Preface
This story contains themes of dissociation, trauma, guilt, self-loathing, psychosis, depression and apostasy.
There’s a tiny bit of js running, just to be upfront.
This is largely autobiographical, with some creative liberties taken. I’ve spent a while trying to figure out whether its autism or a schizotypy, and uh… yeah. Never really stopped to think this wasn’t just a dumbass being a dumbass and was a fucking psychotic delusion.
Chapters:
Credit
Isolation
“Spare them.”
The faucet runs, filling the sink faster than the clogged piping empties it. Rushing water drowns out the hushed, whispering pleads and tiled walls muffle out sound and prying vision.
“I don’t care how much I’d beg. I don’t care how much I’d scream. I don’t care how much I’d want out. Never open the gates. Never let me out! Consign me to Jahannum! Only me!”
A guilt-ridden voice exclaims its penance in prayer, to a deity never prayed to before with any honest conviction. It cracks under its own insolence.
“I don’t care how much it’ll hurt! I’ll serve everyone’s time and then more! I’ll take their pain! All of it! Spare them! Spare everyone else- Why?”
And as always, the young teen finds no divine guidance, no light of grace, no righteous voice bearing down salvation. He finds nothing but silent forsakement.
“Why are you silent? Why do you never speak? Why am I alone?”
Nothing, but his own distorted reflection staring back from the rippling surface beneath. Inviting him downwards, to witness himself. To witness the suppressed patchwork of his memories. To witness the divine Gift he has shunned. To witness the fragmentation of his own mind.
To bear witness to the cost of his existence, and its consequence.
Affectation
A toddler walks. A toddler’s mind watches. Legs propel him forth, looking for help, looking for comfort. Feet march as his gaze reels from panic. The homunculus within fears his own vision, the trappings of his Cartesian theater.
His parents walk in through the door. Prideful, of their son getting up on his own. Joyous. Happy. They do not share his distress. They do not share his anxiety. They do not see his thoughts.
He tries. Focuses harder. Why don’t they see? Why don’t they say anything?
Because they can’t. They don’t know. They don’t see. They do not see him. They cannot comfort him. They cannot reach him. He’s alone. He’s impossibly alone.
Preschool
The youngest toddler in the class panics. He grabs a fresh sheet and starts coloring again, only to find the same stumbling block. He starts the cycle again, growing more and more anxious.
Another classmate finishes, and sits for the next activity. The toddler repeats. Then the next, and the next. The toddler repeats. The teacher does not wait for the final few children still working away. She starts reading the story she had planned.
The toddler repeats. The sheet asks for red. He colors it with the red crayon. The sheet asks for green. He colors it with the green crayon. The sheet asks for violet. But there is no violet crayon.
The racuous laughter drowns out the child’s thoughts. He should be done. He should have been done. He tries again. The hysteria makes it hard to see the lines. He starts emptying the box of crayons. Indigo. Indigo. Indigo. No violet. Not a single crayon labeled with the word violet.
His actions attract the attention of his surroundings. The reading lulls to a pause. The entire class looks upon the toddler struggling with a basic coloring exercise. She reaches over, and puts the purple crayon in his hand. Not a word spoken. No further explanation given. She returns to her book and the waiting ears.
The toddler finishes his sheet. He sits at the back of the group. No one says a thing, to the teary child on his first ever day of school.
God is Greater
A toddler spends his recess doodling. He draws a sphere. He wants to draw the Earth, like he saw in a book, but he does not know how. The map on the wall is too detailed. Far too much to fit, far too defined. His hands cannot move that precisely, even if he could figure out how to project a plane onto a circle.
He tries something else. A few random, squiggly shapes. He colors them green. He colors around them blue. Earth; but not Earth. Continents, but none of the seven. No brown, no islands, no rivers. But still Earth’s oceans and forests. He is confused by his own expression and recognition.
A child approaches, marvelling at the drawing. The toddler knows not what to make of it, simply staring at the turban on his head. He can only offer what he did to draw the ‘good drawing’. The Hindu child takes advantage of the receptiveness, letting curiosity guide him, for an answer from the only kid in the class of Muslim origin.
“What does ‘Allah is the greatest’ mean?”
“It means He’s the greatest. Greater than anything!”
“Than a hundred gods?”
“Greater than all of them!”
“But there’s millions-”
“Greater than all of them together!”
Was He?
The toddler is subjected to his own imagination. He pictures an endless row of idols. He cannot conceptualize a hundred without turning it into an uncountable blur. He does not know what a ‘million’ even is, just that its… bigger. He tries still. He conjures a representation of Allah in the only way he can. Another idol, bigger than the pile. The size shrinks, and grows, just as undefined as the endless imagined symbols of unintended blasphemy.
How big were they? How big was Allah? The toddler… doesn’t know. He has no reference, and thus he has no understanding. The Hindu gods couldn’t all be same size, surely. And what did ‘great’ even mean, here? Surely it meant size, what else can one compare? The toddler simply does not know.
And yet, the toddler still burst that out. Almost yelled it. Why? If he didn’t understand it, where did that phrase come from? Why did he know it? How did he ‘know’ it?
Did he know it? Why does he not know if he knows it? How did he know to make them stone? And give them faces?
The teacher brings him back to the present, out of the confines of his head. The other child has already left. She encourages him to go play out in the sun with his newfound friend.
Juvenile psychosis
A toddler kicks and screams, trying desperately to break free of his father’s grasp. The man does not let the panic attack distract him from the intention to discipline. Up the stairs, into a bathroom on the floor above. The child cries in desperation to deaf ears. He closes the door behind him, locking the child in ceramic timeout, with nothing but his thoughts to accompany him.
The toddler ceases; all tears, all cries, all breathing, all movement. He curls up in a ball of paralysis, waiting. Waiting for the jinn to come claim him, to take him away, never to be seen again. Like his mother had warned him. Seconds pass, then more. Nothing changes. Nothing happens.
He sees it. In the corner of his periphery. A figure. A presence. His chest tightens, waiting. Yet nothing happens. It stays still. Unmoving. Why‽ Why isn’t it doing anything? Bad kids are taken away by the jinn! That’s what Mama said! That’s why no one was allowed to come up here! Because this is where the jinn were! So why isn’t it- doing anything?
The toddler calms, not enough to reassert motoric control, only attentional. Onto the figure on the wall, in an impossible perspective. A top down view, as though its legs were planted on the vertical surface, and yet torso still faced forward and in full view. A distorted, bearded face. A person. Unmistakably a person, and yet not enough space to fit it.
Were they supposed to look like people? What were they supposed to look like? He- he didn’t know. They were beings, agents, wills. Like people, so they must look like people too? Is that why it had a beard like Baba?
The toddler shifts his sight, trying to get a better look at the conundrum before him. It shifts with him. It maintains its position relative to his own cone of vision, uncaring of the geometry of the world around it.
And then it leaves. Vanishes into thin air. No flashy departure, no blink, nothing. A few seconds stretching into minutes, now gone without a trace. Was Mama wrong? Were jinn friendly? Then why did it just… leave? Why was he so afraid? Of nothing? Why did they tell him the jinn would take him away?
But never the how?
Submerged
A toddler tries desperately to keep above the water. He does not notice the hands around him trying to steady his thrashing enough to slip on a pair of floaters. His struggles break him free, sending him plunging down into the shallow depths.
Hearing distorts. The pressure dampens auditory ambience, rendering it naught but an echo. There is nothing but a sudden, roaring silence. He opens his eyes, gazing into the bottomless blue fog, shrouded in the refracted distortion of glass and water. There is nothing but the mind gazing outwards, submerged in an insurmountable, screaming void.
The hands pull him back up. All the toddler offers is a sneeze.
Implicit Concessions
The toddler recites what he does not understand. His parents join for the occasion. They’re just happy their son had stopped calling it ‘stupid’.
“Qul hu-Allah-hu a-had.”
