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[nusaibaaaa]

i don’t like where my mind goes at night.

my head takes a step back while my heart magnifies. it dares, so audaciously, to conjure these dreams, these fictional realities that seem so far away from my grasp. i don’t like it. i don’t like the person it turns me into because there’s no one to contain her. i melt, like a liquid, like silver in a flame— with no mold to encase me. so out of touch with who i am in reality.

it makes me realize the core of who i am hasn’t changed, has it? all that darkness and i still bleed red. all that coldness and i hate myself when i’m not as cold as i want to be, when emotions claw at me unwelcome. God, it eviscerates me, and there i go, putting on the best show of my life like i’m not torn apart. even to myself. i am both performer and the audience. but it’s those nights when the two meld together and create this new, nebulous shadow that’s out of my reach that i despise it all. i don’t want to lose control over myself like that. except i do. i want it gone. i want a mold, a case, a chest where i lie like limp treasure, no matter how rusty.

[nusaibaaaa]

i watched that movie you recommended and suddenly i’m haunted by you. i keep fighting it, pushing it down, not letting myself properly grieve, but today, sudden tears fell from my eyes and it reminded me of why i don’t let people get that close to me. it’s true that the cleaver was in my hand. i was the one who parted ways, after resentment outweighed affection, after the possibility of becoming expendable overshadowed the high of being like a drug as you described. i think you are both the best and worst thing i’ve ever done.

the way i run away from the ability to feel is frightening, because i know whatever i feel, i feel deeply, and i’m not willing to be sucked into a whirlpool of regret and nostalgia… no, i’d rather move on, or pretend that you weren’t a major part of my life, one that created seismic changes in how i view and understand myself. i’d rather think ahead and busy or distract myself with anything and everything except remember you. but when the clock strikes after the evening, and the night envelopes me in quiet, it’s hard not to fill the silence with memories. i think i’m really tired and i have a hard time accepting that. i have a hard time accepting that i’m hurt. yes, i might rewatch that movie because it’s one of my favorites. maybe my most favourite. but how do i scrub it clean of you? time, work your magic. time, heal me. time, don’t let me feel anything.

[nusaibaaaa]

i feel sick to my stomach.

the pattern always repeats itself. i am outside of the glass looking in and everyone is so grateful i can see them clearly while i’m nothing but a blur to them, a hazy apparition. i feel sick to my stomach knowing my heart wants something but the world is making sure i don’t get it. as if there was an elaborate plan somewhere to make as much of a fool out of me as possible, and the sky and trees and wind are in on it while i’m not. a floor plan kept hidden from me, so i keep stepping on the broken tiles and falling into all kind of messes and quagmires. i feel sick to my stomach knowing the thickness of the glass they use to measure my strength— they can always fall apart around me because i’ll catch them. because i’m infallible, i’m all the bravado i make myself out to be and i have infinite hands enough for everyone in need to grab. i’m sick. i’m sick to my stomach knowing my life is a spiral staircase descending into these repetitions that isolate me while making me the fortress everyone seeks shelter in.

[nusaibaaaa]

from a young age, i have always been the one who was never expected to break down. to be the one faltering, the one with cracks in her armour. i was always the pillar, the fortress. i couldn’t be the one to bend or break. the second i did, there would be almost a pin-drop silence, an awkwardness, as if I disrupted the natural order of the universe. the one who always protects suddenly needs protecting, and that is too much to bear. the face that’s always afloat is best to leave alone when drowning— like a tower finally collapsing, and it’s best to leave the rubble behind. finally? was there a finally always attached to me? Is everyone i help stand eager to see me fall and not help in return? it’s exhausting. the time i was soft and meek, sensitive, i was trampled over like nothing. and now that i have some steel to my heart, people don’t care to see if it’s still beating. i don’t want to be the pillar all the time. i don’t want to be the rock, the guiding hand, the defender, protector, reassurer. my whole life has been an episode where i’m a stack that’s cleaved from a headland, surrounded by temperamental waves, hurling and thrashing around me, all the while my still waters run deep. is it inconceivable to think i want the freedom to be a wave, too? to kick, thrash, scream and spin like the madwoman that is the sea, inconsolable to everyone except he who is the headland of calm? i can’t take this anymore. there is something really damaged inside of me.

[nusaibaaaa]

i have become unafraid of everyone and everything. no one scares me. it might sound like it’s coming from a place of privilege, where i’ve been untouched by danger but that’s not entirely true. those dangers are nothing compared to to what sharpened me to fear nothing, because the worst has already happen more times than i can count. my heart has been ripped out of my chest and thrown across acres of betrayal and heartbreak like a frisbee. countless times, like a sport, to the point where i became a spectator of my own undoing on the bleachers. the “arrogance” i bloom with is well-earned confidence, because who can even hurt me? you cannot pick up a weapon i have not seen. you cannot cut me open and butcher me in ways new to me. my favourite colour’s burgundy; reminiscent of violence, of elegance. everything that’s been done to me, i wear like jewelry.

