Tuesday 8 April 2008 12:26:23 AM

Dear Z

I forgive you.

I think.

And S. And your mother.  They were bystanders to our out of control misery.

I love you. We had good times together. I loved how we fit. I loved how we could talk for hours. I loved how nice you were, and I’m sorry I was so miserable I couldn’t appreciate it (it was just concentrating on all the wrong things!). I know you tried, and you tried very hard, and I’m sorry now that my only reaction was to get even more annoyed at you because you completely missed the bigger issues and concentrated on the unimportant things. I – women in general – don’t need solutions and advice and flowers – we need someone to listen. Thats all. Thats all that was missing. You will make some smarter girl who doesn’t work and who will have the energy to deal with men very very happy one day, and I’m really really sorry that girl isn’t me. I’m sorry we couldn’t get past being on mars and venus. If only we had gotten help sooner we would have been saved. I should have known better.

I’m sorry this has all ended. I am sorry you aren’t talking to me. And I’m sorry I hurt you.

I will always have had all my firsts with you. I will always think specially of you. It breaks my heart that this had ended in a way you and I could never have imagined. It breaks my heart because you are more special to me than you think. And I know we would work on it so much differently if we were together again. I would work on it so much more differently. I realize now that at the end of the day, it is the bigger picture that mattered, and the bigger picture was fine.

I love you, and a part of me probably always will. Maybe one day, one day, a long time from now we will be whole again. I will be whole again.

That I will be able to think about this and about you without crying. That I can talk to my therapist without finishing her tissue box. That I can fulfill myself and not rely on someone else to complete me.

Thank you for teaching me so much.

Goodbye.

Monday, April 07, 2008 1:19:59 AM

Dear Z

Hey baby. Work beckons so I’ll be coming back soon. Now if I could just combat my insomnia I would be able to do some damn work.

Anyway. You really need to listen to me – all you need to do is go to a therapist and have a third person explain it to you – we were a textbook first year head case. Really. I’ll send you the book. With highlights so you know which lines to read. Its our arguments in there, word for word thought for thought. If you just start talking to me instead of having this tantrum I can explain it to you. It all makes sense.

If you don’t, my life will go on. It can roll on and I still don’t fucking want that. Why? Have I ever understood anything about us? Have you? Have any of our friends? Have our families?

I sat in the dark with my mother today. The electric was gone and I made it to her room and lay down on a corner of her giant bed.

She asked me what I wanted.

I said I didn’t know. it could go either way.

And then I knew she didn’t want me to stay with you either.

And it broke my heart more than anything else. More than my friends, more than what my own head rants at me, her silence broke me.

Seems to be all I’m doing these days. Falling apart. Putting myself back together to find a missing body part here and there. Lost in the folds of a bed, left in the sheets, fumbled for in the dark. I’ve left such a big chunk back there in you. God knows where you’ve thrown it by now.

I wonder if I’ll stop writing these letters soon. Will this too die out eventually like everything else?

Saturday, April 05, 2008 12:42:00 AM

Dear Z

John Grey PhD says I must remember the love with the pain, experience the pain first hand while concentrating on the love. The pain will disappear. The good feelings will eventually remain. And to think you said books don’t teach you anything about life.

I’m proud of me. Instead of bundling you away into my box, I’m bringing this out. I’m experiencing the damn pain. Sometimes that’s all I feel. And by God does it hurts. Who knew I was capable of all this girly emotion – we both sure didn’t. Maybe it was in there all along and I had locked it too far away and even though you came close I was smart enough to never give you the key – because look, look at where we are.

Look at where you’ve left me.

I can’t get that last morning out of my head. How can everything wrong be so right? How can the one person who has destroyed me inside out be the only person who can put me back together again? I don’t have the energy to do it myself.
I never will.
I can’t live the life Dr Grey says is possible. Its too goddamn sad and lonely. I can’t be sad and lonely any more. I fucking miss you asshole. And I know you’ll never remember this website, so I can say this: take me back. Please. Please. God, please.

Forgive me for whatever the fuck it was I did. I’ll forgive all the beatings and the torture and the mind fuck and your awful sister and you parents who hate me because of how you twisted them over to your side last year. It really means so much that people justify your existence doesn’t it? Just fucking take me back.

Monday, March 31, 2008 1:39:25 AM

Dear Z

So here we are. Alone at last.

I saw a therapist yesterday – well, day before. She was pretty hot. We didn’t really have much time together, and towards the end she checked her watch now and then, but it was pretty helpful. I think she can help me.