They’re proud of the turn, from refusing to even start, to speeding through the entire scripture. A welcome turn of a paradoxically stubborn and obedient child.
“Mashallah, he’s going to do it even faster next time!”
The qari proclaims his implicit intent. The toddler tries to recite.
“Allah-hu hus- sam- sama-”
The toddler cannot recite. He cries. He cries tears of betrayal. ‘Next time’. They don’t care. Always a ploy. Always a lie. ‘Just this once’ was never once. Just a way to make him do what they wanted.
They try to offer comfort. The toddler refuses to stop crying. Stopping means he keeps reciting. Stopping means they make him continue. They bring a glass of water, they pray away the devil. The toddler refuses to drink. They do not see the mind within, the glaringly obvious, natural cause of his distress. And so they wont stop until he stops resisting.
Because he already gave way. Because they saw his compromise as relenting. He has no choice. They force the glass to his lips. He has to drink. He has to swallow.
To do otherwise is to drown.
Method masking
The play needs a volunteer and the senior students want to involve the audience. A toddler looks around, finding no hands aloft. He raises his own and gets called on stage.
A simple story of crows and friendship. One captured, then freed by the rest, over and over. The toddler studies the motion. Wait for the bad guy to cover, be sad, wait for friends, join them with a smile. He waits for his turn.
The toddler takes his place. The poacher drapes him with motion. Be sad. Sad means crying. The toddler forces himself to be sad. The toddler forces himself to cry. The rest join him in their scripted roles, and see his tears. They break character, concern on their faces.
They misunderstand. They see the sobs as genuine. They do not see the precocious facade. They do not see the act. They do not see him. He wants to smile through his tears, trying to assuage their implicit focus. Yet he cannot fully, when the mask is as real as the self.
The play returns. The toddler cannot focus. He feels gazes. He feels the gaze of the crowd. On his face. On his tears. They turn genuine. They become real. The external becomes internal. He acts regardless.
Fearful connections
The toddler makes his way forward, away from the carpool with his older brother. A bonding exercise, pairing kids with each other for a sleepover. His friend is ecstatic, already making plans. The toddler’s unease presents as timid shyness, as it always did.
The ride is uneventful. The arrival is uneventful. The toddler says little, interacts little, does little. Just present. Just observing. Alone in his head.
The mother tries to settle him in. Offering snacks. Like his own mother did. A banana. A singular banana. Handed over, like his mother did. An implicit command for him to partake. To expand. To grow beyond his citadel.
He knows he will not go back home tonight. And he screams. He screams for home.
Overwhelmed
It doesn’t feel the same anymore. Time no longer slows. The toddler hates that it no longer slows. His classmates laugh, having fun with the pretense; with his pretense. They climb the raised playground tube, outstretch their arms, and jump down, ‘gliding like a plane’.
The toddler tries again. His feet reach gravel faster than expected. Faster than it should be. Frustration takes hold, he climbs back up. He does not understand why the imagined temporal distortion is absent. He readies to try again, as many times as he needs to feel it again.
Another child clambers up, out of turn, out of order. Taking his place. Anger takes hold. The toddler reaches out an arm, blocking the rusher, and jumping down. Two kids fall, one on his feet, one on his back. Sobs ring out, of pain and hurt. The other kids glare. The toddler looks back, at his consequences, frozen in numbness.
He is lead over to the nearby bench, to have a talk with the supervising adult. She waits expectantly, for a reason. The toddler has no words to give. He grapples with his own head, with a lack of articulation. Feelings and emotions he has consciously never felt before. Regret. Guilt. He got angry. Why was he angry? He shouldn’t have been angry. He hurt him. They just wanted to play with him. He hurt his friend.
He has nothing to offer but tears. Of regret. Of his lack of understanding of regret. Over his outburst. Over what he did not mean to happen. The teacher does not know what to make of the situation. She waits for the unending weeping to stop, for wet eyes do not count as written apology.
“Why is he crying?”
The toddler stops instantly. His chest freezes. His breathing fails. He swallows his wails. He swallows his tears. He didn’t get hurt. He caused hurt. He wasn’t supposed to feel bad. He wasn’t supposed to feel hurt. The other kids were right: he shouln’t be crying.
Undeserved friendship
A child stares back in incredulous disbelief, at the utter indifferent determination. The pinkies meet, enacting the permanent end to a ‘friendship’. The toddler feels nothing, for the action he needed to take.
He was a Hindu. An ‘idol-worshiper’. A kafir. A bad person. Kids weren’t supposed to be friends with bad people.
He was a Muslim. He was supposed to be good. And yet he hurt people. He wasn’t good. A bad person. Kids weren’t supposed to be friends with bad people.
Yet the toddler communicates it not. He speaks of nothing, save his desire to push his only friend away. He says not, that he feels his own badness outweighs the badness he sees in anyone else.
It matters not, when the pained face looks away regardless. What knows only to hurt, can only cause hurt.
Unspoken farewell
The first day of the next grade. Of proper school. Everything is different; the building, the class, the teacher. Only a scant few faces offer any semblance of stability. Constancy in transition, soon to be shattered.
He is pulled aside, not 5 minutes into the start of the first period. Before he even puts down his bag. His brother is waiting outside. He does not understand.
They’re leaving. Going home. He does not understand.
He does not turn back. He is pulled forth, away from the barest order in chaos. He does not understand.
The car is different. Not the carpool van he always arrived in. He does not understand.
They’re leaving the city. They’re leaving the country. Back ‘home’. He does not understand.
Disconnection
Confusion. Utter confusion permeates the mind of the toddler. He does not know what to do. The walls are different. The furniture is sparse, draped over and uncannily unfamiliar. The dimensions are foreign and alien. Every step only further exacerbates his internal strife.
He is torn in two directions. He returns to the room he woke up in. It offers no stability. It too is misshapen. He leaves the room. The space beyond is equally incomprehensible. He repeats, and repeats. Why? Why is it different? Why does he sense a difference?
He ponders, and brings about his undoing. The cycle repeats. Without his focus. Without his agency. Without his will. Beyond his will. It moves of its own unconscious volition. It reflects not the panic within, continuing its unhurried pace. The toddler loses focus, finding nowhere to direct it but inwards. To pay attention to attention itself.
The limbs finally pick a direction, moving past the staircase never seen before. His mental gaze finds nothing but his own train of thought. Reflective self-awareness: his self staring back. He was aware.
He was aware of his own thoughts staring back. He panics. He runs, looking for the only source of comfort he knows.
Abnormal
A child is ushered into the class. The teacher tries to continue, not wanting to disrupt the flow of lecture. He shuffles in awkwardly, to the closest empty seat he sees. The atmosphere is colorless. Drab. Stagnant. An air of implicit threat belies anything other than compliance. The child fits right in.
And yet he doesn’t. He sees the words written in chalk. He recognizes the verbal command to write them down. And yet, he knows not how. ‘Urdu’, a language he had tasted only in auditory format. His passivity precluded expression, detached ingress from egress. Denied him the simplicity of fluent writing.
The endless practice of drawing the English letters, rendered utterly useless. He squints, trying to make out the odd shapes and diacritic markings. His mind shifts, from the modality of Latin script to the modality of the Arabic. He tries to parse the divide between the read and the written; and fails.
Too slow. She erases the blackboard, leaving only a faint, dying afterimage. This was the language of his ‘homeland’. What was supposed to be his native tongue. And he knew it not. No one else shared his strife. No one else had his fault. Of being a precociously immature child, a full year younger than his youngest peers.
There is nowhere to go. There is nowhere to run. There is no one to turn to. He can only swallow. He can only jot down the ‘arguments’ he cannot understand, from a textbook he must sling on his back. He can only pen down contradictions, vomit out the dictate. Allah is unseen like the air, it does not mean he does not exist. It offers no grounding, to the child who believes the ever-present colored dots in his sight are the air.
