Just Some Thoughts Aysh Has

When we our blatant infatuation simmered and boiled over into a jaded cynicism. When we really saw it all and realized it isn’t all that. Was it when we studied genocide in history class? Or was it when we had a loved one pass away? I don’t know. But I know we weren’t always this way. Sometimes I wonder how many times my baby cousin will have to see regular old light before he stops getting excited. When one day he won’t look at a lamp, widen his eyes to the size of dinner plates, and shout breathlessly with pure euphoria, “LIGHT!”- I don’t think I ever want that day to come. It reminds me of Taare Zameen Par. I can watch Taare Zaneen Par a million times and write entire essays in my mind for every scene in there. It is so so saturated with billions of perfect moments of reality that it depicted so effortlessly but you could spend an eternity analyzing. But I think my favorite scene (an extremely hard decision) will always be the scene where Ishaan runs away from school one day to explore the city. Ishaan in this scene will forever represent a part of me and my relationship with the world. To anyone else, he walks the dirty streets of India, poverty and hectic routine at every corner. But not to him. He sees a thousand worlds, a thousand moments that no one else sees. He sees with an artist’s gaze, but more importantly, a child’s gaze. It’s the tiniest moments of others’ lives, glimpses into their routines that fascinate him, inspire him, that free him from his own nightmarish life of never being enough. He sees life outside, the real world for the first time, another perspective, a million perspectives- a whole entire universe opened for him up for him. He isn’t like other children where they can open up a book and read about the outside world- he needs to observe it, experience it, and the movie perfectly captures him doing just that. I know my mind is very different from his and all the other precious children who have suffered and felt alienated like him. But one thing that I will forever be able to relate to is that scene- just walking around perfectly normal places and mentally painting it, romantisizing it, making it into magic when it’s not. I feel that way whenever I step outside alone and I can never stop appreciating how intensely accurate the movie captures this feeling. Its something like sonder, this overwhelming tide of realization that the sun hits the water like this everyday, that this couple walks their dog past this bench everyday and you feel like you have died and you’re watching this regular world function without you from the heavens and how perfectly it does and it’s so big and you are so small and it’s terrifying that so much goes on without you and comforting that it will always go on without you.

ur 18 now! Here’s a lil surprise to u as soon as u get ur account hehehe

To the eighteen years of your existence and the four years of our chaotic friendship. To my favorite bus buddy Keith Agatha. I love you a billion times more than you’ll ever know and I appreciate every single thing u do for me🥺 wether it be help tie my shoes or go all around the school looking for my id that was in my bag all along, cleaning out my entire closet whiLE making it fun, helping me change on a bus, sharing ur water bottle every. Single. Day. Of high school for four years, and visiting me in quarantine all the time

I could drown in you. You’re a whole ocean waiting to be explored and I could get lost in its depths forever and never resurface and I might drown but I know you’d never ever let me. You’re an ocean but you’re a lifesaver at the same time. You’ve saved my life more than you can ever know. You let me laugh on you and cry on you and everything in between and never once complained. I want you to live forever. That’s a weird thing to want. Cuz you wouldn’t want to live forever. But part of me wishes you stay the you you are now forever, bottled up in your 17 year old thoughts glittery with the idealism of youth yet rusty with pain and experience. But that’s impossible. And I’m only ok with that impossibility cuz I know that the world inside your head that I so love being in and sharing isn’t going anywhere as you grow up. It’s growing with you, expanding and absorbing and reaching its highest peaks. I only hope so much that I get to be there for it and experience it with you. The truth is. I wouldn’t know how to live without you. At all. I don’t know when it happened. But like it did and now I am a lost duckling without u 🐣

Like for example in the middle of the night when I’m dreaming. It’s raining croissants or something. And my first thought isn’t why it’s raining croissants. It’s “omg I need to tell zahra it’s raining croissants. Don’t forget ok? I know you’re gonna forget. Here repeat it, so that u don’t forget it before u can tell her: it’s raining croissants, it’s raining croissants, it’s rain-“ like wh? I don’t even know when you became the person I could tell anything. Maybe when my stomach had just tried to kill itself and u were there for me all throughout the beginning of junior year. Getting me assignments and talking to teachers for me and sending me bts videos while I lay in bed miserable. Maybe it was the forty billionth time u swore to me that I wasn’t ugly in your eyes. Maybe it was the letters you wrote for my birthday, so deep and meaningful and so much more. But you were. You were there for me all four of these years and they would’ve been so so so hellish without you.

I loved this post a lot cuz I’d always be lowkey judging people’s outfits or behavior and then instantly guiltily reprimanding myself and having a whole war in my mind😂 But recently I found the post again and looked at the comments and I saw a bunch saying “but isn’t it the exact opposite?” And I was like woah,,, is it?

