fire

my palms are on fire. my palms, the soles of my feet. everything I touch becomes red hot, becomes red hot and starts raining embers.

Fire in her gaze. The fiercest and most dangerous of all the raging mad fires that ever burned in the history of this fuckin' world.

And when she dances, she stirs up storms. Sirens start singing and the sky tears up and sends down bolt after bolt of lightning, red hot and ready to sizzle.

silence.

It can be so oppressive sometimes, the Silence. Pressing in on your ears with all the force it can muster, bearing down on you until you can take it no longer, until you begin to feel that you shall go crazy just because of the sound it makes. You crave, you yearn for a break, so you can hear it shattering into a million little pieces, so you can once more hear yourself think without that deafening quietness in your ears.

Anything, anything at all.

The barking of the lonely dog down the road, it's mournful howls.
The sound the Wind makes when it crackles through the drying leaves, rustling them this way and that.
A sudden snore from someone sleeping. The sound of their breath as it gushes through their airways.
The constant, rhythmic clicking of the clock.

The soothing sound Time makes as it goes flying by.

Anything, anything at all.

desparationdiaries.

Day 1:

Stupid internet, why won’t you work?

I spend a good fifteen minutes messing around with the router and starting and restarting my laptop, and then hunting down and opening up a different browser.

OMG YES ITS WORKING

*gasp*

And shudder.

Yeah that about sums up my expression.

It’s not.

A huge pink and white message saying that we have consumed our credit limit for the month is being displayed on the screen. I stare at it, willing it to somehow change.

It doesn’t.

Ah well. What can I do now. This is a sign, you see, a sign from all the gods of academicity to me to start studying for this huge test that I have in September.

Deep breath. This is not the end.

This is not the end.

Day 2:

I spend the whole day sleeping. I wake up an hour before iftari, only to discover that I have wasted yet another day, a day that could’ve been spent studying.

After I’ve eaten I feel so full that I cannot move. I realize suddenly with a sinking sense of despair that I still have no internet.

All hope seems lost as I finally open up a ratty old FSc biology book and start studying about pons. Seriously, people-who-name-stuff-in-the-body, PONS? WTF, okay.

Day 3:

My brother and I are getting desperate.

He spends his time looking for books that he hasn’t already read in every corner and crevice of the house. I suggest that he read The Time Traveler’s Wife (which a friend lent to me, okay.) and he is on the verge of opening it up out of sheer desperation, but in the end his inflated ego prevents him from doing so. After a while I catch him reading Madame Bovary with a tortured expression on his face.

I spend my time staring at the FSc book. Its previous owner has underlined and highlighted practically the whole damn thing and has written her own annoying little footnotes everywhere. The fact that the said previous owner is now in her fourth year of med school at King Edward is not helping me.

Day 4:

I suddenly remember that my phone has GPRS. Oh happy day! I am saved! All I do is look at my notifications on Facebook and suddenly, I have no credit.

FML.

Day 5:

My brother and I decide to have a long-overdue Star Wars marathon. We’re ten minutes into it when we realize that soon our villainous father will be home (he knows the internet’s out, okay? He knows and he is still refusing to pay the bill for next month. Evil I tell you. T__T) and that I am supposed to be studying so we retire to our respective rooms and our sad lives that now consist of Madame Bovary and moaning, respectively.

Day 6:

Dad is away to Faisloo (as in Faisalabad. Except Faisloo is so much cooler, right. Like Isloo.) for some legal shit so we plan a bahir-ki-iftari with Ammi. The bahir-ki-iftari goes as planned. It’s fun really, plus it takes our minds off our more distressing problems. On the way back we stop at the office of our internet-provider, the one that is nearest to our place. It is 7.45 pm. We pull up and the windows are dark. The office is closed. Upon further inquiry we discover that it won’t open till another forty five minutes.

We resign ourselves to our fate and return, dejected, to our sad sad lives.

Day 7:

I have progressed from pons to dinosaur fetuses. At least that’s what they look like to me. I’ve spent the day either staring at them or drifting off into unnecessary naps that last too long. I have exhausted the playlist of songs on my phone and am now listening to this on repeat.

People just ain’t no good.

My brother is useless. He can’t even drive these days because he broke his foot by bashing it against his guitar. Someday, when he’s a famous musician, they’ll tell this story.

Ha.

I discover that the dinosaur fetuses are actually chicken. Fetuses.

Hurray.

Day 8:

All my friends think that I’ve died.

I put cherry-red lipstick on and practice my British accent.

Day 9:

Nothing seems to work. I’ve tried to crack the password on my neighbors’ wifi, but tariq1, coolboi and meganfox4eva don’t work.

Things look bleak.

Things look bleak.

kuttay ka baccha.

I have a mermaid. It has pink hair and blue eyes, and a mouth that is in a perpetual pucker.

It stares at me all the time, even when I don't want it to.

I also have a headless skeleton. It glows in the dark. 

My best friend from seventh grade gave it to me. 

It used to have a head then though. I wonder where it went, the head.

My brother and I named it Pilla.

WHATTEYYYYY SHIT.

Okay so yesterday (or was it the day before O.o) I FINALLY posted after a looong time. It was random shit, a longass, rambling random shitty post but it was MY longass rambling random shitty post AND IT DISAPPEARED. IT FLIPPING DISAPPEARED AND I AM SO PISSED.

I MEAN WTF BLOGGER. WTF.

*deep breath*

Anyway.

And I will wait for you

Until the sky is blue

And I will wait for you

What else can I do?

These bloody exams. ;___;

I feel mopey. ;___;

No one gives a shit. ;___;

unblock.