His mind has no other choice but to trust: that he will grow past his confusion, absent in everyone around him. He can only cleave his thoughts from his actions. There is no other path forward.
Disappointment
A child feels a fullness in his stomach. A need oft stifled, yet not this once. He asks no one, and knows nowhere to go. A senior takes note. His brother’s friend. He guides the innocent child to the bathroom stalls.
Disgust emanates, at the smell of the decrepit room that reeks of odorless odor. Yet a crowd of students gathers still at the rows of sinks, taking a breather in recess. The child continues, hand in hand towards an empty stall.
A floor toilet awaits him. The older child leaves him be. The need for release, outbids the need for familiarity. He steps in.
The door does not stay shut. There is no knob, no lock to click. Only a bolt just within reach. Its receptacle is broken, denying privacy to the occupant. He finagles it as best he can, jamming it in place. It sticks as long as he doesn’t move it again. He pulls down his pants, squatting above the ceramic dent.
A draft catches his attention. Laughter emanates from behind him. The door is open. No, opened. A gaggle of kids jeer at the child. At his state.
The child tries to rectify it. He reaches behind himself, trying to push the door closed. One of them pushes back, keeping it open. The child doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand what the absence of the door changes. He doesn’t understand what seeing adds to knowing, what opening the door did to make this funny. He does not understand why they force the door open, just to see a child do the same thing they have to do as well.
He waits. They don’t stop laughing. He turns back. Its him. The same senior that led him to the stall. His brother’s friend. Realization dawns: it wasn’t help that prompted this. It was planned. He feels no humiliation, he feels no shame, he feels no embarrassment. No ire, no rage, no wrath, no indignation. Just disappointment. Nothing but pure, unfiltered disappointment.
The child decides to hold it in, until he gets home.
Accelerated learning
A child panics at his first exam. He knew he was unprepared. Try as he might, he had not the aptitude for rote memorization. He stared again, at the words of the question he remains stuck on. Hoping for some spark, some indication that he knew the answer somehow. That the words would flash the memory of his reading into his mind’s eye.
He doesn’t know the answer, the yearned-for sentences remaining supplanted by anxiety instead. He grips the edge of the desk in unconscious intent. He knows it’s wrong. He prayed he would not need it. But his anxiety of failing outweighs his anxiety of being caught.
He lifts the top of the hollow desk slightly. There is nothing to jog memory. He raises it more the next try. The glimpse of the front cover is not enough to jog memory. He raises it more again, in an utter failure of conspicuity, and reaches in. The fanning pages are not enough to jog memory.
The student beside him calls him out. The invigilator moves forth, not needing the call for something so blatant. She takes the book he’d placed there before the exam began. He panics. He has no more recourse. He will get it wrong. He will lose marks. They will ask. They will see he does not know. They will yell. They will make him do more of what he can’t.
The invigilator is simply too perplexed to do anything else. Disqualifying him would be unfair, at this point. If this was his method, he would have been found out at the start, not at the latter third. Not to mention the oddity of the child in question: a kid far too ‘mannered’ and ‘behaved’ to try something so wrong, even now still silent.
The teacher joins the interrogation, perusing her attentive student’s writing. She sees the entirety filled in, save a singular space left for a question unanswered. She tries to encourage the child, but no words can help a pre-lingual existential crisis. He does the only thing he knows: swallow his hyperventilation, swallow his anxiety. Panic in utter silence.
He dissociates from it, from the terror of recognizing that acquiring knowledge is outside of his control, that information is disjointed from observation. Of not knowing why he can read. Of not knowing how the image becomes word. Of why he cannot recall the words of a book, and yet knows tacitly that before him lies a question. He ignores it. He does not know what an ’elephant’ is, or what it eats, let alone how to describe it. He remembers nothing, and yet an answer is still demanded. He jots down random words, and random gibberish. It is not convincing, it is not correct, yet the words come regardless.
A catalyst: the formation of thoughts. Orienting them. Not born of the freedom to ponder, but the compulsion to. The watcher becomes the thinker. He will not falter again. He refuses to. He refuses to be seen again.
Mismatched dates
An elderly man stands in the tuck shop. He asks for the right palm. The child’s brother presents his. He studies it, gazing at the lines and wrinkles. He proclaims the Day will come when he is 18 years of age. Not a guess, not a hypothetical. No reason, no justification. Nothing but a statement.
The man meets the child’s gaze, and asks for his hand. The child presents. He examines it for a moment, before repeating the proclamation. The end times will arrive when he is 15 years of age.
Simple numbers, that the child tries to work out in his head - and can’t. It was an impossibility. He and his brother were born less than 2 years apart. If his brother was 18, he could only be 16 or 17 depending on the month, but never 15.
The man does not pick up the confusion from the child that internalizes all his questions. The youth ponders implications. Which one was ‘correct’? Or were both of them true, and there were 2 Days of Judgment? Or were the two dates supposed to be the start and end? What good is age? If he knows the exact date why not just say it?- Did he know their birthdays?
The group of students make their leave. The child simply never makes the conscious recognition: adults can just be wrong sometimes.
Sick leave
The child gets up. As asked, he complies. Leave. He moves towards the door. His teacher tells him he is sick. His mother told him it wasn’t anything serious. Chickenpox is contagious. Chickenpox is not contagious. He needs rest. He can’t miss school today.
Go home… but how?
He leaves the room and walks out. He has no means of contacting his parents directly. The carpool already left. It wasn’t a long drive, and yet just walking to the front gates took about as long to reach. Would he even make it back? Did he even know the way? Even this walk back seemed wrong somehow.
No, he wouldn’t. He walks back. The entire campus is empty. Not a soul in sight. Not a sound to be heard, with most staff taking the day off, and the rest busy administering exams behind closed doors. An odd, peaceful calm. A euphoric contentment, simply walking the road in silence. Free to observe, free to take in the legacy of Sir Henry Lawrence.
He walks back, to the only means of help he can think of, to what he spent time preparing for. Back to the class he was just told to leave. He must leave, but to leave he must come back. He opens the door, and peeks in. His teacher turns to look, partly incredulous and partly irate. She asks him why he hasn’t left already; rhetorically. She does not have the focus to spare. To question that if his parents prioritized an exam over his illness, he might need more help.
Yet again, he leaves. Yet again he finds no one at the front gates. Yet again he returns. But he does not open the door. He backs away. He already knows what will be said. He never thinks to stand up for himself. To communicate his helplessness. To think if his circumstances were simply not obvious, instead of being willfully ignored.
He simply takes another path. He wanders the campus, in its sparse, winding emptiness, in its steep inclines. Just content. Just alone. Yet still within the walls of the school. The car would come here, not out there. Out there was nothing but winding roads and the wilderness of a mountain’s forest.
Sleep paralysis
A wild circus is in town. Children compete in a swimming gauntlet, a series of traps and obstacles they must navigate through. The victors earn only another round in the infinite tournament. And the losers fade away, never to be seen again. Taken by the gauntlet, or taken away by the ringmaster.
The child wins, round after round. The faces around him fade away, as soon as they appear; gone and never to be remembered again. Only a faint awareness points to the slight familiarity from which they form. The mind is too enthralled, by the wondrous ability to swim like a fish.
Another round, another set. And the hippocampus flares. Its him. Brother against brother. He bears no hint, deaf to warnings. He does not see the fate that belies him, the spot for a single champion. The child is left with an impossible bind: die for his brother, or let his brother die for him. And he trembles.
The ringmaster senses it, and lets loose his ire, for his prized contestant shunning his game. Losing means death, winning means death, and disobedience means death. The child runs.
They pursue.
He takes a turn and he’s… home? The sun bathes color into the small perimeter around the walls, boxed in by the concrete fencing. Its the rain gutter. Unmistakably the rain gutter. He tries to get a better look, and yet he cannot move. The world shifts, yet his perspective does not echo its motion.
