It’s nice up here. Winking at the sun as it plays hide and seek with my eyes. The wind running fingers through my hair. Moisture in the air caressing my skin softly. Everything seems so small, and trivial. This isn’t over rated at all. I see what all the fuss is about.

Oh the air smells so delicious. Smells like triumph. I want to fling my arms back and inhale, breathing into my senses all around me, to collect treasures of memories as souvenirs of my journey. I have made myself a home. But I’m not made to live here.

I sometimes find myself seeking traces of a heart beat, when I fear I don’t feel. I’m sure its there. I just don’t need it right now. It’s a warmer place for the oblivious, and I choose to be one.

I take a step closer to the cliff every time I come up here, looking down at the crashing waves, knowing it’s soon going to be time to jump into the stream again. There’s no fear this time. I stand alone, with strawberry bruises on my knees. I’m almost amused at myself and the relentless urge to take the plunge…

..Sigh…Step back Maria. Hmm...not just yet. Maybe another day :)

It knocks again. An offbeat dawdling knock. A cold uncertain wind creeping from beneath the door. A rising pungent odor of discomforting solitude stocked away. I stand with my back pressed against the varnished wooden door, thinking maybe if I ignore the presence it will just go away.

This Autumn swept by fast. I saw the crimson and chocolate. I felt the breeze tingling my face. But I missed the squeals of fallen auburn leaves being crushed. However, Winter always has a way of making its presence known...

It’s unnerving how people persist to bind their lives within social stratifications. If you’re not the one who took the lead to look down at the other, you’re the one who was sneered at and in retaliation found yourself snugly standing within the same shoes. Why? Where does all the education and religion, we take such pride in, go then? ..It is harder to look down someone’s eyes, or listen and let a few words sink in. For words can lie, and so can eyes. But so can the illusion...that we already know.

Tonight will be a long night. It always is when it’s so quiet. Not the sound of turning crisp pages. Not the thug of a cup of coffee rested on the table. Not that husky whisper. Not that lingering teasing silence after a witty joke... Its just me tonight.

So where do you go from here?
I don’t know.
What does it feel like?
Nothing.
What are you afraid of?
You.
What do you need?
Me.
Can I help in any way?
Just turn the damn music off.

Last summer quarter has to be the craziest ever....3 nights at Ayesha’s, and all we do is sit in front of a pc dissecting claims, evidence and arguments. Having teaspoons of coffee shoved into my mouth. Emptying Ash’s fridge with Sara. Being up for days on end. Wearing a nightshirt to LUMS. Hysterical laughter fits in lab4. And Bam’s tough love for all! Haha...*sheesh* The dude totally surprises me, you never know what’s going on in his head. And to think I was running around frantically trying to drop this course. There’s a hint of sweetness in the bitterest of chocolates. You sometimes need to be a just little more patient.

All I’ve been doing all summer vacations is fulfill my desires of couch-potatoe-ing endlessly hours on end. Bed to sofa, sofa to bed. I thought I had seen all low budget movies that had ever been made aired on HBO and star movies. However apparently I was wrong.... Going to head for Islamabad for my internship in a couple of days. I’m so excited! I hope we get exactly the kind of work we’re looking for. Lots and lots of it! N its real fun! Eww.. I’m beginning to sound like a bloody workaholic lol..

I hate being sick. I hate being dependant upon someone. Oh and I certainly hate waking up finding myself lying on the bathroom floor! Hahah... I know it’s a weird thought but its an oddly interesting feeling. You’re vision becomes blurry, your senses slowly retrieve and you cant feel anything, no pain no nothing, you can hear a little but you really don’t give a fuck, and the next thing you know your on the ground, and its slowly all coming back. Not that I enjoy it. Allah mian please I so don’t want more lol. Just wierdly fascinated by the dizziness I suppose. I wonder if that’s how you feel when you’re drugged hmm.. My mom’s such a sweetheart :) ..I wish I was less trouble haha.. we’re all such a handful.

I love the weather! Its been raining a lot.. The patter of rain drops. How they form crystals on your eyelashes. The exhilarating smell of moist mud. Trees washed out with various shades of green rejoicing belongingness to the soil they feed off. Jumping in dirty puddles with Hashim and Birjees. Swooshing down a wet slide screaming and struggling to hang on to the sides to keep from falling into the pool of kicharr, within which Hashim awaits with an evil naughty smirk. Birjees’s yummy chocolate chip pancakes!

Its kind of scary being 21. I’ve almost always had my life perfectly figured out, if not too much at least a year ahead. But right now I stand in the field, with the wind in my face, and a sun so blinding I can barely see what’s ahead. It’s distressing as is obvious. However oddly exciting also. There was a time when I would always look five years ahead before taking a step. I've played safe too long now. I don’t want wrinkles under my eyes next time I look at myself in the mirror and ask what if you had? .. It’s ok to take risks. Well calculated, smart risks. But risks nonetheless. The magic ball doesn’t always work. The future is really unseen. The clock doesn’t know how to run backwards. It keeps running ahead, and you need to keep running with it. Taking those decisions, whether they then make you smile or cry, embracing it all without a hint of regret, for through happiness or sadness, you took those steps yourself and on the way learnt how to run and feel alive.... :)

I caught glimpse of a shooting star today,
Beaming glitter across the sky;
Dipping into the pool of black,
Streaks of life, sucked into darkness to die.

