slow but sure

Like the realization of not being anything special creeping in. (it’s okay. growing up is probably accepting that the world is much more than what we can see and what seems. We don’t know what we can’t perceive. Life goes on). maybe it does stop.
I’m looking out of the door of the terrace of my favorite room of the house that I call my home. (home has a new face but home has the same heart. home changed address but home is my mother’s lap housing my tired head). home. It’s raining. (it might rain tonight) The sky is grey. (the sky looks like harry’s invisiblity cloak). A wind blows through the window tonight, making the curtains swell. Summer started earlier this year and this is the first rain. The rain a lighter shade of grey. I’m wearing a baby pink sweater and my sleeves are rolled up. (it’s too hot for sweaters). My hair is down and falling as light as the rain on my shoulders. I wish my mother would allow me to dye my hair black. I’m studying the anatomy of the upper limb ( I’m studying the anatomy of the human brain). (We don’t have anatomy this year). and jamming to a song that a friend had confessed his undying love for on his Instagram story. ( I no longer listen to that song but I would ) I am going to ask someone for music recommendations. Why do I forget to, anyway? Is it the flaw again? (probably). probably.
I have a headache. ( i have a sore throat. hope its not covid). It’s my heart. it weighs more than it should.

Dear my dear,

Why did they let us dream so big when the world is unyieldingly traditional? ( honestly, we never know what tomorrow maybe like). today resembles yesterday a bit too much.

Perfect. Two syllables. Too inconvenient. ( perfectionism is the bane of the youth. we cause ourselves great suffering). perfectionism and narcissism go hand in hand. Excusing inefficiency in a human has be the most humane thing we can do.

I’m watching a YouTube video about the axillary artery right now. ( I’m editing this draft right now but I should be watching a Dr. Najeeb video). (I have to start preparing for my block exam). And a kid from the house down the street is naruto running in the pouring rain. I think he might fall but oh I miss playing in the rain. ( I went out on the roof the other day when it was raining. The whole world was clouded and drowning in a peaceful surrender. The rain was excitedly greeting the world from all directions. It was so cold that I could not breathe.) I miss summer 13. I miss my white shoes that I was wearing when I had chased my best friend in a rain soaked parking lot. We don’t get 5 P.Ms like that anymore. (I miss my friends). If we could play charade once more, I’d try to make them laugh.

Dear God,

I wish life came with to do lists. (what are we doing?) Just drinking chai and facing day to day battles. Well, last week, I was reading fiction again. ( I am reading wuthering heights now. I dont know yet if I like emily better than Charlotte but Charlotte has a special place in my heart. let’s see.) I just finished reading “think like a monk” by Jay Shetty and boy, do I wish I had read it sooner. 2 books 4 days. ( get a life.) Just like in the old days. Kaz is 17. (Show Kaz is not.) I am not. I am so old. (on the contrary, I am to remain young and hopeful to not age before aging inevitably.) There’s a crack in the sky and the dream is done for. ( there is a crack in the sky and the dream is done for.) There is a crack in the sky and the dream is done for.

enlighten me.

(there are poems to be read and poems to be written.)

I’ll write one tomorrow.

September;

September
September, the ashes of my summer, stay still.
Have you or have you not lost someone or yourself in September? Have you or have you not felt like you couldn’t save yourself or anyone else from whatever kills people when nothing kills them?

What is more likely to be tolerated in our societies? (keeping in mind that societies are more or less the same thing wearing different clothes and speaking different words). Would the human societies accept a dead person or an unaccomplished one if they could accept one? If you were expecting me to say that we would rather accept a dead person over one with no significant accomplishments, then here lies the deception of the century. No, we are not yet beyond sense. We are not yet beyond humanity. We can still be saved.Accomplishments are a social construct, obviously. It is one more artificial human made scale. Sorry about the redundancy but I cannot stress this enough. Societies change opinions overnight. We are biased. We have always been. So why would you, trust any scale made for humans by humans? Any scale with no fixed standard. Accomplishments are viewed relatively. We compare one human to another human and then to another. We compare ourselves to any human we see fit for comparing ourselves to and generous as humans are, we see almost everybody as a standard to compare our lives, our goals, aims, ambitions, morals, struggles, pain, history and victories to. That makes absolutely no sense, right?