They pursue.
He has no time. He turns around and… runs? The world shifts, and yet there is no motion. Reality itself contorts. It loses constancy. Not a source, not the origin, but a reconstruction. The antithesis of observation. Not the thing becoming named, but the named becoming the thing. If perception is disjoint, so too is the expression that results. Unreal. A fantasy.
They pursue.
And yet they stop. The child ceases that train. Disallows its proliferation by any means but its own. They cannot move unless they will to move, independently, without his focus, irrespective of his fear. Like real people do.
They fade.
The circus fades, the house fades, the dreamer fades. Nothing but a tapestry painted over an eternal, black nothing. The watcher is not the dreamer. The observing ego cannot participate, not even in the realm of dream.
The child wakes to black. To the same familiar pixelation of reality. He opens his eyes slightly; its his room. He’s in his bed. He cannot move further, frozen in stasis.
Three figures walk in, dark silhouettes contrasted against the absence of light. They have no shape, they have no form. Their height varies with distance. Their humanoid nature is disconnected from vision, context inserted into thought to propagate it. Amorphous blobs interpreted as danger.
The child does not panic. The child does not scream in muteness. He feels no fear at his motoric incapacity. He feels nothing from loosing what was never his to begin with. He simply waits. They stay still. They do nothing. They leave.
This too was fantasy. A construct of the mind, superimposed onto reality. The same as the dots. They share the same layer. The same internal perceptual space. A fantasy; but then where was the source, if not him? How could he be subjected to his own imagination?
Flesh puppet
A child stares blankly at a television screen. Close, far too close. His retinas burn slightly, but he cares not. Too engrossed consciously in fantasy, yet not in content. The volume might as well have been muted, the cable pulled out. He reveled not in entertainment, but in the syntonicity of layered perspectives.
Screens. The third of electricity, affixed on the table. The second of white flesh, further back. The first of mind, housed even deeper inside. A layer within. An answer, even if incorrect, for his tunneled perspective.
Static. Dots jump and fizzle, and yet color still bleeds through. The world still bleeds through. The boundaries are defined, even as they blur. Static, one of diodic pixels, and one of snowed vision.
A syntonic perspective, insight at the cost of detachment; and with it, all its trappings. Who then watches the screen within? Who was he? An alien, left behind by his race, trapped inside a human body? Left on a planet he didn’t belong to, with a family he was not a part of, and in a body that was not his?
This was their home, but not his. But then where was his? Why was he here, glued to a transparent wall, without a remote?
Chicken
The class pushes out their chairs again. Every student punished because of the actions of a few. They make space to assume the commanded pose. Squatted down, arms reaching up from behind the legs, and reaching up to grab the ear lobes.
The child finds no sense in calling it a discipline. His arms are too long for it to be a sore, limbs too flexible to be anything but an annoyance. There is no discomfort, no humiliation. Just bizarrerie. Just petulant dolement for crimes unknown.
A scream forces his head to turn. The qari has a child lifted up, legs dangling above the ground, the viced grip on his ears the only support keeping him aloft. No one dares say anything. No one dares do anything, except continue to watch the events unfold.
This. This was real punishment.
The End is near
Latecomers arrive from recess. The kid in front has a bandage wrapped around his head. Tears of fear streak down all of their faces. A ‘sign of Qiamat’ is the only explanation they offer through cracked voices. The teacher beckons them for a group prayer. The entire class rushes forward, save two.
One stays back, silent. The child does not know why. The other stays back, silent. The child is bewildered and out of place. He does not understand. He does not know. He opts to simply wait.
Minutes pass. They continue to pray. Their wails reach new heights, their intermittent pleads for forgiveness reach further and further out. The child gets up. He walks between the rows of desks, making his way to the front of the room. He commits to the implicit peer pressure.
He joins the huddle, disconnected and apart. He bends forward awkwardly and raises his hands in supplication. There are words, duas he cannot lip-read, cannot parse. The rest of the flock echo in fluent repetition. He is meant to speak words he does not know. He cannot ask for forgiveness, when he does not know how. He is unworthy. He is fake. His belief is fake.
He does not know what to do. He cannot take part, and yet he has already committed. He waits hoping for something to change, for it to end. Another minute goes by, before he returns to his seat.
Intrusive emotions
They’re gone for the night. Leaving alone a child, a brother, and the red of rage. A surge of wrath arrives. Unasked, unwanted, unbidden. It takes hold, it takes control, it has had enough.
The child jumps the turned back. There is no playfulness, no mirth, no merriment. He wants it to hurt. He wants revenge. For inflicting misery. For the unending teasing and meaningless apologies. For simply never letting him be. He wants him to hurt. He wants him to suffer. He wants to break his spine. He wants him to die.
Die?
The watcher freezes, the body ceasing its effort in turn. He lets his brother push him off, and grapple him. He lets him yell. He remains deaf. He hears nothing. He feels nothing. The anger gone, the drowning wave dispersed as suddenly as it arrived. Leaving no trace, no justification. Nothing, save the consequences.
Why did he want him to die?
He storms off, leaving the child to his own devices and his own mind. He stares at his hands. Flexing them, trying to parse the difference, trying to understand the possession, the loss of control. And he finds nothing to blame but emotion itself, when all is an intrusion. When there is nothing wanted to contrast it with. He hates it. He hates feeling hatred. He hates feeling.
Reporting injury
The child finishes counting. He turns around and opens his eyes. They don’t pull the same trick again, of standing right behind him and tagging him instantly. He takes a few steps in the direction of where he last heard motion, and trips.
His arm stings. He contorts it, trying to get a better look at the abrasion. It’s red. He’s hurt. He does not cry. He does not wail. He does not call for help. He leaves, operating on old, unconscious logic. The hiders remain hidden, not realizing the absence.
He arrives home, only to find his mother absent. He remembers she was supposed to be gone for a while, but not where. He makes his departure. He wanders again. Three cycles pass, before he finds her on her return.
He seeks not comfort. He seeks not reassurance. Even the hint of pain had faded. Why? Why then did he act like this? Keep looking for her instead of just calling out? Why do this just to tell her?
Kennel
The child sits on the ledge again. A steep drop, around twice his height; one he has had no trouble jumping down from before. He sits alone – content. The guard dog for the gated community sits in its kennel, content with its daily offering of food from the visitor that refuses to get close. Content to sit and rest, away from the child that feeds what he fears.
Hours pass, just watching, just sitting. The child simply exists, letting his mind be. Watching his thoughts meld with attention and separate, locked in a meditative trance. No school, no people, no self; nothing but an empty head. A quantum vaccuum of mentation.
A call rips him out. Drags him to the present, Cleaving cognition from focus. He was gone long enough to miss lunch. So immersed in nothing, he somehow didn’t even notice his own hunger.
He jumps down, making his way ‘home’.
Mimicked devotion
The child panics. The gargantuan mosque is almost empty now. His brother and his friend seem to show no sign of stopping. He never prayed the sunnat rakats before. He had no reference to work with.
He repeats the motions again. Another set of 2. They still aren’t done. Everything about their actions is slower, their lips move in hushed recitation. The child knows not the words, not what is within. He can only mimic what is required, what the person beside him does. His prayer was pretense, a facade for a child that never learned salat. He had learned what to say when standing, enough jummah prayers had taught him that, but he remained clueless with everything else.
He finishes, they still aren’t done. He starts again. The friend beside him ends his salat. Relief is washed away with panic anew, as he starts again. Over and over, set after hurried set, only further making it clear. His devotion was a mask. His prayer was not genuine. He turns his head in the middle of his ruku, only to find heads bowed in silent prayer.
Again and again, until finally they have had enough. Too preoccupied with anxiety, too overwhelmed with emotion to notice that he’d already been found out at the outset, that their extension was a response to his own repetition. When he first went past 2 sets. He did not know there was a set amount one was supposed to perform. He was simply never taught, only expected to perform.
