tine

To love someone is to stretch them out into a beautiful kind of wornness. I would like to love you and see you become that.

Every book and film and poem and song I run into these days are only provoking me to understand my mother a little better.

every fucking post appearing in my social media is always about fucking fucking sex sex sex boobs tits dih like STOP PLEASE

i want to write more of my thoughts about ATSS but i just feel like i can’t give them enough justice to fully encapsulate everything i felt while reading it. but i will think of them all the time. mariam, laila, tariq, babi. everyone

When you aren’t beautiful, you try to produce something beautiful out of you. It’s true; what is the world without beauty in it? You have to be—to be beautiful, I mean—in any form, as long as it’s beautiful, even if you aren’t the muse. My condition won’t ever grant me that luxury of being one. I thought, perhaps, that I must have inherited at least a portion, or better the entirety, of my mother’s face, but I didn’t have both. All my life I have been told to take care of myself, to apply moisturizer and the ointments, to sleep and wake up early, to shower before noon, to eat healthily, to change the way I live. It isn’t that easy, you know. I never bothered to rise from it when I had already found comfort in darkness, what would be the point anyway? I couldn’t escape my condition; I wasn’t allowed to live normally the moment I was born. I have deprived myself of wearing shorts, skirts, dresses, revealing gowns—things I imagine myself dazzling in—because I have to hide my ugliness. It was better to rot and die, I thought. But I am not a person without skills. If I’m not beautiful, then I’ll create beautiful things myself. And I did, for a long time, and in turn, I cared less of my appearance. I wanted to create so much more with my own hands until my energy run out. I got exhausted, eventually. And there wasn’t any other choice for me but to look at the mirror and see how much damage I’ve inflicted on myself with my own negligence. And how, at some point in my life, like a calling, there was a quiet moment where I realized I can be deserving of good things. It felt like it was time. So—when you run out of energy to produce something beautiful out of you, you try to make yourself beautiful instead. I created a skincare routine, bought new clothes, tried to avoid fast food as much as possible, thought of saving money for new shoes and books I’ve been meaning to read, watched shows and films I wouldn’t watch. And it began, like a butterfly from a caterpillar, the self-redemption. For you, my little self who didn’t know any better.

Mariam jo, is this what you felt too? When you were told that you aren’t beautiful, and you believed it? Did you try to produce something beautiful out of you, too? Did you mold the rice ball over and over until he’d stopped forcing you to chew pebbles, punishing you with it, the very same rocks you arranged in rows back then, when you thought your father loved you. Did you know you were beautiful?