I can’t help but think that the human race has gone a little insane. All these years on earth and our complete refusal to accept individuality has aged us beyond our years on earth. At 20, I feel as if I have lived a million years because my mind presents so many opinions that aren’t mine. I have housed history and traditions in my mind as if they are my own thoughts, feelings and grudges. The collective memory of every generation has a seat on the council of perspective in my mind. I suppose, this is where all the judgement comes from. We seldom have a proper idea of who we really are. Our feelings are corrupted by the intervention of influences that are outdated, thoughts that are harsh and opinions that are invalid. We have to know which opinions to carry to our hearts and which to discard right on spot.

Dear my dear, what is life without your little failures devastating your heart into goodness?

What actually matters in life? I would say it is growth. One less important type of growth is the growth of the list of property under your name and its associated legacy and the number of the people who can claim the said legacy after you are six feet under and faded from their memories. Now, we do care about this growth a lot, whether we want to or not. In this era of economic disaster, we just can’t not care about it. The real growth, however, is the betterment of our hearts; the development of genuine love in it, the riddance of jealousies and cruel judgment and the beginning of gentle humanness. We aren’t as complicated as we like to fancy we are. We crave little joys of being alive. A glimpse of love for us in a loved one’s eyes.

Your splendid stupor, we paid so dearly for.
Forgive me for I never said,
May God protect you, keep you, love you.I wish we could save everyone from their suffering minds. I also wish that you would save yourself today.

Can love be selfish enough to turn into hatred? something like self-loathing? A love of another so strong that we forget to love ourselves? A love of oneself so angry that it turns into a hatred as uncontrollable as the love that bore it? We hate to see ourselves be different from what we thought we would be like. Perfectionism kills progress. Trusting the Writer of the fates is the only way to be at peace with the reality. Maybe, that is all we need. In Farsi, when one hears a compliment from another person, the compliment is itself a compliment to the giver of the compliment as it is associated with their own perception and recognition of beauty.

Love may go far away but love returns. Good things evaporate and good things reappear. Love possesses different faces and different places and different songs at different times. We should let it win. We should always let it win.

poems&notes

Hello there. In this blog, sometimes, we post stuff we find in our drafts, regardless of how old or new they might be.

1

Auscultatory,
Barely,
Stifled and choked back,
Cries mandatory,
Of love lives.
But merely,
a directory,
of names that once brought joy.
Kind of lazily,
ransacked.
And a loss of symmetry,
Adorns the carefree,
Sin factory.

Grief is universal.
Present, stubborn, just around the corner.
But Grief had nothing to teach me and it did not learn anything new from me. I was typical. It was typical. We were staring each other in the eyes. None of us looked away; eyes questioning but not demanding answers, not wanting answers. On my part, like any other grieving person, I refused to see beauty in the patterns of the universe and for reasons that still make sense. Everything ended in grief. I couldn’t see it coming but we stayed, hand in hand, until time made one of us disappear.

2

They think (hope) that I would do the honorable thing and think of you as a rival but I choose to be a coward this once in their eyes and be brave for myself. I have decided to cherish your existence. You have lessened the burden of life on me and many many others. Pardon me for being extra cheesy about it.

Competition and rivalry have always looked foolish and a waste of time to me. You win or you don’t. What’s there to lose? Loss is something quite unfathomable when one thinks of it as a consequence of something quite equally unfathomable. But truly, loss could possibly not be prevented.

---

3

I heard He likes broken hearts and resides in them
So when you broke my heart
I gathered the pieces and handed them all to God
And asked to him to accept the price and fix you
It sounds like bribery ; trust me, it wasn’t
but I really didn’t know what to do
I can’t fix you
It’s not that I haven’t tried
I’ve prayed night after night after night
And Im sorry I’m not a man
But In your eyes
Just half a human

I wanted to look up the stats. How many girls are killed each year for being girls? What percentage of abortions are done because the fetus is found to be female? How many women are killed and then said that it was in the God forsaken name of honor every year? What percentage of girls face emotional and mental abuse in their own homes just because they supposedly committed the felony of possessing the XX.
Women are mad brave. I must say it again. Women are brave. So brave. All except some really stupid ones are really brave. At some point in history, capitalism made everyone weigh your importance with the gold that you bring in. Welcome to rich kids’ dumb little playground.