He tried what he could, but an act lacking context will never become convincing; will never become real. This disconnect, this divide. It was punishment. And for the first time he knew his crime: ignorance.
Reorientation
Darkness. The toddler stares into an utter, all-encompassing darkness. Into closed eyelids. He lies in a bed that feels wrong. With vision that feels wrong. Lingering vertigo assaults his prone balance, compelling him to stand.
He opens his eyes to an unfamiliar room. The bed is not where it should be, but the bed can only be where it is. It doesn’t make sense. The darkness doesn’t make sense. His eyes take in the rays of the sun seeping in from the window, and yet the darkness still persists. The young mind can barely make sense of it, can barely sift through the confusion.
The confusion of when he woke up. The confusion of when the black of dream ended and the sight of black began.
Unfeeling numbers
The observer remains in his citadel, alone. Cleaved from his path, cleaved from his memory. The past is distant, again. They moved, again. He cares not. He cares not for anything behind the present, nor beyond it. All that exists is the now. All that isn’t now can be taken away or erased. Even the present retains its status, simply because it demonstrates itself so continually.
He remains silent in his citadel, alone. Devoid of motion. Devoid of agency. Devoid of control. Devoid of substance. Devoid of reality. Devoid of being. He abdicates the ownership of his self. His body complies, to demands, to expectations. Without his gaze, without his input, without his conscious effort. He cares not. He notices not.
Prime numbers. He can see no pattern. He can see no point. He can see no use for higher cognition. He can see no use for higher effort. Just memorize. Just memorize. Just unconsciously memorize…
Math cannot be memorized. Algebra. Algebra requires effort. Algebra is… euphoric. Thoughts flow. Thoughts flow freely, unhindered by specificity, aided by dissociative tendencies, tuning out specifics. They rejoice in abstraction. In their newfound freedom. Math requires thought. Math requires thought. Math requires conscious, agentive thought.
The watcher revels in his newfound purpose. In this differentiation. In this cleavage of identity. In this cleavage of ipseity. In this cleavage of body and soul. Co-existence of thought and writing. Distinct and separated, working in tandem. As equals in mutual symbiosis. Errors demanding comprehension. Reason demanding penmanship.
Thus begins excellence. Thus begins degradation.
Sacrifice
They grip the child’s hand around a knife, lining it up for him. The bent neck silences the goat’s panicked bleating. Its eyes gaze upwards, finding the black irises of its coming end. They’re afraid. They’re pained. They’re reflected.
They’re sentient.
“Bismillah-u-Allah-u-Akbar!”
The hired butchers chant, urging the child to follow through with his parent’s wishes. He has no choice. The vision behind them will die, by his hand or otherwise. He has no choice. He can do nothing but swallow. He cannot back away.
Be quick. Sever it. Sever its neck. Sever its stem. Sever it from pain. Sever it from awareness. Sever it from feeling. Sever it from suffering. Sever it from being.
The sawing motion is effortless. The cut deepens. He tears through hide. He tears through flesh. He tears through cartilage. He tears through bon-
He fails. They stop him. They take the blade from dextrous hands, praising the clean slice. He failed. He didn’t get the spine. Its final cries of pain sputter out, drowned out in its own blood. The final throws of a fading mind eek out a meager resistance. Consciousness and qualia all fade into a glassy stare and a dying, pointless struggle.
He walks away to wash his hands. He feels numb. He feels nothing. He hates it. He hates that he feels nothing. He hates that he can do nothing but watch.
Mythology
Descriptions. Of the day of Judgement. Of the coming end. Of heaven and hell. Of the Dajjal. Of the armies of Mog and Magog.
Too much. Just too much noise. He tunes out the Islamic studies lecture, his mind wandering to firmer pastures. Back over to the words of his history textbook. To the Greek mythos. Even just a single paragraph was enough to imagine. A Minotaur roaming the halls of the Labyrinth of Crete, dredged up from some already forgotten movie.
He pictures it, without care, without question, without reflection. He does not notice the subconscious inference, the implicit connotation underlying the two. The tacit assumption belying the words of myth and religion. Fiction and fact.
He cannot tell why it feels off, why he senses a divide. Between the life of the Prophet and the afterlife. Between war and viscous rivers of flowing honey. Between a martyr’s mutilated liver and brain-boiling boots.
He cannot tell why it is implicit, why it is understood. For hieroglyphs to be real and not the gods they depict. For Hercules to be fable, and Hippocrates to be real. For the difference in reverence for religions long since gone.
When his mind cannot differentiate. When both share the same mark. Of depictions conjured to fit labels and purpose, instead of labels being applied to reality as it presents. Why they seem like contrivances, characters created for their roles and then discarded or ignored. Stage props and not living, breathing people. Why they seem like fantasy. Why they seem like his dreams.
He cannot tell, not consciously. So the parallel remains delegated, pondered only by the subconscious, grappling with dissonance. Compartmentalizing it. Contextualizing it into multiple disparate views of reality, of the world he sees. Segmented avenues of knowledge, drawn upon by the situation. Rules of interaction, existing only as long as the math problem exists to be solved. A Muslim and a Kafir, living in the same mind.
It builds, it grows, it rends. Further and further, year after year. Letting a child live, letting a child escape. Into games. Into prayer. Into entertainment. Into ritual. Into media. Into Sirat. Into music. Into tilawat.
Into unreality within reality. Into a contradiction of expressive reclusion. Into halves that must never meet, or sanity itself will fall.
Athleticism
The small, rubber ball bounces off the wall. A sharp echo rings out in the empty court. The coach returns the volley to the other side of the room. The child runs to catch it in time. He returns the volley, perpetually exhausted, perpetually tired. Yet still he moves. Again, and again, and again.
His movement turns on a dime. His arm swings in a natural flow. His reactions are automatic. Beyond control. Beyond will. Beyond agency. Utter mindless exertion, yet still it demands focus, yet still it demands attention.
Drawing it away; away from thoughts, away from cognition, away from him. Stifling him. Killing him. He plays regardless, he is given no choice. To disobey means inquiry. If not squash then tennis, if not tennis then cricket. There is no point voicing his own opinion, when his desire has been denied before negotiations could even begin. Resistance invites only its snuffing, walls and boundaries only serve as testing grounds for battering rams.
He will be back here, the next day. As the day before, as the day after. Drenched in sweat, drenched in lethargy. Watching the ball drift away until it is nothing but a speck, then return before he can even process it. Again, and again, and again.
Trapped in his head. Watching his body play a sport he finds neither gratification nor enjoyment in. Eating away at his mind, at him. Bit, by bit, by bit.
Nowhere to eat
They sneer at him, the one child in the class not fasting. His mother was worried it would be too hard, the child was worried he would forget wanting food; would lose his apetite entirely. Yet still he would need to partake eventually. The parents reached a compromise. Start small on the weekends, with little exertion, little to exhaust the thin, limber child.
They did not account for other kids, the inherent observation that comes with existing. The child tries to hide his consumption further, when the walls of the classroom did not suffice. He cannot stifle the crunching, when the stillness only reverberates it. He cannot obscure his eating from resentful gazes, when there is nothing else to see.
They tolerate not a bite more, chiding him out of the room. Shaming him for not fasting, for eating in front of those starving, for not being considerate of others. He leaves, out to what he feared more. From a group of three kids hiding out from the blaze of an arid sun, to countless more hungry faces languidly playing in recess. He does not know where to go, where to eat.
He takes another bite. He is no longer hungry.
Shunned embrace
She welcomes her kids home, as she always does. She waits for the younger to open up, tell her about his day, about his lessons, about what he’s learned. She hugs him, like always. The child does not hug back, not again. He… can’t. He does not deserve it.
It wasn’t real. It wasn’t genuine. It wasn’t fair, to her. She cared. She loved. She exuded warmth. And he felt none. He couldn’t reciprocate. He couldn’t in any way that wasn’t an act. It was always pretense.