I now know what I did wrong. I know now what the world’s image of a wife is: quiet, silent, suffering her duty as she watches her stupid bungling man make a botch of both their lives – but she is also smart. Conniving even. She bears with the stupid man because she must, but does not rely on him for anything. She saves her own money for her own nest egg. She does what she wants and when she wants, but only agrees with the stupid man whenever he asks her of something (he’ll never check if it actually gets done, he just wants her to agree). All insults must be swallowed, all cheeks turned for another slap, all suffering bourne.

For years and years. Till the money comes in and she can shop. Till the kids come in and she can raise them to not be like him. Till he loses interest and gets on with his life and hobbies and she can get on with hers.

That’s a successful marriage.

How stupid I was to expect things of you.

To expect you to want the house and car and savings. To expect you to have the same moral compass. To expect you to know that lying and stealing and hitting was wrong. How stupid of me to give up everything because you loved me and that you swore you would care for me forever. How stupid of me to think you would always be nice to me – even when the going get tough. You didn’t even know the meaning of half the words you swore to me did you? Unconditional love? Ever lasting paramour? Getting old and gray together?

So here I am exchanging sms’s because you don’t answer my phone calls, begging for bits and pieces of the lacs and lacs you owe me. Begging for bits and pieces of myself that I left at our place. Bits of pieces that I will never get back because you gouged them out of me and threw them in the trash.

Is that where all our memories are as well? In the trash? Memories of the good times john grey PhD insists I must fully remember to move on. Memories of lying spooning on the last morning, ignoring the wonderful oasis we made on your half of the bed, as fathers and work called, as the world knew that we had separated and that all hell would break loose and all the hate would culminate. Every day memories to toss out at the end of the day so that hameed would get it in the morning – memories of just sitting and talking and time weirdly passing so quickly. Memories of kissing randomly here and there. Memories of not fitting sideways on the sofa anymore because we both got fat. Memories memories memories. Memories of trash.

Saturday 20 October 7:18 pm

Dear Z

Why do i flatter you by continuing to write to you? i don’t know – love is strange if nothing else. life is even stranger. how can i still be with you? how can i find myself falling in love with you again and again, a little shoot taking root and grabbing hold despite all tendrils against nature. we are more stable post seperation. its like when i came back you started working as hard as i do at this relationship – who knew it could be so hard? hard hard work, terrible tedium and frustration and annoyance. you say you care for me beyond doubt - but does anyone? can we all really see beyond ourselves and give and give and give beyond the point where there is nothing left and we are scared that we will collapse and our empty husks be blown away into great nothingness? i have seen my mother do that – i cannot. i know i cannot. yet.

maybe one day our dreams will come true. maybe one day we will have our giant house, our ungrateful teenaged kids and our twice a year vacations which we go with our giant families. i don’t know if such mountains can be encompassed from such humble black valleys, but at least we can have courtesy and companionship and sex along the way. i love you baby.

Tuesday 17 September 2007 7:41am

Dear Z
God i hate you. i want to leave you and never see your stupid pathetic fat lying face again. You destroy any happiness or goodwill I might have. You seem to sense when life is going good for me, and then purposely swoop in and kill the notion.
How many times have I greeted you at the door, thrown my arms around you, kissed you and asked you if you wanted your (fucking undeserving) dinner? How many times have you been completely unappreciative, completely ruthlessly stripped all notions of security or goodwill I have shored up during the day with one carefully chosen word? Every time if not more?
I hate you so much it leaves me speechless. I am trapped, unable to communicate my suffocating hell to anyone. You who can barely read or write somehow manage to communicate so well – turning each and every bastion of my support against me. Keeping them so far away that I cannot talk to them, cannot even begin to explain the horror of the life you have thrown at me.
How can my father want me to stay with you after you beat me? Is it like H who witnessed the furious aftermath where I left you and packed and was ready to go back to my parents – who weeks later asked me “so did he really hit you?”. How can I explain how those words from a loving protective adopted older brother killed me far more than your pathetic attempts at breaking me. Is that why no one is dragging me away in outraged fury? Is that why everyone passes this off as a first year lovers spat of two spoilt adolescents thrown into marriage? No one believes that someone they know can actually slap his wife till she falls, kick her on the ground, choke her till she can’t breathe (just like the movies) and loses her vision?
Or am I confusing this for the first time? When you beat me so badly in the first two weeks of our marriage that I couldn’t walk to the dinner the next day? That I found myself walking alone on the road in my pajamas at three a.m. because I think I lost my mind with my illusions of a happily ever after. And how you slept after beating me, happily dozing uncaring of the wife you swore to love and protect and all that bullshit walking with a nearly fractured mind barefoot in glass and sand trying to leave leave leave and with nowhere to go.
Can anyone believe that when I don’t believe it myself. Its happened three times in eight months. I’m not going to bother with all the neurosis that goes with being hit with hate – it is your weakness, your fault. You have not once apologized. Not once. Why do I expect you to be human? Because I can’t believe you can do this? If I can’t believe it how can anyone else? How can I explain it to them? How? How to I leave you before the person I was completely dies?

