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in this piece i wrote about how i equated headaches to a good day, and how i hadn’t gotten a headache in a long long time. today i finally got a headache :-D

Morning Person

I woke up at 7:14 again today. I’ve always wanted to become a morning person. Not the ones that wake up at dawn to go running or get a headstart on the workday, but the ones who wake just in time to lay there, that brief juncture in the almost-day when the light is golden and still innocent, pliable enough to mold, when the tendrils of sleep take their time loosening their hold. I like to think I can cut through this softness like butter, run my hands through it, pack it into a little cube and pocket some for night. Of course, I’ve never been a morning person. I wish I was. I never wake up in time. 

I can’t remember the exact moment I decided I couldn’t stand to sleep in my own room anymore. Springtime in Lahore means dusting off the ceiling fans in mid March. I had started sleeping horizontally on my bed so I could be directly under the cool air. When I woke up one morning I found that someone had filled my bones with cement and suspended me in a sunbeam. I’m not sure what made that particular day so defining. It wasn’t a new feeling, this heaviness in me weighing down my mattress. It wasn’t even an oh, there it is again feeling. When I think of the word constant I try to rack my brain for emotions, people, anything to remind myself that I am wanted, that I am anticipated. Nothing comes to mind. Nothing except the familiarity of my own expendability. When you have hollow bones it’s inevitable that someone will want to anchor you like a bird to a cage. I tired myself out a long time ago. I’ve never been one to fight back; it’s one of my mother’s favorite things about me. That morning I felt strange, like I was intruding on an intimate moment between the sun and the eggshell white of my walls, like I wasn’t meant to see the behind the scenes. I was acutely reminded of the feeling of walking into a room you don’t belong in, the heads of strangers swiveling around to look you up and down before returning to their business. I felt shame prickle through my scalp in a wave. My room aglow with the yellow filtering through my curtains, childlike and pure, my body a deadweight, supine and useless, lips cracking in the recycled air, I looked at the clock. 7:14. So this is it, I thought. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I wanted to go back to sleep with a desperation so intense it numbed my toes and curled my fingers. My room looked beautiful and alive and determined to set me on fire. I felt its smirk against my throat as it settled its weight on my chest and pressed me into the bed. I thought, leave it to me to turn beautiful things evil. That night, blanket and pillow in hand, I knocked on my mother’s door. 

The sun rises differently in my mother’s room. When it wakes me up at 7:14 again, it has the decency to look apologetic, remorseful. I decide to have mercy. Next to me my mother is folded into the cocoon of sleep. I tamp down my envy and inch closer. When she puts an arm around me and strokes my hair I fake my breathing. I tell myself I can cry later. The intimacy that lives confined in this hour of undiluted quiet is too pure for someone as polluted with guilt as I am.  I’m supposed to say something in this moment, I know I am. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to find the right thing to say. One day I’ll wake up and my lips will be gone, the top of my throat sealed shut. I’ll know I deserve it, I’ll know that only people with things to say deserve voices. I have nothing to say. With my face turned into the mattress I can almost convince myself I’m here simply because I was bored, not because my loneliness is a clawed hand around my ankle, not because I’ve made a villain of the sun and my room and time itself and fear is a wave cresting outside my window.  I can almost convince myself that my self loathing is contained in the room I’ve left behind. In this new room where the sun is more forgiving and my mother’s arm is a shield I cower behind, I can convince myself I’m safe. The ticking of the clock mocks me. 

I can feel the wave catching up to me.

Once, in a fit of desperate rage, I thought maybe I could outsmart time. That night I didn’t sleep till 5am, until my eyes were begging me for release. I thought surely this would mean I would sleep in until noon at least. When I woke up the next morning, wide awake and smug, the light was all wrong. It was too bright and the room was too humid. I looked at the clock. 7:14. I could feel the sun shake its head in pity, felt the clock narrow its eyes in annoyance. I conceded. As I lay there, limp and exhausted, I began listing all the adjectives I could think of to describe the light at 7:14. Soft. Supple. Ethereal. Tender. Tangible. Ephemeral. Blinding. Desolate. Lonely. Desperate. Gone. Desperate. Desperate. My head started hurting.