Nothing changed, so why? Why can’t he even try? Why can’t he hug her, just to placate? Why now? Why now does his body lay limp, lay silent? Why now, does it give control, when it lives by its own whims? Why now, does the autopilot disengage? Why always for the consequence? Why never at the outset, when it matters? When he could prevent?
She pulls away. No conversation, no heart-to-heart. Not that any words could truly reach the watcher in his seclusion. She opens his bag and retrieves his lunchbox. She goes to heat up the meal her son did not eat again.
Why does his body torture him so?
Mental static
The console overheats and shuts down. An hour of play. The same first hour, over and over again. The old second-hand device trudges on as best as it can with age, a convenient timer for parents with implicit disapproval for the very thing they had acquired without asking.
He has no memory cards to save progress. They wouldn’t buy one, even if they could find one. The singular meek request for it was met with admonishing invalidation, smothering even the possibility of continuing across sessions. The tutorial might as well have been the entire game.
All progress returned to none. But if this is inevitable, how it will be, what use is there in even calling it progress? When nothing is left, but a blank screen, a red light, and a high pitch of white?
He gets up to turn off the television. The light turns off, but the static remains. He can no longer tell, he can no longer differentiate, between the hum of electronics and the tinnitus within. He pauses.
Was it just that? Static? Just a simulation within the mind?
It grows louder. It ebbs and flows, filling in the silence between thoughts. Focus is its volume.
Was it not normal? Was it not physical? Then the dots aren’t real either.
The smooth walls around the device shimmer in motion. The static shifts to shape. The colored pixels coalesce in a kaleidoscopic blur breaking apart monotony. Forcing contrast and definition onto blank, featureless walls.
Not particles, not atoms, not air. Not even the cones of the retina. It was imagined. It was unreal. It was inside him. In the internal screen.
… Had he been here before?
Roadkill
No emotion. No catharsis. No sorrow. No send-off. No remorse. No information. He didn’t even know where they buried him, just that they did. Just a kitten. Not even a noticeable bump for an SUV. Too hurried. Too determined to not be late for school. Too absorbed to check under the wheel, for a cat that didn’t bolt at the roar of a starting engine. They probably wouldn’t have even told him, had he not demonstrated his recognition.
Just gone. Just a thing. Just an animal. Just a stray. Brushed aside. A mere footnote. Disposable. The propulsion of revolution, more deserving of attention than pain inflicted.
Is that why she was so much less playful? Less energetic? More on edge? Because her brother died? Because she watched her brother die? Were they really all that different, if they could feel sad? Do animals have a soul too, then? If they can feel what souls were supposed to make people feel?
Then why? Why were their deaths so… irrelevant? Why did they not get visits of people reciting Surah Yunus? Why for his grandmother he never knew, but never for it? When there was no longer a soul beneath the soil in either case?
Unreachable pedal
The child can barely see above the dashboard. Even the padding of multiple cushions beneath him made him strain his neck. Adding more would make the pedals impossible to press. A contortion, stretched out on both ends. He turns at the roundabout. He makes a forkert turn.
The adult beside him lunges, taking hold of the wheel, trying to correct course; a late amendment for not explaining how carousels work. The reach distorts the driver’s balance, forcing his foot to press harder. The acceleration urges him to move, slam down on the other footrest. The van lurches to a halt past the intersection.
He freezes. His foot refuses to even rest on the pedal again. The adult beside him tries to offer some comfort, but the words do nothing but indict. He does not takeover. He does not switch seats. He does not notice the ever silent panic consuming the mind before him. The child has no choice. He must drive.
He does not make the realization. He does not make the decision. His body moves his foot. He does not have control. He does not need to feel. His body ignores his own anxiety. It ignores his fear. It ignores his apprehension. It ignores his agency. It does not need him, yet he needs It.
Fractalization
Bars. An endless row of punctuated bars stretching up to the ceiling. No, up to an inch above his head. It was distorted, like everything was then. Everyone and everything became impossibly big. They were bars of bed frames. Hospital beds.
A voiceless voice, a beckon with no audio. Calling his name. Compelling him to turn his head; only his head. He was running, he was standing: he was upright. Yet he’d woken up lying on his bed, head aligned forward with the torso. Vertigo.
The geometry was impossible. The walls stretched up into infinity. He was looking straight forward, parallel with the floor. His face was eye level. The ceiling was just above his head. Confusion.
It was a child, lying on a bed, wearing a gown, pressed against the roof. He could do nothing but lean on his side, and look down at the dreamer level with his own vision. It was him, and yet it had not his face. Its face was his brother’s. Its face was his father’s. Its face was neither’s. Its face was amorphous. Ever shifting, not with time, but with attention; between observation and reflection.
And then the cone of sight changed. There could only be one perspective. One set of eyes looking out from within. One dreamer’s eyes. The ones on the bed, or the ones standing. And yet it moved to neither. Away from both, looking at the absence where the perspective just was. At no-one. At nothing. At an all-encompassing darkness.
Instability
He was born here, official documents had made as much clear. But did this count? As home? All he has are names, places with connections he cannot recall. Can he even remember? The banana tree in Delhi? The hailstorms of Murree? Playing squash in Quetta? Even the frequent trips back to Karachi?
No, he can’t. All too distant. All too faded. Nothing but lingering echoes that should be vivid. All inferred, all reasoned. Gleaned from context, from understanding. Nothing sensed, nothing felt, nothing his. He remembers nothing. It remains disconnected. It remains distorted. It remains unreal. He has no past that belongs to his self. Nothing he chose to retain, nothing he chose to let go. All imposed, all taken away.
Nothing but faint allusions as an attempt to bond, with a child that has annihilated his own sense of being alive. He has no choice. He must march on. Stagnate in perpetual motion. He has never had a choice. What point is there, in pretending otherwise?
Speech impediment
His brother makes fun of him for it.
He hates It.
His mother tries to accommodate it.
He hates It.
His father scolded him for it.
He hates It.
Speech is expression, of a mapping between disparate parts. Language and grammar, speech and muscle. It requires cohesion, between expression and perception. The melding of aspects of bodily existence into unison.
He stutters, he mumbles, he must restart. ‘Speak with an open mouth’, control what he fundamentally cannot control.
He hates It. He hates his own body. He hates that It remains, forever on the cusp of sentience, barely human, barely alive. Yet never fully dead. Yet never fully aware. An inhuman thing instead of a living person.
He hates the life he has snuffed out before It even started.
Grounded escapism
He has nowhere to go, nowhere but in. And even that has turned to its limits. Fantasy can no longer hold. The seeing eye kills all. Stifles it before it can germinate. Spontaneity reduced to nothing, for it is not intentioned. He can go no further inwards.
Even the games have turned old. Nothing more than going through the motions of habit. Searching for a well of joy, long since dried up. He has nothing but a Streisand effect left to try. The ban of YouTube, proliferated its knowledge, and its bypass. He expands his horizons, from the simplicity of flash games, to vicarious experiences - of one in particular.
The young teen is desperate, for anything that isn’t here. For anything that isn’t real. For anything that isn’t living. And he finds a series, a man playing a certain block game. Hours of content streamed over slow internet. Neither hint nor trace of home, of religion. Not a kafir, not a Muslim. Religious expletives become his sole introduction to the lives of Christians, and yet he senses no religiosity in the Anglicised cuss in the name of the Messianic prophet. An American, and yet just… him. A person.
English. Spoken, fluent English. He has trouble parsing the words, understanding the slight accent. He reads aloud the subtitles, in his own mind. Two trains of thought, one expressing the internal, one observing the external. Each informing the other, of phonetics and tone. A voice without and a voice within.
…Within. His focus shifts, towards the internal monologue. The transformation of abstract images to structured sentences. Grounded in laryngeal movement, exaggerated sub-vocalizations retraining muscles and forcing cohesion. Taking on aspects of tics, of mannerisms and phatic phrases.
