay out!

March 2, 2021

Winter had to have the last word, so this morning it was so cold I thought I would die waiting for the train. The wind would stick me to the icy rails and then the salt would cure me into leather and I'd just have to stay there until the warm rains came to defrost me.

In this life, I was born girl-shaped. 

My mother didn’t know how to read. When I started speaking dead languages to her, a little after my tenth birthday, she looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. Our neighbor died — they could smell him stinking in the narrow hallway — and I went in with some of the other kids and took some of his stuff. Some books, a small chess set. You were always good at chess. After I find you, you can teach me the rules all over again.

When my mother found out I could read, she tried to smother me in my sleep.

She was crying, which was why I woke up in time to fight her off. I kicked her in her belly and ran. By that time, I already remembered what it was like to kill someone, but I let her live. You’re the one who told me it was bad luck to kill mothers.

A retelling of the legend of Ranakadevi.

The potter’s daughter gathered clay from the banks of the Bhogavo, and watched the funeral pyre burn.

The funeral procession was long gone by now. Their elegant horses and gleaming armor had made quite a sensation in the small river village. But the men hadn’t even lingered long enough for the flames to die down, or to disperse the ashes. They had disrespected the dead, in Hadma’s opinion. 

She had more than enough clay gathered by now. Soft and scented sweet by the river. Hadma had purposefully squatted upwind of the funeral pyre and all of its voluminous smoke, but now as she stood, the wind changed direction and she caught the smell of burning flesh.

Let me tell you a story about two sisters.

(Content Warning: Suicide, Homophobia)

They were born in Pakistan in the 1970s only a few years apart, and came to America when they were young. By the 90s, they were in Southern California. One of them was a lesbian, and the other one wasn't. Their mother was also a sister -- she had three sisters, in fact. One of those sisters was my grandmother. These two sisters are my father's cousins.

The Desi Muslim community of Southern California was in its fledgling stages. The family was more tight knit, the four sisters keeping everyone in each other's pockets, keeping each other fed, keeping each other practicing the faith, organizing the weddings, organizing the funerals, making sure no one was alone when it mattered.

“I can’t be the only one left,” said Lovell.

I said nothing. Most of my focus was on steering us away from the debris.

“Take us back. There were still people on the engineering deck. If they put on their suits in time, they could have survived depressurization.”

“My objective is to get survivors to safety,” I told Lovell.

January 31, 2021

Last day of January. February is the worst month but at least it’s also the shortest month. And then it’ll be March. It’ll be spring.

I’m ready to not feel disoriented again. I want to feel present where I am, to commit to where my body is. Even if it’s hard to find sometimes.

Did her mind finally take flight like it was always secretly longing to do? Did it come free to float there in the fog? There where she will not batter the others, like she herself was battered? Will the cycle end with that one final ascending? Are there stars up there? Does she still remember the first time she held me? What songs are there to sing where she is? Will she dance like when she was a young girl? She has become untethered but, below, her hands still remember how to tie knots. To fasten her sari. To fix my grandfather’s necktie. To loop string around my mother’s ankles and keep her down, keep her sinking, like she herself was sunken, once.

She is kinder now. She can’t be hurt and she can’t hurt. Can you get so full of memories you just stop keeping them? A trail of discarded moments left by her feet as she wanders. Conversations we will have over and over with her, and then never again.

What does she see where she is, so high above? Does she still dream where she is? Dreams she can’t share with anyone. When was the last time she told someone her dreams? Does she see her whole life below her like a vast and unfamiliar landscape? Who is that girl? Armor-less and unrecognizable. Does she know yet all the people who she will slip into this world? A matriarch’s parade marching at her back where she cannot see them. In return we will give her more memories than her mind can bear, and this is what will send it away from her.

How many times have you pierced through the veil and seen what lies hidden? Those truths that you are forced to keep to yourself because no words exist for that unsettling sight, and besides, you’ve forgotten it already, or at least made yourself forget. You wanted your mind to be safe again from lurking horrors. Next time you’ll know better. Next time you’ll keep your curiosity to yourself. Next time you’ll look away.

If we were all unflinching in the face of things we were not meant to see in the first place, what would be the worth of curiosity anyway. Fear is all part of the gamble. A part of all of us that wants to be shocked, snapped into pieces, irreparably changed. I’d like to think that I am made of sterner stuff. But really I just want to be unmade into something a little more interesting. It is a coward’s way to step away from the edge and I would like to not be a coward.

More and more I have grown covetous of stories with doors in them. I love the idea of leaving a place behind and traveling unspeakable distances, seeing unspeakable things, and then coming back to find everything just as you left it. Familiar and untouched and so much smaller, because your horizons have widened too far for you to fit here anymore. There and back never again.

MARCH

The trees are blooming. I’m glad I went out to see them. I plucked a blossom off a branch but I forgot about it in my bag and now it’s all crumpled. So it goes. I want to cherish this last spring in New York, but it’s hard to do that at the epicenter. The city feels normal, but I think it’s used to finding normal. It’s got restless bones and they’re used to shifting.

APRIL

Allah save me, I want to leave. Get me out of here. Most Gracious, Most Merciful, All Knowing, All Forgiving. Let me out. I want to leave my head. It doesn’t feel safe here anymore.

The lake house we stayed at was haunted.

I’m a safe distance away from it now, about an eight hour drive through mostly Pennsylvania to be exact, so I can tell you. Something lived in that old, creaking lake house. 

Sound travelled through it strangely, and at all times you felt like something invisible was listening in on your conversation because most likely something was. If you were in the upstairs bedroom, you could hear a conversation held in the living room below so clearly it was like the people were standing right next to you. This could possibly be explained by The Hole In The Floor, but more on that later.

We dubbed this invisible presence Chris, gender unspecified, and welcomed them as an unofficial seventh member to the group. It is possible that Chris followed us home, but that is unclear. 

Times like these I think finding strength in peaceful moments can be such a powerful escape from everything. So let’s talk about haunted lakes.

In October, my friends and I took an improbable road trip to converge upon Lake Eyrie in Ohio. As someone who grew up close to the Pacific Ocean, there’s something about the stillness of a Great Lake that’s unsettling to the extreme. It can be so quiet for such an enormous body of water. An ocean is terrifying and always moving and you always know that it’s so preoccupied with its mysterious unknowns and its own vast ecosystems of life that it’s not going to give a fuck about a puny mortal like yourself.

The lake, on the other hand, is watching.

Maybe it’s because I lived in a desert where it would rain maybe three days a year, but that much freshwater still boggles my mind. The lake’s moods are ever-changing. From our little haunted house (that’s a different story) we watched it go from still and quiet, to churning with restless anger. My friends and I sat on the deck and watched it rear up like some enraged eldritch creature and smash itself against the rocks like it was trying to grab us. No thanks!

Everyday I look for ghosts.

I’m not actually superstitious. Superstition requires a level of caution that just gives me a headache. If I find myself overthinking something, then it’s time to take a nap until it stops. It’s 2020. Who has time to be anything but reckless?

But I love looking for ghosts! There’s something wonderful about an everyday haunting that makes the world that much lovelier and stranger. Those times when you feel like you’ve pierced the veil of the mundane and seen something old and incorporeal dragging its heels in the dark hallway of your place of work late at night.

Those ghosts are the best kind. The ones you only see out of the corner of your eye, that make the funny spooky sounds, that reanimate old faulty equipment in your lab (I work in a lab) and set them off at unexplained intervals, or at unnatural speeds, or make a funny smell.