So on one hand they’re right. Isnt it the very first thought that defines you? Isnt that what psychologists are so obsessed with getting ur first immediate thought process all the time? To remove the million matryoshka doll layers to get to the smallest purest one? To understand the real you, the very basic mind of the human stripped down from its socially and politically correct policing to its core of pure instinct and base thought? Everything else you think after that first moment is all what you’ve been taught to think, what you’ve been ingrained by society is an appropriate response to the stimuli. It’s not you. Its the you you think you should be, or the you you think you are, the you you want to be. It’s a dark idea, to believe that what defines you is your first thought. I don’t want to believe it.

On the other hand. The post could be right. Maybe it’s the other way around and our first thought is what we’ve been taught to think. I believe this is something in psychology that’s still being explored. Is ur first thought what you’ve been taught, more of a product of how you were raised, or is it ur own thought fueled from your own personality first, and tHEN the upbringing comes in to correct it? Which comes first? I want to believe it’s the second thought that defines you. This is the one that separates humans from animals isn’t it? We are so much more than base instinct and survival. We don’t eat our children or screw anyone we see like some animals. We are complex creatures who process information, a trillion bits per second, we absorb it to create a system of morals and behavior we try to follow to bring good into the world. It isn’t supposed to be as easy as being lucky enough to immediately think good. If your first thought is bad then it makes you all the better of a person to fix it in ur head before it can get out right? Ur working harder to be a good person, more than someone who just thinks only nice stuff. The second thought is you trying, not giving in to your judgement and making a conscious effort to be more kind and open minded. And it’s the effort that counts right? You can’t be defined by something you cannot control. And the first thought is not in ur control.

 Anyways today’s was pretty interesting, it was about art, which I love. The topic was the trend of drawing portraits of these beautiful Instagram style models like with colorful makeup and stuff. Here were the two sides that I saw:

This is awful. Art is supposed to be about natural beauty and all this is supporting is a specific beauty standard and no diversity. They might be different ethnicities, but they all fall under the model-esque typical beauty standard and it not only makes the art boring and shallow and repetitive, but promotes an unhealthy mindset. It makes people feel insecure and uncomfortable with their “less artistic” features and proportions. It’s like casting only super models in the film industry, when people want more than pretty faces, they want life and expressions and an inner beauty that comes from inside rather than only heavily retouched model pictures. People want to see more than that. Of course this type of art isn’t bad or anything, only that there is too much of it and there should be different content out there. Draw life for what it is. Art is supposed to inspire and provoke thought, not harm or cause insecurity.

The other side: Art is art! It is whatever you want it to be, stop putting rules and restrictions on it, it defeats the purpose! Let people draw whatever the hell they want to draw and if someone thinks it’s fun to draw red lips and perfect cheekbones, then who are you to stop them? Stop looking so deep into everything. And since when is makeup and filters not real life? People filter themselves and wear makeup everyday, it’s part of their identity or maybe just a fun way of expressing themselves, and of course art will reflect that. And even if that weren’t the case, who said art is exactly real life, then all art would be a photograph, or maybe video so u could experience the sound and movement of reality, or maybe you wouldn’t have art at all, you’d just step outside and exist if ur so scared to bend reality to ur own artistic liberties once in a while.

We still have assignments sometimes. An occasional Zoom call. But that’s not what high school is to me. I have an obsession with lasts. In so many aspects of life. I remember a specific time, the week before my eleventh birthday. Every single night before bed that week, I’d think to myself, “it’s my last Tuesday 10” “my last Friday 10” it was stupid. But I did that with everything. When we moved. My last time using this shower. My last night in my room. My last time opening this closet door. I never stopped that. And I had built up so many lasts in my head for high school. It was such a crazy time of my life, the most I’d ever changed as a person, the most experience I’d gotten in the real world. I’m attached to that building, its people, the walls, the books. I was so prepared to live through each and every one of those lasts.

