Tears At Dawn

 Some of my favourite songs have been gifts. The result of the ends of conversations on apps not meant for seventeen year olds, loneliness can be desperate sometimes. The melodies are stuck on repeat days after the last text, I still cling to memories both real and daydreamt as the song loops over and over. They were gifts in the most personal of ways, I still remember the givers when their song comes on. I forget their faces, their hands reaching out but always curling back towards their digital bodies, the border between us too big a reality check to ignore. At least I imagine they did, I know I did. A piece of their legacy, forever enshrined in an mp3. 

Everytime I loved a man from Pakistan, I always thought ‘this is a man you’re supposed to hate. You’re committing treason. How dare you!’ 

I’d scoff, I’d laugh. It's a wondrous thing to have read history. Not only by historians, but by authors who wrote truth and branded it fiction. The communal trauma of a time which everyone remembers but conveniently forget that their forefathers and mothers were a part of it too. I don’t know what happened when all four of my grandparents and their families crossed over to begin a new life, and I don’t want to. I don’t know if I’d be able to bear it if I knew that I am the son of murderers and unknowing necrophiles.

The Greeks had the best and worst of ideas that way. They identified sons and daughters by their fathers. Telemachus, son of Odysseus they would say. Minos, son of Zeus. Antigone, cursed daughter of cursed Oedipus. Invocation of the bloodline was the only way to ensure that grudges would be held, revenge sworn would be carried out, and descendants would be favoured by the gods. Names have a funny way of becoming judgement and inheritance, wouldn’t you say? Like even now, I am unka beta, they must be so proud of him. Unka beta, dekho kitna badtameez hai, badon se dhang se baat nahin kar pata. Hum to bas aur khana lene ko bol rahe the, its not like ki we were taking advantage of our relationship to emotionally blackmail, gaslight, manipulate, abuse, and get away with calling it ‘love’. Sorry I turned bitter there. Can’t help it though, even my fingers refuse to edit these words. Truth will out, they tremble. I resign. 

Songs are memories. I often play them while I read the romances of men who dream of summer weddings and hidden trysts I could never imagine. The perks of being 19 in a world caught up in an impending climate crisis and hate-spouting dictators. Were we raised to fight and fix the world our parents built? It seems that way sometimes, reading all the stories where the teenagers rise up against the oppression with their parents looking on from a distance. My parents never believe me when I say that I didn’t have a childhood. How could I when I cannot remember it? All I see are flashes of pages that taught me wondrous things of magic and danger, and the kids who were brave enough to fight back. All I remember is knowing that I must fight back, so why are you so surprised mother? Father? Why? If you raised a warrior in a world that was crumbling around everyone, why did you not expect the rage and the helplessness that fuels it? Why would you teach me that change starts at home and then shut your ears everytime I open my mouth?

Education is a double-edged sword, for some of its teachers never thought that they might one day have to fall to the same blade. 

We are children born of hellflame and google searches that led us down rabbit holes. We climbed out hazed, but aware. I now know that’s the worst punishment for people like us: to know what is wrong but be helpless anyway. All because our parents refuse to believe that somehow, we have faced the same terrors in half the time. 

Songs are memories. I remember my books and my men everytime my playlist drones and fills the stark coffin of mold in my room. My breath frosts and breaks, my hands shiver and steady. 

Sing with me. I remember.