benafsha

Your name means flower

And mine means rose

We are both thorny

We both push away

And we love too much

These are things that only you and I understand about each other

We are flowers

And perhaps this is the bond that takes us further

Than any law of society that could come in our way

We are not sisters

We are not of the same bloodline

Nor of the same country

Nor of the same language

But we can suck on fresh mango and talk the night away

And perhaps this is what makes us one

As if bloodlines ever had to do with anything as pure and simple as our relationship

Perhaps ours is better to remain bloodless

And nameless

You are all at once my best friend, my sister, and the person I will compare every man to

For there is no one else I would walk to the ends of the earth for

With the full trust that she would jump with me

And this is what one should expect from a lover, no?

Even God must be wondering

Why every relationship couldn’t turn out like ours

You are the answer to every prayer I didn’t know I performed

And I thank God for this every day

Here’s to all the relationships we don’t understand, and how unnecessary it is to define them

I love you, happy birthday

You deserve every good thing

Clashing

I am the flute, you are the air

Coming from the mouth of a boy

That never learned music

my healer.

two people joined at the rot.

-

for the fifth time this month

you say you’re going to leave him

he calls you a cunt over the phone

then walks the three miles to your house

and kisses your mouth until the word is just

a place on your body.

i don’t know what brings broken people together

maybe damage seeks out damage

the way stains on a mattress halo into one another

the way stains on a mattress bleed into each other.

- Warsan Shire

i squeezed her wrist

to feel her pulse
it was the only place i could still call home

the little girl

Today she held out her hands to me

And asked

Is this what hearts look like?

Are they like hands?

Do they hold things? Like other hearts?

Do they drop them if they are too small?

Do some of them drop bombs on us?

Is this why we live like this?

questions on the deathbed

when were you the most spiritual?

when i questioned god the most.

what was the most difficult?

smiling and meaning it.

glass

--

girls like glass
are easy to break
but draw blood once they're broken

barefoot in the rain

this is my seven year old cousin, rifa. she is the most important person. if i could, i would never let her leave my eyesight. even in my sleep, i would hold her close. i would shield her, i would never let the world touch her. i would try with all of my might to hold her back, in this age, when there are no battlegrounds to throw her heart into. if i could hold her hand for the rest of my life, her smile would never betray her.

i miss you

Life is much too short. We know that every time we see little boys and girls running around, giggling, as if the clouds had not found their skies yet. In their world, the sun still shines, bright, without interruption. We look back and feel regret. We promise we would take it all back upon a sliver of a chance. We promise that we would laugh harder, that we would know how lucky we are to laugh. We want to hold onto those moments, just as a mother wants to hold onto her child in her death bed. But what for, my love? What reason will you give for stopping time? We came into this world not knowing why, and we will leave not knowing what will come next. Yet we so dearly hold onto something that we never fully grasped.

If you are alive, if you are lucky enough to be here, then realize how lucky you are to laugh. Hug your mother, sing, jump off a plane, but don’t look back and miss. We don’t have time to miss.

the last moments

I’ve always imagined that I would spend the last years of my life somewhere in Punjab. My life would have fallen out of the movie Veer-Zaara. The town would be made, the schools erected, the people happy. Someone would always be singing a song and there would be lassi with every meal. Sometimes I think it would be a beautiful feeling to be old. To watch the sun rise from your balcony, let it hit your arms, your face, not worry about it changing your color or giving you lines. Not worry about whether or not someone will love you if you change. Not worry about changing anything in the world. Not wonder if you are useful or if your body is just an empty vase, taking up space, not giving life to anything. That would all be done, the world would be saved. You could look over the balcony and remember all the times you have laughed, knowing they were the only important times. Everything would be completed, all sins forgiven, no relationships with fraying ends. You would have a complete book of memories, and no fear that there haven’t been enough. For once you would have time to let the sun fall on you, to feel the rain as if it had found you and no one else. And who knows, maybe when you look over your shoulder, from the balcony, you would find someone sleeping on the bed, holding your heart so carefully in his outstretched hand. 

pandora's box

"When men spread themselves over the earth,
And became many nations
Speaking diverse languages,
And observing diverse customs and laws;
The evils became multiplied
As one race or nation
Became alienated from one another
The Brotherhood of Men was now doubly forgotten, -
First, between individuals, and secondly, between nations
Arrogance, selfishness, and untruth
Were sown and reaped in larger fields;
And Peace, Faith, Love and Justice
Were obscured over masses of men,
As large tracts of land were starved
Of sunshine by clouds floating far and high."

Surah Fatiha, Ayat 5

images

I love rainfall. It’s magical; the sound of the water, the feeling that I have fallen into the color blue. It’s loud. And yet, every time it rains, it seems the night has become silent to hear my brain at work. When it rains, when the wind throws the curtains back, and the drops slap against the fountain in the courtyard, it’s as if the clouds pick me up and transport me to another world. Suddenly, it’s midnight. The air is charcoal black. We are in some deserted alley in India. I’m dancing in the rain. You are watching. You are watching the way my wet hair falls against my cheek. The way I’m smiling. The way my teeth break the darkness for a moment. You don’t want me to stop, but you want me to sit next to you. You want to rest your head in my lap. You want us to spend the night like that, soaked in an alley way.