My last time using the disgusting school restrooms with roaches. My last time sleeping on the giant comfy library sofas. My last time walking in to gov with an orange and sticking its cutie sticker on the back of the seat in front of me. My last time listening to music in class and then jolting up when uh oh stinky starts playing on max volume cuz zahra hijacked my airpods. My last time walking to euro with the same song playing in both our ears as we walk off in different directions, sighing when the Bluetooth connection cuts off cuz you’re too far. As far as you can get in one building. What we wouldn’t give to be in the same building right now. My last time quickly clicking out of my Papa’s freezeria tab and zoning back into a lecture about scandalous prince Henry and his million wives. My last time filling out forensics notes made by our sweet teacher who draws cute lil heart bulletins for each of the 19 ways a man’s blood can drain out of his body. My last time rushing to lunch before the giant pizza line or the crowds around the restroom mosh pits cuz some rapper died. My last time cuddling up in a giant blanket with my friends on the floor of our freezing cold English room to watch A Quiet Place or Marriage Story or The Good Place. Our last time making a steaming cup of hot chocolate using our teachers coffee machine to read a picture of Dorian grey. My last time sneaking my friend into library free period and then getting caught. She made my friend go out but we keep talking, through the glass. We write words on our notebook paper and show each other. We play charades. We FaceTime and text despite being a foot apart but there’s glass separating us. My last time sneaking up to the abandoned second floor of the library where all the lonely dead books live, where it feels like an airplane when it rains. You can hear the rain pattering above you and the lights go out and u feel like ur in a giant haunted library all alone. But then ms b yells for you to come down and change the water filters or take out todays orbeez and youre back in reality. My last time jolting awake to the sound of the awful trumpet bell and rushing to the bus. Saving a seat for zahra and cringing at boys’ conversations behind us as they compare weewee sizes and rate girls. Recording a bus vlog together and sharing headphones to watch funny videos. My last time walking home with Renelle and MonaLisa, stopping every few feet so they can film tiktoks. Arriving at the crossroad between our houses and saying “See you tomorrow,” before heading home. Every day. Every day we said those exact words like a tradition, even on Fridays by accident and then we’d giggle and say “oh I mean Monday” and I thought to myself that the last month of school I’d record us saying that everyday to make a graduation memory compilation.

My last time going to high school. Or school at all. Unless you count college as school, which I guess it is. But still. It’ll never be the same. We’re opening one chapter before finishing the last. We haven’t fully left high school but technically we’re in college. We haven’t fully started college cuz we’re technically still in high school. It’s over. My last day of school was something I barely remember. My friend had memorized a thousand digits of pi for extra credit and we watched her perform it in front of her class. I’m trying so hard to go back and count the lasts. But I didn’t savor it. I wish I’d known it’d be my last. It’s taught me at least to savor everything. Anything can be a last moment. Life can change at the drop of a hat.

We missed our university orientation. It was gonna be the most amazing two days of our lives. Our first ever slumber party. We’d be roommates in a dorm room and we’d do the candlelight traditions and the songs and everything. They gave us an online one now. Staff people speaking us through green screens and a bunch of twenty minute videos. Zoom calls. Surveys. Emails. All our real life experiences replaced by the stupid internet that I hate so much but it’s all I’ve got.

Who knows if we’ll have a graduation, a prom? If we’ll ever get to walk across that stage or wear that dress or even see each other in person again. Sometimes my friends come by, on their bikes or with their parents. We talk through my second floor window or on the porch six feet apart. When they leave it feels like they never came at all because it was so surreal. It doesn’t feel the same. Nothing feels the same. It feels empty and hollow and lonely and like reality is fake. Time passes as a blob now. Someone says it’s Friday and I want to scream. What does that supposed to mean? Is that supposed to hold any meaning to me anymore? Friday meant no school tomorrow. There’s no school today or tomorrow or the day after or ever.

https://my.w.tt/2w8EIKRCf6

Lost girls and lost boys

Distanced from life’s joys

Guided by blue eyes

Blue like someone’s ocean, blue like someone’s sky

Some have to drown, some have to fly

Some turn to dust, some turn to ice

They all ask “what’s paradise?”

Maybe they should ask “who’s paradise?”

🦋Note🦋

Most stories have a beginning at the beginning and an ending at the end. Some have multiple beginnings and then an ending. This one, however, begins with multiple endings. And ends with a beginning.

I wrote this short story (combination of short stories?) for a school project. The project was to do anything at all, something you hadn’t done before (one girl tried raising crabs!) Buuut I’m not that creative, so I decided to write a story in a format and writing style I’d never tried before. It’s on Wattpad, but I wanted to upload each chapter on here too.

I usually write stuff like fanfictions or like more YA type little stories full of dialogue and like in first person. This is more fairy tale like, and I’d like to believe something you’d find in some antique gilded book that you have to blow dust off of:)

It’s not like anything I usually write and its writing style reminds me of The Language of Thorns (which is a super amazing book my friend gifted me for my birthday!) and it might be my favorite story I’ve ever written. So please give some honest feedback but don’t be mean🥺

Also this is a picture book so it’s full of aesthetics and character pics and a ton of scenery!

P.S there miiiight be a huge significance to their names! Virtual cookies to whoever figures it out!! 🍪