The sky was painted  a flat purple and I was eating strawberries.

The cherry bombs exploded, leaving behind firework-shaped redness in the sky. I blinked but the colors wouldn’t go away. They just hung there, suspended by invisible threads. I let them. Who was I to tell them to come down? They could take their own sweet time. They could take a hundred years and a day.
x

How come I end up where I started?
x

Drawing kittens on my toes
x

Who is Katy?
x

The winds were blowing really really really fast and I couldn’t hear myself think. All I could hear was whistling and whistling, wailing in my ears and my head was about to explode. It was about to explode and soon bits of brain and membrane and skull would come flying out.
x

My shadow was dancing. It was whirling around like a dervish and I was standing there just staring at it, dumbstruck.
x

The girl sang and her voice soared. It was flying, soaring like a seagull, now it was deep and low, like the purr of a wildcat. Now it was sweet, smooth as melted chocolate.
She had tears in her voice. I drowned myself in the tears.
x

The man looked at me oddly, told me to sit down or he’d make me. I refused, I shook my head no, and he came forward threateningly. I stood my ground and then he struck me on the side of my head and the world swayed. Everything went black.
x

Thunder rolled. (Inappropriate slaughter.)
x

I could feel it in the air. Taste it in the water. It was despair, hopelessness written over each and every ascpect of their lives.
x

The nauseating man was always talking, always talking. The mindless chatter flowed from his lips in ceaseless waves, the way sewage flowed into a river. It went over my head, whatever he said. I had trained myself to shut off my ears and mind whenever I was around him, to wear a mask of impassivity that betrayed none of the emotions inside of me. I watched his fat blubbery lips moving, I heard sounds coming out of them; and yet I understood nothing, comprehended nothing.
x
The rainbows were melting and I opened my mouth and stuck my tongue out to taste them. But they forever stopped, stopped just short.
x

Probably my favorite, they said, peering over the tops of their specs, looking importantly at the papers stacked in front of them. I shifted in my faux leather chair.
x

Who is Katy?
x

She died when I was still a whisper in the air, when the idea of me was floating around in his head, too small to be noticed, but there all the same.
x

The videotape was running and it was making chokey noises too. Suddenly the VCR blew up and caught fire and then the whole television came up in flames. I screamed I don’t remember if I did.

Then I left. Floated away until I was only a memory.
x

SILENCE!

I KEEL YOU!
x

She stared and stared and stared and nothing happened. She stared and stared and stared and nothing happened.
x

It sounds like memories.

It sounds like dreams that someone dared to dream. It sounds like sorrow, and it sounds like cold, cold, despair. Like the tiniest of sighs escaping someone’s mouth, like the taste of having belonged.

Why am I such a consistent slacker?

I gave a statistics exam today.

I didn't know SHIT.

I swear. I actually thought I’d gotten the wrong question paper when I first looked at it. I was about to ask the invigilator for the correct one when I noticed the paper number written on the top right corner of the sheet.

Oh BHAINS.

I took a deep breath and started scanning the questions.

Question 1:

Anne has a fair sided dice. She rolls it six times. Find the probability that she suffers from constipation on Saturdays only.

What? That is what it looked like to me okay. O___o

I carefully measured a space the width of four fingers on the answer paper, and left it blank. Maybe later God would send me the answers.

Yeah.

Questions 2 and three were skipped in a similar fashion.

By the time I reached question four and had gone through it, all I could think was

WTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTFWTF

Question four was something about different colored flowering heads, or something. Flowers that were flowering. Heads with flowers shooting out of the ears. Whatever.

Anyway, the question regarded probability. (Yes, I know how to identify questions now. Whoop-dee-doo,) I did NOT get it. How the HELL would it help me in real life if I knew what conditional probability is? And that too regarding heads that flower. It won't. It won't it won't it won't.

I scribbled some incoherent looking jumble of numbers down. It didn't make sense to me. Maybe, by some odd chance, it would be right and I’d get three marks for my effort.

Yeah, right.

The next question was basic stats. Draw up a table; make a histogram. Easy as pie. I think I did that right. If not, then, well, LAANAT.

The last question was no better. Permutations and combinations. I always go crazy with those. I did the best I could, really I did.

But whut.

There were children outside and they were running around and screaming and I wanted to scream too. The kids sitting around me were asking for extra sheets.

What were they writing, flipping essays?

'Sheet' said one

'Sheet' said another. That’s what they were all saying. Sheet sheet sheet everywhere. And all I could think of was, yeah that’s right, sheet. BULL sheeet.

I had scribbled all over the question paper. Little sad looking men, flying cows and something that looked like a dog with a shoe on its head. There were also a number of oaths directed at the questions. 

I hated this. 

The girl next to me had a pocketful of imli flavored candy and she was sucking on them one by one. Loudly. 

I stared blankly at the white toes of my trainers. I’d memorized every scratch there by now. 

The invigilator, who also happens to be my stats teacher, wasn't letting me go. She hates me, that woman. She does. She thinks I’m a stupid noob with a Neanderthal brain who doesn't know shit. She shot me a glare every time I even shifted. It was torturous. 

Waiting. Waiting. 

I kept staring at my answer sheet, two pages of which were completely blank, save for the question number. 

The boy sitting in front of me was feverishly scribbling away on his paper, as if his life depended on it. I eyed him with interest. I had never noticed him in school before. He had two calculators. I sighed. When he caught me looking, he actually covered up his paper with his arm. I rolled my eyes at him. 

When we were finally allowed to leave, I was the first one to get out.

If all goes well, I’ll get eleven. Out of fifty. I sure aim high, don’t I?