I’m still dancing. You don’t know if you will ever lay your head in my lap. You think about the scene in slumdog millionaire, when a boy and girl meet in a cave, and go on to fall in love when they’re older. You are wishing that we were little kids. That it was raining and you sought refuge in this cave; that you saw me and asked me to join you. You wish we were in that cave, learning each other’s names for the first time, listening to the rain whistle outside as each droplet bounced off the roof.

clean

Today I came home, to my own skin

And I found that I had finally washed you out of every last corner

My flesh no longer remembered the way it swooned under your touch

Or how you pressed it closer to me

Waiting till the day it disappeared

And I came home in the body of a girl you would like to hold

Today I came home

And I wore the shade of lipstick you despised

I slept in the rain

And did not untangle the wars from my curls

I conceded to myself

I told the soft parts of my body

That they could stay

They have nowhere else to go

You were the only one that had to leave

the name

my name, faria, means smiles and roses, one meaning coming from arabic and the other from farsi.

my name is wrought from two different worlds. it rolls off of two tongues the same way but renders different meaning to each. to one i should be a flood of happiness, to the other, a sweet smell, a soft composition.  this split, the way i know the cradle of both tongues but belong to neither, reminds me of how i've seen too many places to remember my own, how my soul is split into every culture; how i want to know the tongues of every language, the skin of every country. it reminds me of how i belong to the world, yet no country can house me.

my name makes me wonder if i there is some gentle faria hidden within me. do i, like gifted roses, breed love in another's heart? does someone admire me as they swoon over a bouquet of roses? do i console one's tear-swollen eyes just as rose-water does?

when i think of these questions, i don't believe in my name. i become afraid that it captures the way i love people, but never how i push them away. when i am vile, when i deter someone who bent down to pick me up in one sharp prick, i worry i have overstepped my name's boundaries. it is at times like this, when i doubt my very nature, that i have to remind myself of what a versatile name my mom gifted me. it is then that i remember even roses have thorns. 

“Women cry more, therefore they are weaker.”

Many people believe that women are the “weaker” or “softer” of the two sexes because they cry more on average. I have been thinking about this hypothesis and my own experiences and have come up with this conclusion:

First of all, one needs to make a distinction between the amount of tears one sheds and the strength they possess. One’s tendency to cry actually tells us very little about their strength. What determines their strength is the method used to deal with the problem at hand, which obviously, can be executed identically by a person who cried and a person who did not.

As far as I can tell, tears are just the body’s immediate way to shed some stress hormones. It is necessary for the body to do so in order to allow the brain to clear itself and consider future advances to deal with the problem. An average woman may cry more than an average man, but she probably punches fewer walls than him too. The body always has to find some way to release stress that has built up. Everyone finds their own way to shed it.

I can say so with confidence because I have experienced many ways of stress release myself. Without any medicines in my body, I tend to steer toward the “male” side of the spectrum. When I am entirely myself, I will go without crying for a year or longer, which is quite the stretch for an average female. But this does not mean that I don’t experience stress or that it doesn’t actually have a physical affect on me. It does. I may not cry but I feel definite uneasiness in my stomach and many times feel the need/actually do vomit. It’s just another way for the body to release. And when I am on medicines that throw any balance my body had out the window, I will cry for no reason at all, sometimes with very few breaks throughout a whole day.  It is just my body doing what it has to do. It doesn’t make me any weaker than the person I was without medicines and it definitely doesn’t change how I tackle stress. It just tells me that the stars have aligned in such a way to determine this as my stress relief.

So, I am not here to tell you that every woman is a super-woman and will tackle all problems like Chuck Norris. I am just hoping to open your mind. Judge a person’s strength by their ability to deal with what life throws at them, not how often you hear them sob. And honestly, even though it may not come to you naturally, a good cry releases a lot of much-appreciated endorphins. Next time you feel your eyes well up, go for it.

good morning

its morning, my third morning in nairobi. i have learned to wake up with the sun here. and the morning has become my time to write, to try and press something on paper as beautiful as the kenyan sun that woke me up and the land i'm hovering over at the top floor of this apartment building. i spend a lot of time at the window, watching kids play, people roam about, women cook and hang their clothes and rugs to dry on clotheslines. kenyan women are beautiful. the people here are loving, happy, at your service. there is a maid that comes here every morning. she does the laundry, cleans the bathrooms, does the dishes, sweeps the floor with her back nearly bent in two. our driver, every restaurant server, every gate keeper is a native kenyan. when i am here i feel like i have intruded on their country. that i am a trespasser on someone's property. that people like me have turned this country in on itself, and now its natives have learned to cater to everyone but their own people. i don't like being a trespasser. but when i watch from the window i feel that i could only ever be a watcher. i could never be a true kenyan, i could never see true nairobi. the life i was born into will always keep me inches away -a safe distance away- from the truth of this country.

i don't want that. i don't want to always be a watcher. i don't want to be a product of the life i was born into. i will choose the life i live. and this new one will not separate me from this country. i will not turn this country in on itself. i will reach the heart of the matter. somehow, i am bound to find it.