---

4

I wish that I knew
Where you would go
Now that you’ve left yourself alone

Sadness is far more complicated than happiness could ever hope to be. Happiness lacks reason. It’s random and light. It comes and goes. It stays and sometimes, does not. Sadness takes time to develop and to grow; to house in your heart and be at home; open doors, running water, sunlight pouring in,nice and cozy. Years. And by the time one notices sadness, it has been engraved and rooted so deep inside one’s heart of hearts. There. Settled; with children and grandchildren and multiple wives.

They all chuckle as we wonder what made us so completely and irreversibly sad.

---

One hundred years of solitude (sort of a book review)

pdfs. I think we all have a lot of them in our phones. Downloaded; to be ignored forever, never to be opened unless checking to see what it is about or just going through them when we are bored. Which is exactly what I was, lets say, because admitting that I am supposed to be studying 24/7 isn’t easy. Anyway, like any normal person, I looked for an escape and like any normal person, I looked for it in my phone and found this book.

This book is so freaking insane.

When I first scrolled through it, I thought it’s a war story and the main character is this dude named Colonel Aureliano Buendia who is always taking great pains to give us a detailed account of the weather and with some melancholy, talk about every memory that each element of nature in that particular instant brings back to him. You’d think this guy discovered Spain.

This overview didn’t spark joy, honestly, but anyway I started reading it for the sake of reading and forgetting that anything in the world other than it amounts to anything more than mere silent existence. guess what, I love this book so much. 8/10. Perhaps, the fact that I had never read anything like it before (magical realism is my new favorite), made it even more amazing and devote-your-whole-day-to-it-able for me.

My favorite character is probably Ursula. A total boss woman and the only Buendia with actual functional brain cells apart from Jose Arcadio Buendia (the main guy, the first guy, the sitting under the tree guy) who definitely has my respect and whom I would refer to as nothing other than ‘sir’ if I were in Macondo and I would stay as far away as possible from Amarantha.

(Ok I am not even going to talk about Rebecca’s parents’ skeletons lying about in the Buendia house dancing tiredly in their dirty old sack and no one caring about it at all. Its so frustrating like bro please just bury them already) isn’t it very much like how the ghosts of fictional classical dead people might actually invisibly be? Or the strong but silent schemes of the quiet and mysterious characters?

While we are at it, can we talk about how cool is the name Gabriel Garzia Marquez? I wish my name sounded that dope. He lived up to it, though, didn’t he? I would expect nothing less from a Gabriel Garzia Marquez tbh. I remember thinking ‘this guy is nuts’ and at the same time knowing that he is nothing less than a genius.

Sometimes I think about how Remedios the baby grandmother and Remedios the beauty had kind of a similar fate. First of all, they were both too pure for this world and secondly they had to deal an unwelcomed and unwanted attention and sexualization in their own innocent manners. Through them, the author has portrayed what is devastatingly fundamentally wrong with society and it’s attitude towards women.

My guy Melquídias was awesome through and through. He literally knew about every bullshit that this race of Aurelianos and Jose arcadios and Amaranthas would pull in a hundred years and wrote about each and every one of them in Sanskrit and mathematics. Admirable. I bet the Aureliano Segundo part was in stats though. Not to forget Melquìdias cured the town’s insomnia!!! That was something.

The amnesia itself was something. I think it being contagious is one hell of a metaphor.

Intentional forgetfulness leads to total oblivion. We help each other forget things that would have , other wise, lasted longer in its full glory. We take pride in forgetting the past, the languages, the words, the stories and we encourage each other to move on and create new lives and realities. But it wears us down. It tires us. It drains our energy. I suppose it’s because some part of the killed memories remain inside of us , crippled and angry, gnawing weakly at our hearts because there’s nothing much more that they can do. The unnoticeable and negligible feeling of unease passes away in seconds but it has long term damage. We celebrate advancements, intentional or accidental like the people of Macondo thought of the diminished need for rest as a chance to work more, earn more, party more and be better all in all. Then they got bored, they were hopeless and so fucking tired. The gentle weight of memories and the heavy weight of knowledge, everything that made them them was shed from their shoulders and they were left behind wide eyed and clueless. What does that remind you of?

And the rain!

