Those Chips in Me.

As I am sitting here on a Saturday morning, munching on Chips Ohoy early in the morning, I am smiling to myself for a reason so unknown. Maybe sometimes you smile because you don't know what else to do about what you're being subjected to. Crying seems to be to cliche. Plus why overburden your lacrimal glands when you know that your tears won't even dampen the cause of the problem to the least bit. So we started off with the cardiovascular system in college. The physiology part is so freaking extensive, but insh'Allah, I plan to ace this module. It's funny that I'm studying the human heart, something that nobody has fully understood to-date. They say the heart has four chambers, I beg to differ. It has a chamber within a chamber, each chamber with several twists and turns, a maze within a maze, and so many diversions. If the heart were such a simple thing, more than half of this world's problems would cease to exist. But then again, this is just what I think. I have been thinking a lot these days. Funny how sometimes you take "mental vacations" to such demented areas of life that you feel so very detached from your past, presence and future. Like the chocolate chips sprinkled across dough in making chocolate chip cookies, you feel like your pieces are dispersed across the seven seas, each fragment resting on embers in a different land. *snap, snap, snap* Sidra, get yourself back. You're drifting off a little too much these days. Get a grip on yourself, what are you doing to yourself? Why are you letting it affect you? Haha, these are things that I have to keep telling myself. See, I told you, growing up wasn't just a physical process- it wasn't limited to the obliteration of your epiphyseal growth plate in your bones or the onset of hormone secretion. There was a lot to it. Coming from Saudi to now Pakistan, I feel like I have just come out of an egg shell with one of my legs still very much caught in the gooey yolk and the pieces of the broken shell clinging to my hair. Maybe I'm going through a 'culture shock' or maybe I'm just being irrational by choice or maybe I'm just expecting too much light out of fireflies. I am doing things that I used to run away from. I am feeling something that I thought was just so low and cheap and "so-not-Sidra Chaudhry-type". From a super-focused-Paki woman, I'm turning into just another girl, who goes weak in the knees at the sight of a shooting star, who wants to wear the stars as a tiara, who goes goo-goo eyed at the mere thought of honey, flowers and butterflies. What's happening to me? Lol. Gah, so random. According to a friend, I've become bipolar. But who isn't bipolar? :P Everyone fluctuates through highs and lows, but maybe my frequency's a little fishy. Sighs. I'm being flipped like a paratha on a hot skillet.


Is this what you call pain?
If yes, then I want to ask you,
why it chose just me?
Did it fail to see you?
Or did you divert it to me?
The twinkle in your eyes,
sparkles at my cries.
The smile on your lips,
my dainty wings it clips.
But just to make you happy,
I'm ready to befriend misery.

I know, I don't know.

I don't know a thing. Or maybe I do, I don't know really. I'm sitting there in a corner, sulking...sobbing over what once was or maybe over what I wanted so badly to happen...each tear gliding down my cheeks and getting lost in the creases of my sweatshirt. I want it to rain so badly. I want it to rain cats and dogs, bulls and buffaloes, chickens and roosters. I want everything to be drenched, soaked and so completely wet. Why? I swear, I don't know why. I want strong winds to blow outside my window, so that the peaceful looking leaves stop sticking their tongues out at me and my restless soul, so that they too get a taste of the storm. I want the sky to turn a very dark purple, the stars to twinkle so bright like little diamonds studded in the night, I want the clouds to let it all out tonight. There's so much more that I want, but I just don't know. I want to arrange shards of broken glass in concentric circles and walk all over, starting from the outermost circle inwards...the crunch of the glass under my bare feet echoes in my ears, the pain is too familiar to feel anymore...I walk, leaving trails of crimson behind me...I hold out a candle in the palm of my hand and as the wax melts down into my skin, I don't feel a thing. I don't know why. It's probably because heat can't compete with the fumes that reside within me. I walk and walk until I reach the center, where I stand alone, staring out into nothingness. Things are too bright. They hurt my eyes. I don't know why. I try to shield my eyes using my arms...the candle falls from my hand...it all starts from a flame...the next thing I know is that I'm standing in a hoop of fiery flames. It feels so much like home. So much warmth, so much love, such a fiery embrace...the flames come closer and closer, enveloping me from all sides. I welcome them with open arms. Trust me, I don't know why. Amidst the flames, I see a face. It's yours I think. I smile. My eyes twinkle, not with glow, but with the waters pushing to come out. But tears don't fall. I don't know why. Maybe because they know there's no point in trying to diminish my family of flames. What are you? A mirage? Illusion? Hallucination? Thoughts of a crazy mind? A hoax by the wind? I really don't know. But I know just one thing, you are 'someone'.