[nusaibaaaa]

“The enormity of my desire disgusts me.”

I imagine this quote tattooed in cursive handwriting across my back in an ink so deceptive it matches the exact shade of my skin. Embedded into my spine, jutting out in the form of ribs and femurs before creating the whole of who I am, a line of shame, desire, disgust made into bone. So much feeling ingrained into one person the way I stuffed my jacket into my bag earlier today, getting angry at how it wouldn’t fit. That’s how I am— coiled like a serpent, thrashing, slinking and striking at anything that moves. “Fragile not like a flower but like a bomb.” They don’t know this, but I’ve been set on fire ever since I was seventeen and still can’t put it out. So it comes out in plumes of intensity, of needing to take the lead, of all this energy beaming out of me and an unexplained eagerness and does no one see I’m a mess, all this distress. They say it’s the stars that burn but when was I ever a star? My life has barely begun. The cursive tattoo is swivelling and swerving with all its perfect little rotundities and flicks of a trained wrist. My mind is spinning, as if the tattoo’s curves became a Ferris wheel on which I’m a permanent passenger. I want to get down. I’m tired of a ride with no destination in sight. The journey is repetitive and nauseating.

[nusaibaaaa]

It’s supposed to hurt like a b—

i spent so long in a cage i forgot i’m supposed to be hurting. i’m supposed to let other people affect me. i forgot that being 21 means trying to put yourself out there in the world for whoever may stop and see you. my heart is supposed to get broken, i am supposed to be losing my mind, i’m supposed to be a hormonal and emotional and existential mess. IM 21! IM NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE IT ALL FIGURED OUT. IM NOT SUPPOSED TO BE INVINCIBLE. i’m understanding, i’m absorbing but God it hurts so bad i’m starting to realize why youth is accompanied with pain, the same way we cry when we are born. being young means beauty. being young means pain. being young means doing things you’re not supposed to and making mistakes and learning from them, it’s supposed to be the time you break so you could really build something. i forgot all about that. I grew up so fast it feels strange remembering i’m supposed to feel how young people feel.

i’m supposed to fall in and out of spaces and people and relationships, supposed to take the punches and flowers and words of encouragement and malice. my life is not an assorted dish— it’s a bowl of food from every continent of people, of rice that taught me to and tastes like, “that’s what you should do” and a bit of nasty stew saying, “that’s what you don’t. now you know.” i’m only 21. I keep telling myself i’m supposed to screw up. 21. 21. 21. 12. the 12 year old girl is still alive and now she’s 21 and has a bowl of thousands of assortments that make no sense but they kind of do and i’m losing my mind because i’m only 21. may everyone that made me grow up too early never have access to the youth that’s still alive in me, that cries like she’s just born, as if every suffering reincarnates me to someone else.

[nusaibaaaa]

i think i am very hard on myself because it’s a mistranslated act of love.

it’s the language i learnt from childhood. my parents always pushed me to do better, be better, and i know it stems from love but the rose it originally blooms from is overridden with thorns once these encouragements became demands. suddenly their love becomes a powerhouse, a factory constantly pushing for higher efficiency, and it became easy to forget it was love running through the wires that kept the place alive to begin with.

i never felt it.

i would never defend such methods of pushing one to do better. but here i am, following them. a slave to the very thing i resented. i set these goals out of love, but it feels like a serious project. i’m tired. why the rose at all? why the factory ever? i want to be encased by safety instead of free in a cage— but see, i feel caged by love, too. i don’t know. one minute i’m a porcelain doll and the next i have the elusion of a ghost.

[nusaibaaaa]

one New Year’s resolution dies to January.

i told myself i’d face my emotions this year. that i’d feel them instead of running away, instead of bolting the door behind them until they overwhelm its hinges, flood the room i call routine and drown me. but i’m not. i’m not sure what made me this way. my emotions are separate from me, another person that looks exactly like me just with endless tears or anger colouring her skin. she terrifies me. her capacity to feel terrifies me. the dive her heart takes in a barrel of pain petrifies me, so deep it’s like i’ve spent my whole life underground. does anyone have a cleaver? hand it over at once. there’s someone I need to separate from.

[traumasurvivors]

I used to think healing meant becoming unbothered.

Now I think it means noticing when I’m bothered and treating myself with less cruelty about it.