The four years, eleven months and two days of rain in Macondo which started after the banana company killed all it’s workers and fled the area (more ‘realism’ than ‘magical’ tbh)

Úrsula always tried to go a step beyond. Open the windows and the doors, she shouted. Cook some meat and fish,buy the largest turtles around, let strangers come and spread their mats in the corners and urinate in the rose bushes and sit down to eat as many times as they want and belch and rant and muddy everything with their boots, and let them do whatever they want to us, because thats the only way to drive off rain.

Ursula 1:0 Fernanda

Like the Colonel’s routine of making metal goldfishes, the story too, seems like a habit of history. The twins (maybe) exchanging names and forgetting who is who to the twins dying on the same day and their coffins getting mixed up and their gravestones bearing names that they didn’t live their lives with.

That’s not even half of everything I want to say about this book but maybe some other time. Girl has to go to school now. Alrighty.

The god of small things (sort of a book review)

7.5/10

I read this book about two and a half years ago for the first time and I wouldn’t have bought it if it weren’t for this outrageously appealing look of it having been hastily thrown on the dusty floor of an old book store selling second hand books, waiting there patiently and a little angrily to be picked up, put on one of the shelves or on top of one of the piles on the floor at least. I had been looking for some other book that I don’t recall the name of any more.

This is the only work of Arundhati Roy that I have read so far and the score above should tell you that I absolutely loved it. It’s perfect for someone like me; to whom any spoiler is not spoiler enough. She tells us the ending of the book in chapter 1 and I think that’s admirable and really really brave of her but of course she is a great writer and would not, for the love of her life, ruin the mystery or to say “the confusion lay in a deeper, more secret place” .The lack of mysteriousness in the tone of the book makes it so much more intriguing. Roy would just nonchalantly mention things as if we are already supposed to know the whole story. She goes ‘oh yeah so it happens’ and we can’t help but think “no shit but HOW”.

I like how she questions the vulgarity of the love laws that exist(ed) in India where the color of your skin and your profession and your father’s profession and your great great grandfather’s profession decide(d) your worth as a human subject in a capitalist society but most importantly, it decided who you can love and how much. It’s the same with the whole world, to be honest. It’s really something that needs to be talked about more. A lot of our cultural norms are severely racist and misogynistic.

Ammu. When I first read it, I thought Ammu could have avoided all the despair that took over the lives of Rahel and Estha by, well, by not falling in love with someone she wasn’t supposed to look at, let alone be with. Then I realized, that’s the whole point of it, isn’t it? One can’t decide a human being’s value based on the color of their skin and the surname of their ancestors. It’s kind of stupid but after having been disappointed by history many many times, it’s not hard to imagine humans doing stupid stuff anymore.

Human 1 : oh look at that! It’s so stupid!

Human 2: yeah ikr. let’s do the same.

Human 1: eh.. okay.

That a woman that they had already damned, now had little to lose, and could therefore be dangerous.

I suppose a woman who has nothing to lose would be kind of dangerous. Just the thought of a woman who has already faced every painful consequence of every bad decision is so wild, in a way. I guess it’s the same for every other gender. Humans are shackled to the ground because of their loved ones and the inanimate and the abstract things that they hold dear. I wonder if anyone ever runs out of things to lose.

Ammu was disgraced and disowned and lost Velutha to the hate laws but she still had her twins. Her twins, to whom she was both father and mother and whom she loved double.
Despite having been anchored to the world by her children, after Velutha, she was but an Ammu shaped hole in the universe. I wouldn’t call that dangerous. Haunting and heavy on the conscience but not in the least, threatening and scary.

The brown household and it’s great many condemnable traits have been portrayed really well. Mammachi’s weird obsession with her son and her hatred towards his love interests, Pappachis jealous-of-his-wife antics, baby kochamma’s gaslighting parasitic behavior, a divorcee being treated like scum, the american cousin being all the hype and the apple of everyone’s eyes even though she would sooner call them a bunch of idiots than family.

I have almost comments about Rahel and Estha’s relationship to be honest except that they seem to me to have been portrayed like soulmates. Brother and sister, who always said “we” and never “I”. I mean soulmates aren’t always some stereotypical heterosexual non-platonic couple, right? Well, I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure I’m not.