Is it not?

When I carried five kilos of onions and another five kilos of potatoes from the markaz back to my house, I actually felt what it was like to carry the burden of a lifetime with you. As the polythene bag handles bored into my skin and when my fingers were sore due to the cold wind and the heavy bags, I felt like no other. It wasn't just the weight of onions and potatoes, it was so much more, but I just couldn't put a name to it. As I walked down the streets, I felt like I was walking in a gel..so slow, struggling to walk faster, walk smoother...As the sun started to go down and the entire sector became a tadbit darker, it felt like everything was just leaving me so alone little by little. The cold winds adamant to pull the dupatta off my head, the heavy bags of groceries, the weight of a million effervescent thoughts colliding in my head, the dust-laden streets which seemed to lead me to a place I was supposed to accept as home. I see a huge pile of dry leaves right ahead and I have the sudden urge to throw off my groceries in the middle of the street and jump into the heap...to keep stomping every little leaf until my lungs would collapse and my breath would fail to come to normal...I wanted to grind each leaf to a gazillion fragments, picture each leaf as a major source of pain in my life, hammer it out of my life, excise the tumor. But unfortunately, I couldn't do that, I could just gaze at the dry leaves, which rustled against the dusty road, and pretend as if they didn't exist. I shuffled the grocery bags around, trying to calm my screaming muscles, but I failed miserably. Who said pain was only physical? My aching deltoids were nothing compared to the massive aches that I was encountering deep inside. I don't even know whether it was my heart or my mind that was aching. But there was pain. I just knew it. As I said earlier, I just couldn't put a finger on it. I tried to divert my mind. I concentrated on the sound of my own footsteps on the road. The silence around made it so much easier to do that. Each "thud" felt like a little betrayal to me. I was walking as if I knew where I was headed, but I didn't. I was pretending all this time. Everything was so wrong, so alien, so strange. When I reached home, I climbed the stairs, dumped the groceries in the kitchen, then I literally dragged myself to my bedroom. I was sick and tired and super-saturated. I threw myself on my bed. I lay there for ten minutes staring at the ceiling. The fan stared back at me and I wondered whether it ever got fed up of witnessing everything from up there, at such a distance. Things blurred, so I just closed my eyes. That was the best I could do. I once read, you can close your eyes to things you don't want to see, but you can't close your heart to things you don't want to feel. Funny how quotes can so aptly describe your condition, but do nothing to improve it. I reached out to my side drawer and pulled out my scrapbook. Its incomplete-ness bugged me. I had planned so much- to fill it up, I had collected leaves, pressed flowers, cut out templates, and piled up accessories to fill up the empty pages. But save the first few pages, the rest of the book was staring back at me with a blankness so penetrating, that it made my hands tremble. I flipped through the first page- graduation, the love, the drama, the tears, the farewells, my parents, my friends, the pain of parting ways..second page, summer fun, eating at china grill on July 20, a day of revelations. Once happy events seemed to have a little fragment of pain attached to them in some way or the other. Pain was so inevitable. Fearing needles, blood tests, and driving out of the fear of pain was pointless. Pain still got to you. It had its own ways. It could sneak up behind your back, enter through a small nick in your soul, grow inside, pulsate, put you in a fix, make you want to cry all your body fluids out. I passed my hand over the shells that I had collected from RT beach before leaving Saudi for college...Each shell, a little bump under my fingers, felt so cool and so tranquil. They had been relocated with me. I had deprived them of their abode- the warm beachy sands of Arabia. I was cruel. I had picked them up from the depths of the sands, stored them in a used plastic cup, washed them again and again until I was sure there wasn't a single algae stuck to them. I had subjected them to so much. Stuck on a page in my scrapbook now amidst glitter-laden and smiley faces, the shell looked so out of place...like me. I closed the book shut. Everything seemed to be going through a little tragedy.

A million moons could do no good,

to lighten up my world,

what to talk about those dainty stars.

One by one each candle collapsed,

failing to show me the way,

it was me and darkness, for eternity.

Feb 1, 2009