As our teachers predicted, the majority of students would not come back after the first year. Last semester, at least 150 of us sat in an auditorium room for the three year Associates Degree program.
Pieces
“The house at the end of the street was…scary, dreary, dangerous, abandoned…”
I watched the responses roll in and thought, Jeesh…maybe I should have just gone to the dawat with my family.
I paint swirls on banners and marigolds on teacups,
polish the cutlery and set out the tablecloths.
This glass skin of mine shatters and distorts beneath the scrutinizing gaze of my audience. I sit there, frozen, uncomfortable and dissociated. They watch my every move, like a rat in a maze; every twitch of my eyes, every hesitant turn, observed and judged.
I groaned softly as I stretched after climbing down from the weathered jeep. The long drive up into the mountains from the airport in Islamabad had worked its way deep into my bones. For a moment I simply stood there at the outskirts of my village, listening to the wind move gently through the trees overhead.
aching soul,
restless,
mind never quite at ease
grief takes its home
in between
“Harakah and Barakah, reporting for service!” Harakah announced. He snapped to attention as the Senior Angel passed by, then eased back over the welcome counter the moment he was gone.
is Jannah as sweet,
without the triumph of making it there?
would the rest be blissful,
without the toils of this world?
The world is still exactly the same. And nothing is the same anymore The seasons carry a certain air of…
