3:30
This week's newsletter takes you by the hand and leads you on an all consuming sensory journey into hallways full of memories of moments past
Greetings dear dreamers
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Abandoned Dreams Collective
One of my favourite tropes of popular social culture from the past years is that of girls finding their soul sisters in party bathrooms. A short exchange of “I love how you carry off that fit! I could never” or “Do not drunk text him!!! He does not deserve you” encapsulates an almost friendship. It nudges alive the possibility that someone you crossed paths with fleetingly saw you for who you are and if you had more time around them, you could be friends.
I have something of that feeling for this week’s author, Rejah Khawar. She and I had our writing featured adjacently in a zine a few months ago. I loved the writing in her piece immediately and harnessed a bout of courage to reach out to her when I was starting this project. The piece she submitted was a realization of all those possibilities. It was the kind of writing that brings alive fading memories and immortalizes them into sepia tinted photographic evidence of its one-time existence. It had the same heady mix of sensory stimuli, akin to synesthesia that wash over me every time I listen to Taylor Swift’s Red. Now that my mandatory TSwift namedrop is done, I’m going to let you go read the piece.
3:30
I got them in the mail – a postcard, a wilting leaf and a few traces of a lingering, unmistakable scent. Charred lavender and cinnamon. Cinder and smoke. Quite possibly, the scent of your palm. The dying tint of this maple leaf reminds me of the blood gushing in my veins and for a split second I can almost taste it on my tongue. I think to myself, “Will I have your blood on my hands too?" Everything that comes from you bleeds. I see a halo of red around you. Everywhere you go, everything you touch – reddens. In a fiery sort of way. Didn’t you once tell me it was your favorite color?
Red.
I hope you remember I wear red glass bangles too. I hope you know we are both fragile so you don’t clutch too hard. They pinch. Both ways. I wince every time I think of them breaking, cutting both of us open. It is futile to try to stop my mind from wandering at your doorstep again and again - so much of me is already painted by the colors you exude.
I am reading the words that you have written for me and imagining them as promises blurted out in crisp English air, earnestly, surely, purely out of love. I find myself murmuring, “How wonderful. How unreal.” It’s a hopeful picture, a pretty picture. Should I stick it on the wall? I often think about the post-it note I once wrote for you. It was up close to the same wall because walls are useful like that. You can create a sprawling network of dreams and they quietly let you. You can draw-up windows and schemes to run away from them and they let you. Your note however, it ate up. My road to you does not begin through this portal either. Our love for Harry Potter makes us conjure crude ideas, doesn’t it? No 9 ¾ for us. The words though, this wall lives up to every afternoon. It warms up as soon as the sun prepares to set and reminds me of you basking in the sun on some Scottish beach. The one we joked we could play catch-me-if-you-can on.
Sometimes I think about the first time I wrote to you. I foolishly assumed I’ll write to you a lot. Never considered that it would instead be about you. Here we are. Sweetly bleeding some more.
I wonder -
What would it have taken to take that flight?
15 hours. A bit more courage.
What would it have given us?
A lifetime’s worth of something. Or nothing. Absolutely ridiculous, totally worth it.
I don’t juggle with it longer than a moment when you ask. Even now. Neither do you when I ask. Even now.
Where do we go?
Morocco, Japan, Iran or Africa. The world is at our service. The universe is trying to make this happen.
Why are we not any closer?
Too hard, too complicated, too soon, too much luggage. Too much.
Too much?
We lost each other while we searched for places to find ourselves. Oh, the irony.
I am sitting here still trying to stitch together my thoughts and it feels like I can barely remember anything properly while the truth is, not a day goes by when I am not thinking about the possibility of this resurfacing like something would just as unexpectedly on the shores of sea view. Everything is etched in my brain like a Sumerian inscription that is impossible to decipher and erase. It seems like you have found a home in everything I have. My kurta, my earring, my conditioner, my hair, my scars. Everything goes back to you. Will we ever talk about the damage your denial has done? Will we ever know each other in the physical realm of this world or will you just conveniently continue to haunt me my whole life?
Stop.
Four days away from ‘22 and I am sitting on the toilet seat bending forward, hugging my knees, hoping earnestly that this feeling will pass. This all-too-familiar feeling of despondency I never fail to feel in parallel with gratitude. This dread that everything that I am cherishing open-heartedly in this moment might crumble to bits in the next because you’re not in there. Because they are not you. And it is in fact, impossible to see them with you as the benchmark. They are not you. They can never be. Is this unrequited? No. Is it what it could have been? Not even close. Am I being unreasonable?
We dreamt this.
The hopeless romantic in me would actually sit and sketch a misty scenario in my head (and sometimes on Adobe sketch) where you are tying a beautiful anklet around my heel and I’m absurdly thinking this is one of those shackles you are never getting free from. Imagine being a prisoner to trinkets. (You won’t be the first.) To finding your way to me by following their dancing sound. (You also won’t be the last one to do that.) To only being able to hush them ever so slightly under the weight of endless pining. (Only you can.)
Get out of my head.
But don’t you dare ever leave my heart.
You are like the sea you love to dislike so much.
Intense. Calm.
Unforgiving.
How – you might wonder - does this work?
It does by clinging on to imaginary letters.
Or finding chinars.
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The dreamscape you light up is somber and quiet these days. Too many sleepless nights. The jharokas of our dream house that would open onto the courtyard where you’d wait for me are stuck shut. The wooden grains are alive and relentless because of the rains. The thunders have shattered the cabin I was so lovingly building for us but the address for you to post onto remains the same. Once the skies have cleared (and you find your way back in my dreams) and the sun is high up in the sky, we will meet on the banks of Jhelum and hunt hybrids. Considering the wildling that I am, I will then sleep peacefully under the shade of the almond as you thread those daisies gently in my braid.
-Rejah Khawar
I look forward to seeing you again next week with a new story.
Much love and many dreams
Nirmitee
The Abandoned Dreams Collective