Expiry Dates

of pulling out grief like the burnt edges of bread with a promised shelf life; a loafsome tragedy

“If you feel far from God, who moved?”

— Afghan proverb

Before you begin reading my the trajectory of my unfazed soul bled with this virtual ink, I would want you to tap and play this music to accompany your sojourn in my words, thank you

Selam,

Are you a little bewildered by the fact that I arrived before spring? Well, maybe I heard the abyss call out your name and tell me how in my letters our predestined rendezvous could be manifested. That everytime we are strolling restlessly in the lanes of this epistolary plot, my ink clots give up their rampant determination of holding tight. If there's something I have learnt the hard way in life then it is that a human hand’s anatomy is like that of a paper. Each hand has its own origami, maybe so the creases have been drawn on our palms like fate lines way before our inception and are yet the last and only thing to remain upon our burial. These fate lines exhibit a certain kind of manual for us to remember, you can fold a paper maximum a seven times. And so you can only hold onto things you adore for seven lifetimes. Letting go will be the reason for your eighth incarnation. Are you staring at your palms now that I have bought your attention to? If yes, then look at the gaps between your fingers, who would have mapped and demarcated it to a certain limit, a limit that is both meant to fit and to reject.

This gap is directly proportional to the infinite warfare of your sanguine beatboxer AKA your beautiful heart. The more your heart adores, the more is the possibility to accommodate and hold onto. And now as I write this letter remember that my hands, my fingers and my heart are all in perfect alignment. In this very moment, I am breathing, I am hearing the trampoline bounce back as my emotions ricochet avidly. The ink as I say is and shall always be more indelible than blood stains. You will find me beside the bay singing love songs and succumbing to the tragedy of echo. Isn't it a melancholic reminder that the alarm is set and shall ring anytime soon. That every breath I inhale is followed by a reciprocation and by no means I can guess which one would be heaved in singularity with nothing left to be given or consumed anymore. Does that mean I should already give up all the dreams I have knit in the dark with a propensity of chewing light?

I know you too seek the answer to my previous question. Why are we even alive if we all come with expiry dates? Remember those last two pieces of bread you rejoiced as a delectable sandwich with whatever odd ingredients you had because apparently it would expire the very next day and would then be unfit to even look at. I remember how they would print an assumed age on its abdomen as if the moment clock ticks to twelve and it is the "doomsday" it will grow mold and caterpillars will crawl between its amoeba-like holes. Maybe bullet marks it carries from the previous life. Now that sounds absurdly philosophical in context of a packet of bread, but my point is how we all are very aware of this expiry date that has been imprinted on our underbellies while we were in the universe's oven being baked with so many other bodies waiting for life to invade. This irrevocable , undeniable and inadvertently escapable date shall knock all our doors.

But you know, you don't die in a second. Remember how even two days following the promised perishing date the bread looked all fine. Our very indianness would even admit nonchalantly consuming it and realising later, but it tasted just fine, didn't it? Because it wouldn't and it cannot die like that. Death is a midnight angel that stands by your door and gawks at your face realising how you resemble so much to all your ancestors who have been or will be taken along in your lineage. We die everyday just as much as we live everyday. Aren't we closer to death as much as we are closer to life. Isn't a birthday a reminder of the fact that all that has been born shall anyways decay in its own flesh. You know how there's so much more invisible around us than all that human eyesight can perceive. The profound lacuna between our atoms or the congested hope in how they would make sense t me while drawing their composition in solids in a science class— tightly packed as it read. Death isn't and has never followed after life, for they are lovers in disguise waiting to intertwine and melt into each other's arms the moment your name is erased from the worldly registers. Hence do you realise how even the act of dying is a very pious celebration of life?

Well now that we have found an answer to this, the other part of the question that remains tangled and unanswered is what can we do in this case? Have you ever seen children in a state of meditation with their eyes wide open, maybe while thoughtlessly holding crayons and colouring in their sketchbooks? What if a child was handed down only two crayons with a timer to draw something peculiar using them. What should be the best resolve in this situation? Using only one and running out of time? Boom he could never utilise the splendid vibrance of the other. The best answer is to hold the two in both hands and scribble listlessly, let the colours swirl like graceful ballerinas and jolt as if in a carnival. Maybe the end product isn't as neat as someone who was inherently precise about not rubbing the crayon's head a little too much or letting it step out of the defined boundaries but would at least be satisfying. The child would sleep in peace knowing each resource was put to action. You see, the crayons are like life and death, even though they aren't in your hold to be defined but they are right there between the same gaps in your fingers I talked about waiting to be the binary language of your expression. Live everyday knowing you are closer to death so that when you die you know in your last seven seconds, you truly have lived everyday. "Kun Faya Kun" (كُن فَيَكُونُ) ; Be! And it is.

Remember to be the way moths surrender to fire, allowing it to ablaze their abdomens and ashen away their corpses in its engulfment. Let your fire open its mouth wide, and the moment you look at it delicately you'll find its throat pierced with tonsils, of all the things that remain unsaid. Of you, unscripted. Of you, untouched.

If only you allowed it to speak, or perhaps scream until this young flame is a wildfire; you have anyways burnt enough that even fire isn't afraid to invade your heart anymore. Here is a list of moths representing everything that you wish to embody, choose one for yourself and tell me as you evolve into your soul moth this year,

In this body I feel like a young flame,

and so every time I walk, I am mistaken

to be a rebellious candle march.

I always fantasized war memorials are built in salt.

It took me another year to know,

The blood between my thighs too has the country's salt.

I was 9 when I asked the florist, if his flowers were

so beautiful, why would he sell them for graves? At my grandmother's funeral I nodded, it wasn't a rose on her grave. But another grave on her grave. No flower alive could visit a graveyard.

Nobody cares about a young flame until a

pyre is waiting to be cremated when the

wood is wet after a rainy autumn night,

i am afraid if the rain doesn't stop soon

we would have to cremate our fathers on

our

gas stoves.

As I seal this 'loafsome tragedy' with a kiss of poetry, I would like you to know how you are worth being preserved in museums and yet with all respect, deserve to trace the jawline of sky swinging down upon its intestines. With the inception of 2025, I hope you know that in this very moment, in this overpopulated globe pregnant with seven billion stories birthed every seven seconds, remember that you aren't a mere speck of dust destined to be crumpled. You are one of the innumerable stars bedecked with love on the galactic paunch of this universe, each one of them flickering with hope, an inseparable atom of a sprawling constellation that would have never made sense had even one of them fell from grace or went missing without notice. I shall meet you once again, when spring knocks your door and heralds like a flower child with its pink bosom adorned with lilac epiphanies.

Your fellow post woman on her unicorn bids you farewell for a while. May this rendezvous between the lines, this inkling tryst surmounting our existences perhaps far away in physical metrics but just an inch apart in the letters I write and letters you read. Until next time, don't forget I exist in some corner breathing to be able to write for you.

“Your eyes are like Baghdad; Even in sorrow they are sweet”