The autumn of grief
No one has asked how I’m feeling in a while. I don’t remember the last time someone asked how my day was. The vast expanse of loneliness seems to grow bigger with every passing moment. I dont know if its my state of mind or the political situation. There is a foreboding silence, like the calm before a storm. A deeply unsettling quietness, uneasy stillness. So much is happening, always. But with the aftermath of the — jalsa things have taken a turn for the worst. I know too much and I dont have anyone to share with, it makes me afraid and amplifies the loneliness. Its been a few weeks I cant sleep. I lie awake and trace the edges of my loneliness in the dark. Toss and turn. Toss and turn. All night. Simple worries overwhelm me. If someone were to call and ask about my day I feel it would cure me. Too much to do, too many places to be, too many people to meet. Yet loneliness stalks me like a shadow. Kamran is still in jail, there are more charges now, a new FIR on financing terrorism. I know other things I cant write. They weigh me down. Went to the Baloch missing persons sit in, sat with the missing mans wife. Her eyes were piercing, haunting, they have been following me around since. Who can dare look back in to them? Pablo Nerudos book lies between all the missing person posters. The sister of the missing is reading it. It makes for a poem.
Bazyaab karo bazyaab karo. Pablo Nerudo. Jabri Ghushudi band karo. Pablo Nerudo.
There is so much grief and misery around. Mine mixed with everyones, cant tell where mine stops and someone elses grief starts, its all one big massive undemarcated forrest of grief and loss. There are country wide strikes against electricity bills- the states license to rob its people legally. An old man committed suicide. Hes the one that got out. The system needs you alive and willing. It needs your blood and hunger and depravation. How much does it need? How much blood and how much sweat and how much death and how much grief? To continuously turn its pistons to keep making profit for the bourgeoises fuckery, its instgram whores #travelgoals #weddinggoals #cargoals #bossbabe. How much of our blood pays for your fucking hashtags and your asthetics? Then you somehow get us to like it too, aspire, long, to cannabalise each other. There is the bourgeoises fuckery and then my comrades. Drunk as shit, laughing through it all, hobby activism, our casual switching to and from lives. It makes me bitter. Others are busy making careers out of revolution. Theyre in the revolution business. Some think its a good pass for a free fuck all, toxic masculinity, pakistani men, imbalanced gender dynamics and progressive politics. Its a nightmare. Its hell in a bowl. If wedrink, sleep and smoke through everything, who will lead the revolution? I dont say anything, because I cant, because we must glorify alcohol. Our idea of progressiveness rests upon slow poisioning our livers and lungs and copying western party culture. I dont know whos debauchery is more criminal, the capitalists who eat and drink of our flesh and bone or of the comrades who forget the gravity of our situation, the boulder of responsibility on our shoulders and the herculean nature of the task that lies ahead. But Im not worried. The revolution doesnt need us. The people will lead. The real leaders will emerge in all of this. All these desi wanna be AOCs and Lenins cosplaying revolution, will be stuck out the first wave. All hope and power is with the people.
I feel as if Im being watched. I keep looking over my shoulder to check but never see anyone, yet I feel so strongly as if someone is watching me, someones eyes are piercing holes through my back I wonder if its my paranoia returning. The gaze weighs heavy on my shoulders. Its not paranoia.
Unknown number calls again.
I saw him briefly. I say never mind to the beat that skips my heart. Revolutionary love never ends well. Revolutionary love is a death sentence. We’re all fated to death or prison or endless waiting. If we’re lucky that is. Otherwise we are fated to eachother. Which is worse. Which is trauma, demons and baggage and ghosts. All that ends in death ends well.