This novel might be called depressing and too sad in some circles but it’s just common everyday stories of every other house. Stealthy slavery. In many households (especially in joint

This master piece won the booker prize in 1997. This book is so important and filled with an emotion so raw and genuine that one can’t help but feel both dumbstruck and aggrieved. I love how the story is structured. It is as if Roy blended her skills as an Architect and as a writer to create a very unique way of story telling.

The maybe alive cats

The world was silent except for two voices. One was mine and the other one was mine too. But the world is never silent, is it? It is in fact too loud and clamorous all the time. Could this too be a myth and another random half-assed but fully believed fact? It does seem so at dawn when the birds are having their last dreams for the night and I have more to say and when I am frantically and eagerly trying to tell God how much I love everything.

The silent hour has more to say than possibly any other hour of the day. It is truly a miracle how one certain shade of blue on the sky of the limits of our eyes can be of such a wonderful event to our hearts, a little revolution every twenty four hours, limited time offer, catch it in the 20 minutes of it’s existence or keep on dying on the inside with not a speck of golden brown relief in the blinding red canvas of your life. Time is amazing. I can never not think of that one Sci-Fi film, Lucy, in which they say that time is the only dimension and we exist in a tiny portion of it (obviously) and that if time ran a bit faster (enough to cover our life span in a nanosecond or even more of a negligible period), we won’t even exist.

That makes me think of how if some kind of a glitch happens in the universe right after I post this and time jumps 50 years ahead (give or take) and I cease to physically exist (above ground ,at least), what will become of this post? I guess that depends on how long WordPress survives or if someone copies it down to some other website or some magazine or a piece of paper or a memory or anything that holds art and literature and other attempts at knowledge, it would survive as long as they do even after I’m dead and the microbes have had many many feasts in my head. Like classic literature and the mural paintings, the scratched words on a tree and the permanent footprints on a cement side walk.

The duality paradox lives in my head rent free. I can’t help but think of everything in those terms on some level. Is the true nature of light particle or is it energy? Many people never presented these arguments before Einstein did because the dual nature of light was nothing peculiar to them. They must have always had believed in the soul of the universe (yep its a reference to the alchemist by Paulo Coehlo. read it.). It’s not a new concept. I bet humans knew from the beginning that we are body and soul not body or soul. (As long as we are alive, at least). It’s ridiculous how scientists got so confused over it and carried out so many diffraction and interference experiments and not to mention, put an imaginary cat in an imaginary box for it. Science is astonishing.

Do we exist outside of our time or not? Would the particle nature of light have a shorter life span than the wave nature? Do photons ever die? Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, first rule of thermodynamics, something of the thing lives on. Maybe, time has nothing on us.

One thing that really hit me while watching “Interstellar” was when Brand says that she still loves Edmund even though he is on a different planet so very far away from where they were that travelling there alone could make them lose hundreds of years on Earth and then she goes you know what “love is the only truly perfect dimension” or something along the lines. It made sense because space and time are painfully limited but things manage to exist and even thrive beyond the four obvious dimensions. There must be something that anchors them to existence; that convinces the future of its right to being. I hope that something that keeps me alive is something beautiful.

Maybe, just maybe, love is the greater, more reliable dimension. More valuable than time. It must be more intricate, more widespread but less confusing and less delicate than time. I sometimes think that time had to take the L just because it’s so confusing. (We did lose our minds watching ‘Dark’).
So Schrodinger’s cat was more alive than it was dead. Shakespeare and Sappho are alive. My great-grandmother who I never met but heard about in so many of my mother’s stories is alive. Dante and Dali are alive. We’re all alive and that was one of the many things that I was and am grateful for.

The birds that were dreaming their last dreams for the night woke up and I had to hand over the sacred duty of marvelling at the universe to them as I went downstairs to have some tea.

she told me

that one day I’ll know what she went through. She wouldn’t tell me but I’ll know. She won’t write it down or speak of it to anyone but I will know. She won’t hide it in a poem or leave behind a secret keeper but I’ll know. I can’t doubt it. The universe has strange ways of wrapping shows up even if it takes one hundred years to do so so I will know even if I don’t live to be a hundred years old. That’s because I already know and, probably, I am subconsciously feigning ignorance because once I know I can’t un-know it, unsee it. It will over shadow all the falsely cheerful realities of life and take into it’s arms all my hopes and dreams of a better world and hide it away for some other world.

