sidewalk scribbling

September 29 I woke up that day adrift in a sea of blossoms, pale pink, delicate, silent. Except they didn’t smell like flowers, more like mothballs or dust and then when I leaned over, closer, the blossoms turned out to be scrunched up paper, I barely touched one with a finger that the entire sea shook, shuddered, rustled and it sounded like rain or a child beating on tin sheets, and the papers unfurled, words poured down, catching in my hair, bruising my skin, scratching, tearing. I woke up one night to find myself standing on a bridge made of playing cards. It was dark all around me so I couldn’t tell if I was surrounded by water or fire or a just a deep abyss. I’m afraid to move because I fear the bridge might collapse so I continue to stand, gingerly, terrified and stuck. I hope the sun rises soon so I can see clearer… Thoughts can sometimes be like bedbugs. They make you twist and turn and roll around, they yank sleep away just as it starts to settle on you like a film of d...

September 25 My favorite photograph of me on my wall is the one with you. Well, all three of them. Thinking of you is like listening to good music while walking – everything looks better, feels better, the grays in the sky are infused with lavender, the taller treetops are able to reach out and grab on to – for a while – the fleeting sunrays. Of course sometimes the distance kicks in and then it’s like the battery ran out or I took my headphones off. And all of a sudden the world is ordinary again. It’s really quiet except for the rush of traffic in the background, and I no longer feel like I’m on the set of a TV serial. I’m going to take the liberty and blame you for the most recent holes in my self-esteem. Or rather, the lack of you. In other words, I really miss you. I go through memories like a stack of photographs, bagels and cream cheese, three is the perfect number of cigarettes, the comforting patterns of chauvinism and punches we would follow, how can you eat Chinese f...

September 24 A week later I’m already scaling boulders and rocks and whitewashed walls. Not. But I have moved to three sets of arm exercises – today I did it twice. That’s six sets. Wow. Stronger arms and math skills, I’m on a roll! I’m also drinking milk. I’m half a half-a-gallon down in three days. That’s the beauty of blogs – narcissism at its shiny fake silver peak. Everything you do is worthy enough to be penned down because you are essentially just writing as you think and so Alice is in wonderland, slipping down dark green leaves and into pasta bowls. Sometimes your brain feels like a slippery fish, you try to wrap your fingers around it but it slips out again and again, slopping sloppily all over your fake wood floors. Or like overcooked spaghetti. Are you happy, you ask, peering down into the gray-pink folds of your mind. Are you sending the right messages out, connecting the dots and nudging the neurotransmitters that can keep you happy? Dopamine that is. Something doesn’...

September 20 I have always loved movies about sports, my heart goes out to the underdog/s and I urge them on in their practice routines, as they drive or are driven hard, beyond the endurance of the average and then how in the end they always win while emotional music plays in the background. Even movies about dying children and women with cancer don’t make me cry but when the star basketball/hockey/football player is lifted up on the shoulders of his ecstatic teammates, my eyes tear up. Human psychology is incredible and the lengths to which people are able to push themselves go beyond the imagination (or at least right up to the edge of imagination). The catch is, of course, you don’t really know if you’ll be able to lift that car debris off your kid until or unless the actual moment comes. And while in theory and movies it seems like almost anyone (and maybe they can) can have the determination in a given situation, say a 100-metre race and they’re in awful shape (as in the mo...

September 18 I have a tendency to get lost in lists; what with Japanese drummer girls, baby giraffes and hot air balloons all within reach, I think I kind of strayed too far away. And then a slight tug around my ankles, a vague fretting sensation, the beginnings of melancholy. Fears, anxiety, nostalgia, longing for someone you’re used to being part of your daily grind. A happening, happy life brimming with awesomeness? According to whom? For whom? Is someone really watching and measuring how cool you are; does anyone care? Is it really sad if nobody really does or does it work the other way around too? When do I stop being an insecure 16 year old? Remembering your self-designed purpose in life can be difficult in these fast-paced times where it feels months pass like minutes, calendar pages whirring away in the kind of blur they show in movies to show time’s passing by. I put up so many little post-its and daily planner pages that the larger picture is completely covered up – the r...

September 14 It seems like just a few months ago we were trying to come up with a different way to layout the “flood stories” (a deluge of stories about storms in those months) so people would still pick up the paper and read about other people whose lives were streaming away from them in muddy, brown waters. When you work for a newspaper, news becomes old really soon. The tragedy of a city like Karachi is reflected in a city editor who has been in the business for 10 years and when there’s a bomb blast, what comes to her mind first is: what will the headline be this time? “I’m running out of ideas and new angles…” she would puff out exasperatedly. Just halfway through our first year publishing news, we started taking things in our stride: ‘okay, so we don’t need to worry about page 2 and 3 because there are so many flood stories; the building collapse in Lyari comes with a really good photograph so that’ll be all of page 1 anchor (bottom part)’. The tragedy of a country like P...

September 7 & 8 A new pair of shoes that finally fits right and you can stuff your foot in without untying the laces yet the shoes are still not loose, or a pair of jeans fresh out of the dryer that’s just a little tight but then a couple of hours later it’s perfect. It was like hopping up and down, trying to prop myself up a ledge and today I finally managed to get up there. It’s a cute little niche and guess what I found there? Indian food, coffee chocolate cake, a strange drunk man, a really cute black coat and my first birthday hug in St Louis. -- What a randomly adorable day. If you manage not to miss home on your first birthday in a foreign place, you have to think about how lucky you are. St Louis is really starting to grow on me and of course, it’s the people around you who make the connections in your brain that spell out the beginnings of love. So when we’re born, all our neurons are just unwired and there are a million different ways they can be connected, for...