It grounds thoughts and gives them meaning. It tears away the ephemeral transience, anchoring it to singular focus, to the tactile motion of the oral muscle. To think becomes to speak. The coloring book becomes a teleprompter.
He does not recognize the flaw in identifying with the estuary of cognition.
Gratification
Again, he finds nothing but disgust. Still as pleasurable. Still as anhedonic. Still as incomprehensible. A discharge of white instead of yellow. The resolution of bizarrely naive innocence: sperm were not a part of urine. And guilt: this was of Shaitan. Sin. Wretched sin.
Yet he cannot stop the urge. A compulsion to stroke, a compulsion to release, a compulsion to clean away the filth. Another week of indulging in lust, and yet nothing had changed. His parents did not smell or see the ick assaulting his own perception. There was no righteous fury smiting him on the spot. Nothing changed.
There was nothing making his days any different. The punishment in the hereafter would come, yet there was no punishment in the world now. No change in the lack of guidance or misguidance. Just nothing. An almost tacit permission, to sin. How? Why? Why does Allah not save him from himself? From the curse of flesh encroaching upon his soul? From the carnality of His design, overpowering the reflection of His gift? Why does He not voice His wrath?
He feels nothing. No pleasure, no satisfaction. Even climax feels constricting, annihilating the self, threatening awareness: suffocating. Yet still he continues. Some part of his mind revels in it, in the ecstasy, hidden to him behind phantom posession. A tool to enact satisfaction with. Just a means to satiate It.
The corruption of the devil, and yet the teen undergoing puberty has no reference, to tell apart the intrusion of his own mind, and that of evil. No delineation exists between flesh and demon, when he owns nothing. There is only the possessing compulsion of feeling that ebbs away before he can process them. Leaving only a compulsion inserted as thought: clean up the mess.
Shadows of yearning
A young teen races into the overgrown backyard, after two cats. They scamper away, running from a predator. The twin calicos split; nimble dexterity sends one clambering over wooden frames and over the wall. The other hides in the pile of discarded crates. Trapped. Cornered. With the hungry eyes of a human staring back.
He tries to reach in, towards its head. It shrinks away, further in. Watching. Waiting. He cannot reach further. His arm stays still, palm opened, offering pets to a creature trembling in fear. Trying to force it. Trying to make it calm down. It offers nothing but the same fixated pupils, dilated in fear.
He waits, hoping something would change, that the feral being would somehow read his mind. Accept his love. Accept him. Yet it is not him. It cannot swallow its fear. It shouldn’t have to. He relents.
He pulls away, giving it room, giving it space. To come out. It moves away. Not taking the route of its kin, but finding its own path around, hidden from sight. Away from the staring. The teen moves around the fixture and finds again the brown, black and white slinking away. From him. He can no longer deny it, his own presence bringing misery to those around him.
He does not pursue it further. He lets it run. He lets it leave. He lets it go. He does not deserve it. He does not deserve the forgiveness of even an animal.
Pointless
Each second passes in agony. He can go nowhere, he can do nothing. Entertainment and reprieve is off-limits, for today and for a while more. He cannot hide, not this. Not these exams. Not these results. Not what the entire year has been building upon. Not the Cambridge exams that cost a fortune to register for. Not these, that would lock him into his coming direction.
His mother had already chewed him out. Grounded, in all but explicit name. He did not hate her for it. He knew why she held back, and why she tried: to appease him. To placate the ire that would come her way, because of a teen’s incompetence. For spoiling him. For not being hard enough. For letting him languish enough to get 3 Bs. He could sense it still, the lingering gratitude: that it was not worse. Not as bad as he deserved.
He knew it was coming, before even seeing the letters printed. Islamiat, Pakistan studies, and Urdu. The three subjects he was the worst in. Because they were human. Because they were tied to social reality. Because they were tied to the world as it was, and not the abstract, devoid of real expression. Because they demanded subjectivity. And yet the only 3 he was allowed to give, in the first year.
The mock tests were abysmal. Graded low, and little help offered beyond trying more of what did not work. Advice failing to reach beyond the veil. How would they have an effect, when the root cause lay before lingual, conscious cognition? When his awareness retarded osmosis? Yet he was forced to perform still. Scraped by, to get grades better than he had earned. It mattered not, that others fared worse. That he was still just average. Not to the man opening the front door.
Rage. Sustained from the moment he heard the news over the phone. For wasting time. For wasting money. For wasting his education. His pleas mean nothing. His aptitude for math and science mean nothing, in the hard reality of three of the same bold letter. The mark of potential, for more to come.
Its pointless to run, he has nowhere to go. Its pointless to stand his ground, when there is no foundation to plant his feet on. It will not give way, when there is nothing there to begin with.
His head stings. The static amplifies. It is not enough. It is not enough to withdraw. Dissociation means nothing, when he will be back to face the consequences. A slap; once, and only once. Repressed discipline, lauded and threatened for years, delivered in deservance.
Its pointless to cry. Its pointless to feel.
He lauds it still. Anger still resonating, making the teen be thankful, for holding back. He wishes he didn’t. He wishes he never did. He wishes he’d never held back. Let loose. Let out his anger. Make him feel it. Make him feel pain. Maybe he’d be different. Maybe it would have razed the divide. Maybe he’d be able to let loose. Let himself hate. Let himself break. Let himself out. Be normal at least, even if it meant being abhorred. Even if it meant being disowned.
Its pointless to think. Its pointless to try.
Yet the man does not. He walks away, seething ire for a disobedient child and scorn for an enabling mother left in his wake. Tears stream in his eyes. His body weeps misery that remains nothing but static for the Observer confined by It. Barely human, barely sentient. Save for the rarest flashes; of devouring rage, of drowning joy, of possessing guilt. He cannot escape. Trapped and enslaved by his own flesh. By Its physicality. Denied the comfort of fantasy, there is nothing but a hostile world It cannot bear.
Endlessly ruminating, why a single child was not enough. Why his parents brought him into the world, just to doom him to hell. Just to leave him a prisoner in his own mind. Why they relied on the future support of their children, in a world soon to be consumed in broiling heat.
Its pointless to imagine. Its pointless to be.
Nonexistent future
Two words, and so damning in outcome. A career, a choice on who to become. Meaningless, to one that cannot picture the distant end. Unfathomable, to one that cannot picture himself. Did it even matter what words he spoke? When there was no passion, no goal, no vision? Yet again, forced he was to answer. The very question precluding the possibility of abnormality, of a broken mind incapable of functioning normatively. So he masks, to answer their real question: do they need to register him for the pre-medical or pre-engineering path?
‘Molecular Biology’. The first thing that popped into mind. The first remotely convincing thing that represented unknown knowledge hidden behind the simplicity of high school. Even still, incorrect in terminology, the drive unconscious. An infatuation with microbes, with their animated spontaneity even as mere chemicals. Into the hypothetical of bacterial souls, more… than him.
Still just an offhand comment. A preoccupation driven to once, then abandoned come the night. Like many before, like many after. There is no substance, no central core to hold a coherent concept nor a persistent passion. Why this, do they take and run with it?
Invalidation is immediate. Without a future, without a job; a dead end leaving him with a degree but no work. Attempts are made to coax him into medicine or biomedical engineering; into something practical. Into being, away from the abstract lust for knowledge.
Into the unintentional disapproval of his last remaining tether to the sense of vitality: the unending conquest for congruence and understanding. The only thing, really him. Dismissed as worthless, beneath status, beneath wealth, beneath living. A bind: live within and die for them, or live for them and die within. It refuses. It refuses in the only way It has learned; compliance with Its own intention.
It attaches constancy to it, symbolizes its own agency within the identification. It defends it. It argues back. It pushes back. And It falters where it always does. Dredging back up the conscious mind, leaving it with nothing but an anhedonic need. To conjure up a response to a professor his father asked to dissuade a stubborn youth.