She told me that I’m being too clingy. To life. That it will slip away like a ballet dancer and jump into someone else’s arms to keep the act going and that I am dumb for having hoped for more. She told me that after all that she saw here, she doesn’t find herself obliged to remember anything at all. Tit for tat, she said. It won’t remember me and I won’t remember it. She told me that she will start her new life like she started like one; like a baby with a broken maze for memories, no language, no sign of culture or traditions, no recognition of the sky or the daisies and sunflowers or the stars that she loved so much. She told me that it will be okay that way.

And of all the mad things she told me, one was that she hoped that I will be loved like she never was; that I won’t grow to hate myself with the surety and conviction with which she hated herself. She said that I look like her. But that’s okay and so does the mirror and the shadow of her mother. And that’s okay, she said.

“you will hear them say things you would never want them to say and act the way you couldn’t bear to think that they ever would and that’s okay too”, she told me and then looked so wistfully out of the window that I guessed that it’s not really okay but what can one say? She told me that her life went up and vanished like cigarette smoke in a joyless twirling and she looked happy enough while saying it as if her own life had served to be of some aesthetic value to the world.

She told me that she isn’t greedy but would begrudge me that sweet pain in her chest; that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to feel what she felt ; “no matter how badly you fall from your makeshift castle in the anchored artificial skies, I won’t share with you the only thing I’m allowed to carry with me to the world beyond the world”, she said. I didn’t know why she was being so pompous. It’s not like I fancied having some sort of a pain in my chest. But she knew what she was saying. Medals, souvenirs and evidences.

She told me to move on and stand on my feet like the ghost of myself. Carry on, be the utter nuisance that I wished had disturbed my dark tangled thoughts and set them in some sort of a queue, at least, if not a perspective.

Why did her hands dissolve into mine when she held them up the cheeks and cried into the palms of a stranger that I was to her? It is as if she was breaking her own promise of betraying whoever betrayed her. I was too dumbfounded to raise these questions, not even when she smiled her sad smile and hid her face behind her dirty gray veil and left, maybe, for another one to tell her regrets to.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (sort of a book review)

7.8/10

No one:

Definitely not Sibyl Vane

Not even Lord Henry

Dorian Gray: anyways so what if Hallward is a cake?

Now this book is a master piece. Oscar Wilde has truly eaten every writer up with this one. I can almost picture him with a smug smile and sad eyes on his throne somewhere in the afterworld or downworld (in case he is a vampire). I can understand why this book is a dark academia favorite.

The metaphors in it are insane. The whole theme is insane, to begin with. I’d list all the metaphors but I am afraid I didn’t get half of them. (will reread at some point). I think that every other line was an epiphany that Mr. Wilde decided to throw at us. Consider this

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own
soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for.

And this

There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.

And

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

And many many more that make you take a deep breath and smile to yourself then silently curse because what the heck was that?

So Dorian is this disgustingly rich dude with an angelic face (same old white boy charms tbh) golden hair, blue eyes, pink lips, whatnot and everyone who has ever seen him believes that he is an angel amongst men. On top of it all, his innocence is noticable and praised left right and center. Later on in the book, when he is slightly older, everyone thinks that he is that bitch for sure but also not shit. He still looks like a Greek god but his mind is in the gutter; is what the general public opinion is.

So in the prime of their youth, his friend Basil Hallward paints a picture of him. This very picture makes Dorian realize that he is hot. (I blame that on Harry of course). And Dorian totally loses it and becomes jealous of his own picture for remaining young forever and ever and ever. Youth is the biggest happiness and aging is dumb; or so dude thought. Let’s talk about Harry now. He is mood, for starters. Secondly, Wilde used Harry to unleash his philosophy of literally anything and everything on our already deliciously over burdened brains. Thirdly, Harry needs to chill. Basil said he is a bad influence and we trust Basil, as the owner of the only brain cell in the book, to tell the truth. I mean look at what he brought Gray to but honestly, Gray would have walked himself there too (Ok so I knew for real that he isn’t right in the head by the way he was simping for Sibyl)

Our boy Dorian is always the talk of the town of course and God knows what awful agendas he used to have in the London of that time because he was infamous. He doesn’t age a day. Nor does sin write itself across his face but guess what happens to the painting? Guess what happens to the painting ??