I want to fly sometimes,
Across those very horizons;
But weary of taking that leap,
Don’t know how far, before the journey is done.

Think not when you speak,
I want to know what your soul has to say;
Pause not when you speak,
Let go of that fear your wrapped around, today.

These walls around me I’ve built,
Feel thinner than they look;
Ask me not to break them down,
I see cracks from the last time they shook.

Winter never stays too long here,
But I stand with a frozen heart;
Clutching onto petals, squirming in my palm,
I feel, just sometimes choose not.

If every gesture could not be read,
If every dawn was not followed by twilight;
If it did not matter where we were tomorrow,
I’d smile for you tonight.

Alive? Or just alive?

I don’t want to feel the breeze. I want to be the wind.
I don’t want a bite. I want the whole cake.

There’s just so much I want to do. But the clock keeps ticking.
Insatiable desires that keep lighting a candle, I put out every now and then, on a quiet autumn day..

I want to stop the incinerating forest from burning. But I wonder what it must feel like to be a swirl of smoke making unsymmetrical circles through the air, smelling of amber burnt leaves.

I've taken huge decisions in life, without always having to turn to someone. But I can simply never decide between coffee and tea.

If we know there always are shades of gray, then why must the answer always be in a yes or no? Words can’t always be taken back once you say them out. I’m not sure how many I have with me anymore...

Freedom of speech, they say. Hah. There are parameters to speech. There are parameters to freedom. And parameters to creativity.. As suffocating as it may sound. It surely matters not how you think. But when what you think, is also to be heard, things get slightly more complicated, for we spill beyond our little bubble of space.

I swing between a guitar, drum kit, pc, and a pile of books.....between friends and family....between I and me.

Its crazy. Almost deafening. But I like noise.
HmmMm.... So lets make some more eh? ;)

I wish you weren’t so fond of me,
With your mocking cruel gaze;
Who does the sand fool, being turned over,
It seeps through the same hour glass always.

Laughter that crackles,
Revealing the hollow within;
A numbing silence precedes,
An empty noise so deafening.

I thought of you today,
That moment when it felt you didn’t care;
Keep looking back once in a while,
In search of that hiding lonely tear.

I like keeping them to myself now,
As I bleed some more;
A salty stream, bearing some of me, some of you,
Rain seems strangely comforting after a storm.

Cold water tingles over a burning soul,
A piercing mist struggling to break through;
Colours return to the pallet soon,
But you shall forever, remain my blue...

Moushoo
Skunk
Atom
Orange-lady
Chip-munk
Duh
......familiar?

And then we say we aren’t judgmental.

I write of language discourse and creation of identities, yet just realized how often we ourselves are perpetuators of such discourses….:S…wweEops too much SS lingo? …it gets to you sometimes yes haha…anyways...

I tend to be bad with names. But if you chose not to wear that torturous odor everyday, spare my nose and try using a Fa antiperspirant, attach more recognition to your identity than the cartoon image of a stinky fish skeleton or a used dirty green sock with gray smokey fumes, I might just consider attempting to memorize your damn name!

'N hey it’s not my fault if twenty four parents around the world chose to have kids at the same hour and name all of them Fatima or Ali. Where is you sense of originality? I’d so prefer Rupelstiltskin anyday! ;D ....(no offence to any Fatimas and Ali reading this ofcourse. I know you? I love you... hehe)

Ok…so sometimes you do tend to remember the names too, but it’s just so much easier to give a name that makes more sense to you. It’s actually a favor bestowed upon mankind. Say if a person who’s a real dog in nature, is actually called “dog”, wouldn't that would make life so much simpler for those around, and save those innocent naïve creatures running around from being beguiled by their deceptive identities?

Naming for the sake of analogy is also as legitimate a cause. What can make more sense than the dorrito vs. namak paara theory when trying to illuminate the credentials, and lack of, between two potential interests? Yes that might involve reducing individuals to a level of objectification where they are being compared to a packet of crisps, but hey dorritos are anything but derogatory.

We criticized to death the Akbari-Askari way of thinking in urdu literature classes back in grade eight… yet insist upon doing so ourselves. We consciously believe in ‘shades of gray’, but when it comes to dealing with people they’re either angels or they have the devil in them. The guy you see helping the old lady cross the road goes on to the golden star list and the one that sticks his head out of the window and spits red eow pan slashes on the pwetty walkway next to the flower beds gets to be black listed. One becomes the sweet-uncle and the other the icky-pan-thook-guy. But that’s not the end of it…there is more to them then you know. I never thought of myself as vulnerable and naïve when it came to judging people. But man, I suck at it! :S

I could never understand Manto’s “khol doa”…how those men could be heroes at one end and then in another instance commit the same crimes they were supposedly saving others from. But very recently have realized it happens all around you. Hypocrisy, double-standards, weaknesses......a complex mesh of incomprehensible weirdness.

So the moral of this immoral story is….naming people for the sake of simplicity can end up making you believe, they are that simple.

Beware of the evil within you.

The truth is out there.

For those of you who read this the second time to actually make sense of it, and those of you who do not like dorritos: you are a sad individual, go smash you head against a wall and squish any remains of those brain cells that exist up there…they are useless. *smug smilie*