[nusaibaaaa]

sometimes i wonder if they can see it. behind the facade of bursting energy, the smiles and curious eyes. the tiredness. the exhaustion. the idealization of giving up. how close i stand at the precipice of destruction, letting my foot dangle, teasing the rest of my weight with the lack thereof of the abyss in surrender. i wonder if they can see this life is killing me— i die a thousand deaths and am reborn when i stand in the sunshine. but once i’m gone, that rebirth will be short-lived, too. like the rest of them, and it’ll be only me at the wake. i’m a funeral and resurrection wrapped in one, two sides constantly fighting, making up who i am, the colour of my eyes, the flash in my grin, the smooth, flowing river that is my words without the world knowing they were nothing but brittle and broken. now, my words may not be broken, but i am.

[wholeheartedsuggestions]

this post will find you when it needs to find you.

just some facts: you are loved. you are not alone. you are valuable. you are worthy of good things. you are deserving of self love and forgiveness. i’m glad you’re still here.

[nusaibaaaa]

coffee-coloured eyes from my childhood.

would i have lost you too?

would you still have chased me, called me moti when i lost weight, squished my cheeks if i lost to you in chess? would we have laughed under the table like we did back then, me going hysterical as you stoked the fire of hilarity?

would you have stayed?

i can’t forget you. time seems to have buried us under the rubble but i crawl out of it and constantly search for you. a hand, a trace.

you have to be here somewhere.

every little detail washes over me like a dream i woke up from, like it was just yesterday. vestiges of it clinging to me like dust. you running, catching me. always wearing longer-than-conventional black socks. sitting beside me on the bench when we got in trouble. your voice, the premature maturity it held. your eyes, like the darkest shade of honeycomb befriended darkness, boring into mine. They won’t look away, my heart’s pounding and my face is in your hands—

tell me why i stop and look twice at any person who looks like you.

tell me why i’m still bound by nostalgia for what could’ve been.

tell me why you still have a hold on me twelve years later.

[nusaibaaaa]

we aren’t supposed to be self sufficient.

no, i’m not supposed to pick myself off the floor when i feel parts of me seep through the cracks of it, forever lost, as if merging with the ground. with loss, anguish, surrender. i’m not supposed to be able to talk myself through it like a second person, cannot be both hurt and healer, the dark and light. is it so sinful to want a lighter for this match? a cure for the disease? can i not want medicine as the sick without pretending to be both patient and apothecary? what if i am just that, a single, separate patient? a dependent? pathetic, symbiotic and needy. human?

how degrading it feels to be human.

[nusaibaaaa]

i thought i was high enough,

basking in my tower of shardy indifference but clearly not.

it snuck up on me

like a black panther in the dark,

ensnaring me with its limbs before tearing me apart

a creature called jealousy.

a surreptitious snake so deceptive i don’t even realize it’s the

veins in my arms.

[nusaibaaaa]

no because i doubt i even intellectualize my emotions. sure, i assign some coherence to them. sprinkle in salted self awareness. but i don’t think i ever cradle them close afterwards, accepting them. no. i pretend i know what i feel and i accept that, and when no one’s looking (myself, hundreds of reflections in broken mirrors) i take a knife and shear it away like cutting through clay. i trim and disfigure it the way fire burns flesh off a bone, getting rid of substance and leaving behind a mere trace. i turn my emotions from some intellectualized whole to a barely-there thing. like a house withered away in storms. and it is this portion of clay i allow to harden, that i place on my head like half a crown and claim, “yes, i feel like this because so and so.” but why is it that even after all the shearing, the burning away, the withering and ignoring and avoiding they come back and i find myself shattering on a random tuesday? i throw the crown away, feeling like the discarded clay somehow runs in my veins and solidifies my entire being into sorrow, heartache, betrayal, all these nasty emotions I keep away from like monsters in a closet. or at times i don’t even know how i feel. ignorance is so blissful i’m not aware of what my own heart is saying until it screams at me and i can do nothing but cry.

[nusaibaaaa]

enmeshed in every drop.

it is hard having so much in common with someone you barely speak to.

i know no one will understand me like you do, unless they love me to the bone which who is to say is guaranteed? the realization is both horrifying and gratifying, like being stuck in a cell with a monster who sometimes morphs into your own reflection.

i distract myself with delusions so i don’t think about everything that happened. because the second i do, the second i really let myself sink into it, tears come unannounced. and we both know i don’t like that— things unplanned, cropping out of what was promised, a splotch in the schedule. we don’t like that. we need things to go our way, or at least by way of what was assured. but as i grew older and so did you, our paths began to separate in the most polarized opposites, and what festered in between was not just our mediator but hatred and resentment. every ember of love i watched burn away to a plume of smoky indifference.

but now that i really think, i realize i can never not love you. no matter the fact you broke my heart. that you broke me. there is an unceded part of my heart that always belonged to you, no matter how much i denied and disavowed that about myself. no matter how chipped away and broken it was. you cannot scoop love out of blood— it is enmeshed in every drop. so i begrudgingly admit in this text that i love you— i love you so much. but i can’t see myself saying it to you again.