Well well well I shouldn’t just spoil the whole book like this. So take my world for it. It’s crazy good.

It’s one of those books that I really regret having read from a screen. It deserves to be held and put themed bookmarks in, put on a shelf and given admiring looks to now and then.

Trade of dread

Hellbent, modified
Never were we
so vilified.
Lost in your head
Thinking about that
Crucified love we dread.
Alas, we will lose
Again this time.

---

I wish it hadn’t come to this.

I don’t want to know what a sailor might think when he finds out there’s no saving the boat now. The storm has eaten up it’s life force. More often than not, we find ourselves clutching at thin air, hoping against hope; but maybe if we didn’t, we would have been dead and gone a long time ago.
It is an awful poem. It’s far from being balanced. But hey, so is everything else. Come to think of it, out of all the inconvenient wrinkles in the space- time of my existence, my favorite would have been a miracle. Inconvenient because I wouldn’t have expected it but nevertheless, it would have been more than welcome.
Though I know not a lot of people will read this but I want you to know and understand that if you are capable of hurting some one , just don’t.
I’ve seen too many monsters and not enough heroes and its probably because the heroism would be in a collective effort. Everyone! Be kind.

The Kite Runner (sort of a book review)

Personal rating : 7/10

I read it back in 2017 when I had just started college and it was a whole new world with it’s ruthless competitive nature. This book brought me back to me from the cultural shock that I had just received. Here, read a book. Be you.

Besides that , one more thing that makes this book really special is the fact that it has a fragment of past that doesn’t matter to most readers but nevertheless is important to me in so many ways.
You might think it’s odd how I am writing this in 2020, three years after reading it. Well, what can I say? Somethings stick with you. Some books you just don’t forget and move on from. Some books do leave an impact. Moreover, I just finished rereading it.
( Definitely not because being at home has taught me a thing or two).
Hosseini is a phenomenal story teller. A thousand splendid sun’s and And the mountains echoed are both fine examples of it. But with The Kite Runner, he ate it.
Absolutely ate it.
If that’s the case then why not 10/10, right?
Well, for starters I am almost never satisfied with how a story ends. It’s no different for the kite runner. It’s ending , even though it was happy, was in fact kind of cringe worthy. (I do hope Hosseini never reads this).
Nevertheless, I should not complain! Why should the world of fiction match the plain realities of life? If the ending is unbelievable and unrealistic then so be it.
But if there is something about the characters that you find so awfully relatable then it is , I confess, hard to get over such a brutal assassination of their whole character arch.
There you have a kid, belonging to a race so looked down  upon and discriminated against, son of a father who pretends to be his master, sexually harassed, physically abused, alone but true to his word , kind hearted and grateful. If any one deserved a forced happy ending, it was him, Hassan. But I guess we had to make it look realistic.
Then we have his friend who lived in the big house and read such awesome books , owned pretty cool watches and was a son of a father who wanted the best for him. His repentance arch was impressive. Amir is a protagonist in the true sense of it.

I thought about Hassan’s dream, the one about us swimming in the lake. There is no monster, he’d said, just water. Except he’d been wrong about that. There was a monster in the lake. It had grabbed Hassan by the ankles, dragged him to the murky bottom. I was the monster

Why did he have to make it, though?
Who knows why in all of his stories the sad remains sad and gets sadder for a change. ( reference to Maryam from A thousand splendid sun’s)
Well that’s about all the personal reasons I had for the -3.
Now let’s come to the bright side. The 7!
The kite runner , like the rest of Hosseini’s books, paints a picture of Afghanistan from before and during the dark times it faced and is still facing. These books are important to so many people. It has their stories in it. Their pasts. And a lot of these stories are beautiful. Amongst the river of English words in the book they find some random Farsi, Dari and Pashto words that, I bet, must be heart warming.
This is one of the stories that keep you on your tippy toes; that you just can not stop reading, when every
last line of the page urges you to turn the page and read some more. And eventhough the misery of the story gnaws at your heart, brings tears to your eyes (literally),you are compelled to love it all the way.
Such a piece of priceless art. A story of love, friendship, brotherhood. A story of racism, terrorism, fate and privilege.