A couple years back when my migraines got really bad, I went in for an MRI. I remember the frustration I felt when the doctor said there was nothing wrong with me, the desperation of wanting her to stick a label on the issue and file it away as a problem solved. I wanted her to tell me what I already knew: that the migraines came from the same heaviness that pressed me into my bed every morning. I wanted her to stick her hands in her white coat and tell me not to worry, there’s a very simple solution to this, we’ll send you into emergency surgery and hollow your bones out again and then you’ll be as good as new. Instead she told me to take it easy and stay hydrated. On the way home the sun was white hot. I’ve always found it weird that when I have a good day, I go to bed with a headache. It’s important to note here that a headache is not a migraine. I never understood these headaches; maybe they came from laughing too hard, or smiling for too long. On these days I think my heart pumps blood differently, like it’s so relieved to find a reason to beat again that it works overtime to compensate for all the days I let it sit in my chest and harden. I like the idea of giving my poor heart a purpose, the way it trips over itself trying to butter me up. When I hold two fingers up to the side of my throat, my skin feels alien, the veins underneath pounding out a code of don’t let us forget this feeling again. I send back an apology in advance. I can’t remember the last time I got a headache.

Tonight my dinner congealed like wet sand on my gums. But it’s night, I thought, I’m supposed to be okay, at least for now. I dared to look at the clock. 7:14. Is nowhere safe? There was a time when I didn’t know how to read clocks. There was a time when I chided myself for never waking up before noon. I don’t know when I started being afraid of the sun. I don’t know how to stop. 

do you have any favourite love letters from the past?

“You have fixed my Life – however short,” Wilfred Owen to Siegfried Sassoon

“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia” / “Throw over your man, I say, and come,” Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Love is my religion – I could die for that, I could die for you,” John Keats to Fanny Brawne

“I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days,” Oscar Wilde to Alfred Lord Douglas

Morning Person

I woke up at 7:14 again today. I’ve always wanted to become a morning person. Not the ones that wake up at dawn to go running or get a headstart on the workday, but the ones who wake just in time to lay there, that brief juncture in the almost-day when the light is golden and still innocent, pliable enough to mold, when the tendrils of sleep take their time loosening their hold. I like to think I can cut through this softness like butter, run my hands through it, pack it into a little cube and pocket some for night. Of course, I’ve never been a morning person. I wish I was. I never wake up in time. 

I can’t remember the exact moment I decided I couldn’t stand to sleep in my own room anymore. Springtime in Lahore means dusting off the ceiling fans in mid March. I had started sleeping horizontally on my bed so I could be directly under the cool air. When I woke up one morning I found that someone had filled my bones with cement and suspended me in a sunbeam. I’m not sure what made that particular day so defining. It wasn’t a new feeling, this heaviness in me weighing down my mattress. It wasn’t even an oh, there it is again feeling. When I think of the word constant I try to rack my brain for emotions, people, anything to remind myself that I am wanted, that I am anticipated. Nothing comes to mind. Nothing except the familiarity of my own expendability. When you have hollow bones it’s inevitable that someone will want to anchor you like a bird to a cage. I tired myself out a long time ago. I’ve never been one to fight back; it’s one of my mother’s favorite things about me. That morning I felt strange, like I was intruding on an intimate moment between the sun and the eggshell white of my walls, like I wasn’t meant to see the behind the scenes. I was acutely reminded of the feeling of walking into a room you don’t belong in, the heads of strangers swiveling around to look you up and down before returning to their business. I felt shame prickle through my scalp in a wave. My room aglow with the yellow filtering through my curtains, childlike and pure, my body a deadweight, supine and useless, lips cracking in the recycled air, I looked at the clock. 7:14. So this is it, I thought. This is what I’ve been waiting for. I wanted to go back to sleep with a desperation so intense it numbed my toes and curled my fingers. My room looked beautiful and alive and determined to set me on fire. I felt its smirk against my throat as it settled its weight on my chest and pressed me into the bed. I thought, leave it to me to turn beautiful things evil. That night, blanket and pillow in hand, I knocked on my mother’s door. 

The sun rises differently in my mother’s room. When it wakes me up at 7:14 again, it has the decency to look apologetic, remorseful. I decide to have mercy. Next to me my mother is folded into the cocoon of sleep. I tamp down my envy and inch closer. When she puts an arm around me and strokes my hair I fake my breathing. I tell myself I can cry later. The intimacy that lives confined in this hour of undiluted quiet is too pure for someone as polluted with guilt as I am.  I’m supposed to say something in this moment, I know I am. Sometimes I think I’ve spent my whole life trying to find the right thing to say. One day I’ll wake up and my lips will be gone, the top of my throat sealed shut. I’ll know I deserve it, I’ll know that only people with things to say deserve voices. I have nothing to say. With my face turned into the mattress I can almost convince myself I’m here simply because I was bored, not because my loneliness is a clawed hand around my ankle, not because I’ve made a villain of the sun and my room and time itself and fear is a wave cresting outside my window.  I can almost convince myself that my self loathing is contained in the room I’ve left behind. In this new room where the sun is more forgiving and my mother’s arm is a shield I cower behind, I can convince myself I’m safe. The ticking of the clock mocks me. 