the other one doesn’t work

i’m an empty husk
hollowed
hallowed
waiting for consecration

i hate
me, you, him, her, us, them
i want to be so much more than what i am
i am the sum of
: longings unknown
: future unknown
: past forgotten

confused, twirling, pretty circles empty of color
wanting to die
wanting to live
hating life and hating death
in constant waiting

Tuesday, August 15, 2006 2:32:46 AM

Dear Z

 

When I picture being married to you, I mentally zoom through the functions (GOD knows how they’ll go – but I’m secretly scared that the valima will be horribly sparse and undecorated because if you’re handling it then we’re screwed because you’re a boy and you hence don’t know anything about décor – plus where will you get time to do beautification of hideous creek club halls?). Anyway. So then we get married and the only clear thing I CAN imagine is the time period we stay back for the dinners and stuff and I get to wear my new clothes and dress up and wear my jewellery (yaay), and then we go freeze on our honeymoon (still seems unlikely we’ll go because you’re so against it) and then we’ll start the drudgery of corporate work. Basically can’t imagine anything but the family post wedding dinners.

What do you think it’ll be like?

Monday, August 14, 2006 7:01:10 PM

Dear Z

I’m furious with you. I’ve lived in constant terror for the last two weeks over you-know-what. I feel my gut clench and spasm with horror as I recall every dizzy spell, the hyperventilating I had at Dubai airport and the constant need to eat meat.

Then I’m furious with you in making your stupid inconsiderate doltish mock serious SPEECH about how “I should take this seriously and it’s not funny”. You bloody idiot, what the hell do you think I DON’T know how serious this is? Will you have to go through ANY trouble at all? Will you be compromised physically, socially, mentally in ANY way? Will you even have to miss a single day’s work or a single night’s sleep over this? Will you have trouble conceiving for the rest of your life because you were stupid adolescent and amateurish in your bloody precious sex drive?

Fuck you and fuck all men.

 

I’m done with trusting you to be the grown up and take care of things. I’m done with it. You get NOTHING done, all your promises are crap. You have failed to deliver on every single thing I have relied on you to take care of. You whine and complain about the stress and the finances, but haven’t compromised either. You don’t buy three hundred rupee phone cards yet pay fifty thousand rupees of your father’s debt. It’s like there are two boats, one with your parents and one with you. You feel the need to help them by cutting holes in your bloody boat and throwing it at them. I know you would love to be the good son, but frankly you’re not in the position to play savior. You yourself and in pathetic amounts of debt for pathetic reasons, you have no game plan to get out of it, and you proudly dig your self deeper in massive strokes while patting yourself on the back for saving three bloody hundred rupees.

Congratulations. I can’t wait to sink in your boat with you. If you can’t control your dick and your finances soon, there’s going to be trouble.

Friday, August 11, 2006 4:51:33 PM

Dear Z

You bastard. You’ve gotten me used to this absolutely unrealistic level of commitment that you made initially by calling me a million times a day and basically worshipping the ground I walk on. Where’s the worshipping now!? It’s downright cruel to do that. EVERYONE knows that the honeymoon period of relationships is unsustainable, so everyone tries to compensate by setting realistic standards. That’s a GROWNUP relationship. And there you go and disregard all these basic norms of common sense and build this up toting it to be forever and then we crash and burn and I end up feeling ignored, used and slightly resentful.

Basically you’re not calling me and I don’t like it. And when you do call, there’s this annoying tone to our conversations that’s dissatisfying and vaguely irritating. Plus its VERY rude to not say goodbye before hanging up.

Anyway. Lahore is in full insect bloom these days. Summer quarter springs unfortunately to memory, with leaving a single plate in a kitchen and having a swarm of a million ants infesting every scrap of edible substance. Of sitting on a bench next to the pond for five minutes with the dorm delivered pizza and picking it up again to find it overrun with black teeming masses from ecological hell. Yuck. All the greenery in Lahore has its downside. On that note I shall depart and carry on with my own life that is slowly strengthening here as I pull away from us.