What Not To Do When You're In Love

06 | Turmoil

06 | Turmoil

Everyone is unreal.

None of the people feel real, they all look like silhouettes; like the shapes of entities, a reassurance of company, but not even close to real. They look like they're there, but it doesn't feel like it.

It feels like I'm surrounded by people, yet they're far, far away from me.

I'd been writing all my life, and when I wrote, it felt like I was doing something. It felt like a task, only one I enjoyed; I had to sit down and make things up.

But when I wrote this book, it felt strangely different. It felt like I was emptying my feelings onto the limitless blank sheet of digital paper. Writing this book, it felt better than writing ever had.

I had started, and now I couldn't stop, and I was glad for it.

Honestly, this depression subplot, it hadn't been a part of the initial planning of the book. Well, there hadn't exactly been a planning in the first place, I just began venting out as soon as I registered that I could start writing.

But anyway, I did not really want to write about a sad character, it was different from what I'd always written, plus I just did not want to write a sad story. I had just wanted to write something sweet.

Yet I found myself doing it, and with great hard work. For unexplained reasons, the writer in me wanted to do it extremely well, and so ridiculously urgently, that it didn't even want to wait and plan things out, like I was used to doing.

I had no idea what I was up to, and I couldn't stop.

And I enjoyed it.

It was the best part of the entire day that I sat all dolled up in my room - to sit on that desk, the curtains drawn, focused on the nonexistent things that surrounded my head instead of the overwhelmingly real ones that actually surrounded me.

Hafsa would come to me and talk about herself, and ask me about me, and tell me things about Hasan. Ruqya Bhabi also came with her, and she didn't speak much, but seemed to enjoy being their when Hafsa talked to me.

One of the many things we chatted about, over kebabs and sharbats, was literature.

Ruqya Bhabi hadn't spoken a word since she returned my Salam when she entered my room, but when, after her constant prodding, I admitted to Hafsa that I wrote sometimes, she spoke. And with considerable enthusiasm.

"What do you write? And in which language?"

Her voice gave it away. I sensed she was interested in literature, and I smiled when I told her a little more about my writing.

"When I was younger," she said, in a tone which made her sound way older than she was, "I wrote, too. I wrote urdu poems, though."

"Really?!" I exclaimed, my eyes wide. I truly was amazed, because poetry was way more difficult to compose than fiction was, at least for me.

"Yes. But I don't anymore. And because of all the time that has passed, I don't think I can do it half as well as I'd once been doing."

"Oh," I said, and now I was filled with rage where I'd just been I inflated with delight a few seconds ago.

Again the unusual topic brought a gloomy silence we both didn't know how to end, and Hafsa came to our rescue with a rather silly question.

"Why does a person write? Tell me, my two writers, tell me why you write, or wrote. Why not just watch TV when there's free time? Or better yet, why not just nap!"