The Resurrection

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”- Milan Kundera

It has been a slow few months and for once I find it heartening to realise that life always does move on. I am no longer seeking romance in a cup of coffee and a bite of pizza or even in the weather. I am not even reading poetry the way I used to. Instead, I have switched to political satire because it is apparently a more easily marketable personality moniker. I am consciously shutting down that idiot in me who feels a desperate need to archive and poignantly demarcate every silly, tween-time minute of the day before dampening it in soul-sucking majesty. I am breathing for now… shallow, staccato in-takes that move me forward in a straight line so I am not confused or confounded by Beentherella knocking inside me telling me that none of this is really me. 

I am meeting people and my shrill laugh and awkward self-deprecation actually seems to be coming off as endearing, at least I like to think so. I am also grateful for this on some level. I have always been somewhat of a verbal fidget: talking too much around people I don’t know and would probably prefer to avoid and sulking in silence or silly satire with those that I do, who would probably prefer to be elsewhere. Still, this whole socialising thing…it seems to be working. If nothing else, it passes time and makes me feel like some of my former self still exists. Like if I try hard enough to get to know people, I might end up finding some validation and almost feel normal outside of my head. I could fit…not fit in per say, but settle…like a congealed mass of jelly that feels utterly vulnerable but is slippery and sluggish enough to persist in its environment.

There is also some solitary sort of comfort to be sought in the fact that one can return to a completely un-changed place and have become an entirely new amalgamation of self. I feel as if I am living my life in iambic meter, skipping over all the ugly and diving into the busy with little consideration for everything in between. I moved to Islamabad a few weeks ago for work, temporary work, but work nonetheless and it has been a decidedly odd experience. On the one hand, having my own place and my own schedule does afford me some peace and alone-ness which is much appreciated. On the other hand, I hate this city. I always have. It carries a cesspool of shitty memories, lousy blood ties and bad karma. It doesn’t help that I now find myself constantly looking over my shoulder for fear of seeing my father in some random restaurant or walking next to me towards the nearest khokha. This is an odd reversal of the love I have always sustained for Lahore, where I spent my teenage years looking over other peoples shoulders hoping to catch the slightest glimpse of my Mom at every street corner. It is an odd paradox, knowing that the one city awarding me single-freedom in this god-forsaken country happens to be the city I always associate with prison. After all, any place you don’t leave is a sort of prison and there will always be a small part of me that can never leave this place. Such is the brittleness that comes with self-sufficiency.

A caveat: Living alone in Pakistan is not for the faint hearted. And I always was faint-hearted, wasn’t I? Strong minded, iron willed, brutally silent and acerbically amusing but ever, ever faint-hearted. I somewhat miss that girl, who launched her personalised crusade against society and silently flitted through each day terrified and shy. Now as I cross hallways in my apartment building followed by strange gazes and haggle with people at counters, I feel nothing. I still search for it though, that odd piercing tingling at the back of my neck alerting me that I am being leered at and each time I brush through it I feel an odd imbalance. As if I have gained and lost something simultaneously. In social conversations, I race at warp speed through every random subject I can envision just to avoid a silent swamp I might potentially sink in.

I am striving for success this time. I am aiming at wealth … at eventual power even. Or at least pretending hard enough to want to. I still haven’t learned to switch off my brain though, and I am beginning to fear I never will. That is what will always get in the way, the consistent self-critique that psyches me out from doing something before I have even fully contemplated doing it. That is why I have never really been able to write, even though I pen down over a thousand words on a daily basis. I find that my words are safer on paper and this is by far the most degenerate incarnation of cowardice.

I wish I could unlearn now.

With all the undercurrents I am riding on, it’s still somewhat surprising to find that it was all so easy in the end. I always knew I could not keep myself and succeed in life. It was a most unrealistic and selfish aspiration, to not only relish the challenge of a life that resists perfection but to expect to profit from such an existence. Still, it has been depressingly easy to forgo Beentherella. I always assumed that when the time came and my illusions were finally shattered and reality confronted, there would be a break, a collapse, a maelstrom of misnomers and memories but it never came. All it took was a short-lived, short-loved, ill-conceived marriage. All it took was finally making a mistake and acknowledging it. It took me 28 years to find a fairytale and storm the Bastille of my phobias only to realise that I really am one of those girls. Girls who are impossible to forget but hard to remember.

So now, I rest among latent chidings begotten with affection and as I slither in my degradation hoping to reinvent myself as a ‘strong woman’, I can’t help but wonder what that means anymore. I still don’t want to be of the world or belong to it. I have far too much of myself invested in surviving on peripheries and playing in platitudes. But I need to. For the first time I need to sublimate and socialise, make friends even. No matter how much I resent the interaction, I find myself manipulating circumstances to maximise the plausibility of it. The soul should not have to compensate for what the body needs and for what the ego wants …but it does. So that is where I am now, compensating, compromising and decidedly congealing into a state of ordinariness desperately needed to thrive among the living.

I am trying as hard as I can to be as hard as I can.