as i look for things to say

when in pakistan…

my main issue right now (there’s always one…) is that none of my reflections properly resemble the next. before the full-length mirror hanging from the back of my bedroom door, i look lumpier, older than the image of the 22 year old i can’t get out of my head. in the eyes of my group of coworkers-turning-friends, i am feigning avoidant attachment when really i just haven’t figured out a structured approach to narrating my lore yet. to an old friend i am off brand for reading System Design Interview by Alex Xu but if i could afford to id much rather be reading whatever performative core authorship ive always been a fond of. in the middle of all of this, i am somehow on the outside of myself, watching parts of me shrink and embolden, with the weight of having to sum all the right parts, of deciding whether i’m looking at my 25 year old self or just an aberration of the mirror, whether something deep within just doesn’t want new friendship at the moment, or whether taking a liking to Alex Xu is somehow betraying albert camus. all versions can be true, there is room for more than one truth, but regardless, lately i haven’t been adequately certain about any of them, certain enough to be able to say, “this is me!”

a few months ago i had decided to give it time and wait it out until everything falls into place on its own. back in march or april i told my boss during our 1 on 1 that i was giving my life time until november to sort itself out before i ended it. it is now november but in this time ive grown to believe that killing yourself is the cringiest thing in the world and my life is actually pretty normal with not much to worry about and hypothetically if i were to leave a note behind i wouldn’t even have enough problems to fill it with, so that would be lame. my boss did say i should see a therapist and i even looked up a few in my city but never ended up going because of this tweet i saw around that time that was like “Sure I ‘grind my teeth’ but it ‘happens while I’m sleeping’ so it’s ‘impossible for me to tell’. Oh you have a solution, and it costs $300. Sure yes I trust you ‘dentist’” and i thought the dig at dentistry was analogous to therapy. regardless, even if i were to see a therapist, i’m not sure what i would say to them to convey my desire to kill myself that really isn’t as much of a desire to kill myself as it is a twitter-bred expression for misplaced discontent (maybe that’s a good place to start?).

a little while after that conversation, i turned 25, and all of a sudden i started hearing people talking about income tax in the smoking zone at the office. to be fair i’m not exactly the type A kind, so half of it is on me for not anticipating word of taxes right now, but the other half is the sheer betrayal of being left behind by your own body as it grows to the kind of size that owes the government money, while you still keep finding reasons to linger a few steps back. this is not my first time showing up to life unprepared, but still, it was a different, even thrilling, kind of unpreparedness being on a plane to sarajevo and asking the passenger next to me what the currency of the country was just before the plane landed. they were life’s surprises but they were also, admittedly, on my own terms, and i suppose now, they are less so. like having your birthday surprise thrown at your own house as opposed to someone else’s, where you’re summoned to instead of thrown into; the latter is for obvious reasons less imposing. at some point i figured being old and alive is a laden task and if i just led with my career and got that sorted, that would naturally open up space for me to eventually get the rest in order as well. and so for a while, i did that.

i began to, and succeeded to a commendable extent, if i may say so myself, to assume a detachment entirely foreign to the real lover and ex-bpd haver zion. i began to speak less and less, and frequently ran out of things to say. when people asked how i was doing, i had not much to indulge them in, and so maybe that’s where i picked up lying properly for the first time. i would muster the most romantic image of paying my credit card bill or of a random side quest that i could, so as to convince the other that i appreciated them inquiring. except when i thought my stories should undulate a little as well, then i would pick a nearly harmless encounter and embellish my victimhood to elicit some sympathy, lest they felt like they were clapping for me too much.

a strange byproduct of this was that my already deficient memory got progressively worse. i would listen to people, chime in, until the spotlight was off, and then i would get ready for the next act. this was a lot of work on its own, and if i had to keep tabs of all of the things i was agreeing to (or disagreeing with, to even things out), i would’ve probably gone insane by now. i started going to the movies by myself every week, until i watched almost all of them, because for just $3 i could go three hours without having to answer questions about myself, or any at all, for that matter.

except, in work meetings. here, i was so loud with my questions and ideas at work in a way that would make all the other kids in the class hate you. i frequently got things wrong, but we all went ahead with it anyway perhaps because i was just so loud. i feel some regret here, because i wasn’t an expert of the things we were doing and i might’ve led a few collective missteps, but really, i couldn’t help it when everything faded in urgency next to my career. it was the door to everything that was actually important. ill get this sorted, and then ill deal with the next.

then slowly, but also suddenly, i looked up like in the movies when the character breaks the 4th wall, and i thought, prepared or not, i am 25, and i owe the government money. that life has been happening, all this time, notwithstanding my lack of consent or even dearth of awareness, not in a linear fashion as i was expecting it to be, but all at once. that i feigned affection in places no one would argue were any less worthy of real affection. that i spent all this time believing nothing is important except just One thing, over all that graces god’s green earth, that i even let myself decide on a whim what that One thing was going to be, which also led me to not saying the word “postmodern” in months.

i’m finishing this post on vacation, and with a return ticket with a set date in hand, i am perhaps even more wary of the passage of time. it is going to be the 16th of november one day and i am going to go back home, and until then i can choose to either care about anything in lahore or not, but it is going to be 16th one day anyway, and the time will have passed. i could pick one thing in this city to obsess over, and only think about that from the moment i wake up in my airbnb and go to sleep, and when i go back, i will only have one thing to talk about. regardless of how much good health and fortune that one thing brings me, when i recount my two weeks here, it is going to sound boring as hell to others and most importantly to myself. if we’re being honest, life itself isn’t all that much longer than two weeks either.

i usually write one of these posts right when i have a lightbulb moment with a capital P problem but before i’ve fully overcome it. i went to an art exhibition here and i saw this work with etchings in white fabric that was casting shadows on the wall that i thought was speaking to a different me, perhaps the 22 year old in the mirror. i thought it had something to say that i couldn’t (or shouldn’t) be privy to. i tried looking at it for a bit but had to look away because i felt some semblance of what was quite possibly shame. the exhibition is still on, but if i went back again tomorrow, even after having written these words and realizing how absurd all of this sounds, i don’t know if anything would be different between me and the shadows on the wall.

a lot of time has passed since i last saw the world in a different way, and i guess i have, irrevocably but not irreparably changed in some ways. i say that because i am too old to still have issues with self-acceptance, and this is just how i’ve grown to be over the past year. a lot of time has passed, but undoubtedly there is still time left, to make space for things and to laugh at things that are actually funny. maybe HR was plotting in my favor when they said i couldn’t take my work laptop to pakistan, and i actually had to take the whole two weeks off instead of working remotely, so i would get a little practice of doing that, away from work. or maybe not. regardless, if you want things to be good, you have to believe there’s something bigger than you that wants it to be good for you.