I can feel the wave catching up to me.

Once, in a fit of desperate rage, I thought maybe I could outsmart time. That night I didn’t sleep till 5am, until my eyes were begging me for release. I thought surely this would mean I would sleep in until noon at least. When I woke up the next morning, wide awake and smug, the light was all wrong. It was too bright and the room was too humid. I looked at the clock. 7:14. I could feel the sun shake its head in pity, felt the clock narrow its eyes in annoyance. I conceded. As I lay there, limp and exhausted, I began listing all the adjectives I could think of to describe the light at 7:14. Soft. Supple. Ethereal. Tender. Tangible. Ephemeral. Blinding. Desolate. Lonely. Desperate. Gone. Desperate. Desperate. My head started hurting.

A couple years back when my migraines got really bad, I went in for an MRI. I remember the frustration I felt when the doctor said there was nothing wrong with me, the desperation of wanting her to stick a label on the issue and file it away as a problem solved. I wanted her to tell me what I already knew: that the migraines came from the same heaviness that pressed me into my bed every morning. I wanted her to stick her hands in her white coat and tell me not to worry, there’s a very simple solution to this, we’ll send you into emergency surgery and hollow your bones out again and then you’ll be as good as new. Instead she told me to take it easy and stay hydrated. On the way home the sun was white hot. I’ve always found it weird that when I have a good day, I go to bed with a headache. It’s important to note here that a headache is not a migraine. I never understood these headaches; maybe they came from laughing too hard, or smiling for too long. On these days I think my heart pumps blood differently, like it’s so relieved to find a reason to beat again that it works overtime to compensate for all the days I let it sit in my chest and harden. I like the idea of giving my poor heart a purpose, the way it trips over itself trying to butter me up. When I hold two fingers up to the side of my throat, my skin feels alien, the veins underneath pounding out a code of don’t let us forget this feeling again. I send back an apology in advance. I can’t remember the last time I got a headache.

Tonight my dinner congealed like wet sand on my gums. But it’s night, I thought, I’m supposed to be okay, at least for now. I dared to look at the clock. 7:14. Is nowhere safe? There was a time when I didn’t know how to read clocks. There was a time when I chided myself for never waking up before noon. I don’t know when I started being afraid of the sun. I don’t know how to stop. 

something i wrote about finally getting what you’ve always wanted and realizing it’s not what you thought it would be! #pain <3

i hate the word remember

(a janamaz is a pray rug)

which came first: life, or the absence of it?

an excerpt of something i’m writing:

i am icarus, but i’m smarter, because my wings are titanium and steel, and i’ve reached the sun, at last, at last, and i’m pulling out a chair and sitting too close, close enough that i can feel the tingle of the heat, cold and insistent as your fingertips across my face, hours after i fall to the ground

and now i am you, reaching out and touching my skin and not knowing why it feels different and wishing it wasn’t different

and hating that word, wanting to strike it from existence

a big red line through the naivety of longing

nm.

Sylvia Plath — The Bell Jar

something i wrote about finally getting what you’ve always wanted and realizing it’s not what you thought it would be! #pain <3

i hate the word remember

(a janamaz is a pray rug)

oh my god this is insane

from war of folklore

god this line just makes me wanna *clenches fist* commit unspeakable crimes

Illustration for Goodnight Moon, Clement Hurd / Class of 2013, Mitski

NEW TO TUMBLR HI THERE EVERYONE!! pls interact i would like some moots❤️ ps check out my writing on my page!!

i hate the word remember

(a janamaz is a pray rug)

mothers and daughters

part 2

lady bird (2017) // gillian flynn “sharp objects” // chen chen “poplar street” // pinterest // annie ernaux “i remain in darkness” // ? // ancient egyptian depiction of a mother fixing her daughter’s hair (egyptian museum at san jose, california) // john mayer “in the blood” // i.b. vyache “does your mother know?”// uquiz.com // joan tierney @filmnoirsbian // mitski “class of 2013” // n. p. “mothers and daughters”

this beautiful addition by @cryptid-of-lesbos