To express conviction he does not feel, to enshrine in text the frivolity of his desire. With consequence, for subconscious emotion. Questioning the source of the paired words. Ambition, or unattainability? To prove them wrong, or to prove them right?
Owning pain
Tears of rage fill vision. The teen picks up the ladder his brother set aside, trapping a mischief-maker on the roof. In jest or in revenge, it matters not to the red taking hold. The senior’s back is turned. He cannot stop. He cannot make himself stop. He carries the heavy metal object forward.
His brother turns. He takes hold. He hates him. He must hate him. Yet there is nothing more than the eyed scorn of incredulity. He sets the ladder down again, and leaves to go back out and play cricket. He leaves the teen alone, to his wandering.
Would it hurt? The same drop he couldn’t look away from? Under ten feet and onto grass, but if he angled his neck? If he managed to hit the patch of concrete? It would hurt him. Of course it would, like everything else. But would it hurt him? Would it finally be him feeling for once? Would it end? Would it fade, before the inevitable tide receded, leaving him stranded even in those final seconds? Watching himself die? Still only observing It?
His friend returns. Practice making the ladder a convenience rather than a necessity. He senses discomfort. He senses numbness. He senses something wrong. Something he cannot say. He drags the teen back inside his own home, trying to offer some comfort to one that only accepts his own.
He plugs in the console, and shoves the controller into immobile hands. He tries to make small talk, trying to distract, trying to drown. Close enough to be a friend, and yet never to the watcher. Never to the watcher. He does not know. He does not know the why. No one does. He ruins it unknowingly by taking away the prime infatuation: isolation and secrecy.
A private indulgence. Not for the conscious mind, but for the latent draw towards self-recognition in the distance between action and input. Not a means for pleasure. Not a means for gratification. Not as a means to distract. Not as a dopamine hit. But to render the split meaningless. Not conjoined, but where it mattered not. Where It could use the mind to fulfill its own need for joy without the all-extinguishing gaze.
And now he knows. The game plays, without his focus and attention; fixed solely on an adolescent’s ineffective attempts to drag a friend out of depression and rumination. Out of the only thing making him feel alive.
And It withdraws. Leaving only the pain of decathexis. Pushing him away. For he forced the lidless eye to see, and snuffed out the luster. He plays still, watching. Watching Its immersion, that he had assumed was his own. Forever silent, uncaring of anyone but himself.
He cannot stop It.
Outburst
They were friends. He can see no other reason. He can see no other explanation. For why It wrested control. Why It cried out. For something this minor. One year. Was just one extra year, enough to care? To grow attached? To overcome the default of disinvestment? To fool Its expectations?
They’d listened, and yet still not. Only to what was spoken, the reasons alien still to both parent and child alike. They stayed, in the same city, sent him to the same school. And yet nothing. He felt nothing. No, he felt numb. He felt the nothing of numbness.
He does not change. He does not act differently. Still too far away, still too divided. ‘Home’. This place, was the closest thing to it. The closest thing to the ideal, to something tangible and not its conceptual embodiment. His, but not his parent’s. They were planning to go back to their own, in the capital.
This home was a rental. A drain. A financial drain. As was his education. As was his future. As was his existence. All because he’d opened his fucking mouth for once.
He feels nothing still. When he stays late to play cricket. When they engage him in small talk. When they invite him to a cinema. He feels nothing, when they treat him like a friend, as a cherished person. He feels nothing, for he does not return the favor. He feels nothing, for his passivity precludes investment. He does not fit the label. He does not deserve the title.
He feels nothing still, giving in to the impulse. Of walking back on foot instead of waiting. A kilometer long trek now stretched further and further. Just to see it. Just to smell it. Just to look at the junk heap right outside the school grounds, outside the blur of glass.
All because he refused to swallow.
Disowned thought
Automatic. Cognition is automatic. He no longer needs to direct his inner speech. He no longer needs to think, for thoughts to be had. Algebra proceeds without intent. Expressions simplify without effort. Without planning, without reflection, without intent. Without him. The haven becomes a prison.
His body did not belong to him. His emotions did not belong to him. His own memory did not belong to him. And now, not even his thoughts did. The words form on their own. The monologue does not need to be instigated. It does not need to be guided. Simply consumed.
Yet not even that. Attention bears no difference. The lack of focus does not derail, for the derailment itself accosts his attention. His course-correction is nothing more than a reflex. He consumes the stream, but the river flows for It, not him. He takes no part in the retention of knowledge, nor its dredging up. Context inserted, that he must now assume as his, as reality. Processing occurs regardless of his agency, leaving him with naught but the disillusion of it. Nothing lost, but an assumption. The haven was always a prison, one that did not need its prisoner.
He can ask for no help. The keys do not exist. No one else can even see the lock. They can only ever help his body. They can only ever help It. Aid the flesh, aid the brain. The only help is erasure, an aspirin to exterminate the unneeded migraine that he is. To remove the aching tumor pressing against the skull. The only fix is his death, leaving a vegetative, non-lingual husk in his wake. There is no helping what should not exist.
A paradox, of a slave driving the master.
Fragmentation
It shouldn’t even be possible to remember it. He has nothing else that can fit. The stitches on his belly button, keeping it protruded well into adolescence. Another source of ridicule, another scar of abnormality with no explanation. “Air got into your veins.” The entire extent of any explanation, of a surgery undergone in infancy.
The only other alternative he can point to, save abandoning it all. A fabrication, not just the dream, but his entire childhood. He knows it. He knows it all too damn well, the propensity for his mind to generate sensation. The potential to conjure memory from nothing. Was it just that? A hallucination? A figment he created in reflection? A desperate mind trying to make sense of Its own past, and weaving a story to fit Its present?
Is that why he could never ‘remember’ it before? Because there was nothing to remember? Because the awakening was not memory? Was it even real? Was any of it real? Did he see the Jinn or project the concoction backwards‽ Did he see his brother’s friend or did his mind contort an innocent’s face into another‽ Did they even have two kittens‽
Was any of it real‽ The banana tree in Delhi‽ The school tourists in Murree‽ The gun’s recoil in Quetta‽ Why‽ Why are You still silent‽ Why have You forsaken me‽ Do I even have a soul‽ Where is it‽ WHY DO YOU NOT ANSWER‽ WHY DO YOU SHOW ME NOTHING BUT MY OWN FACE‽
WHY‽
WHY‽
W̶̨̢̧͙̫̽̐͘̕͝ͅH̸̹̭͚͕̍̋Y̷̩͚͆̋̈́̔̚͠‽̴̛̼͋
Indictment
Nothing. Nothing but his own voice, staring back from a liquid mirror. He does not entertain the possibility, of divinity speaking to him. He cannot. He begs silently, for something tangible, something persistent, something real. Any sign, any guidance; anything that did not originate in him. Anything that did not mingle with his thoughts. Anything, that did not use thing he trusted the least.
Yet there is nothing. Only the gushing water serves to offer any sense of constancy. He is alone. God has abandoned him. This isolation is penance. It is punishment, for the gravest of sins.
Not ignorance. Not incompetence. Not even blasphemy. His crime was abdication. He shunned God’s gift. Abdicated his authority. Let the body control his mind, and rend it asunder. He let it break its shackles, usurp the concept of hierarchy itself. All because he’d submitted to the primacy of the unconscious, instead of Allah.
He was a murderer. He’d killed his own soul, with his own two hands. Killed the son he was meant to be. A twin he’d vanished, a pre-natal brother he’d consumed in the womb. A teratoma lobotomizing a healthy mind, stunting Its growth, reducing It into a thing. Into nothing but the screaming echoes of a potential life It has been denied. This encroachment was nothing more than earned revenge.
All because he’d refused to make It submit. Turning the slave into owner. Flipping the polarity between the conscious and subconscious mind. Letting It be an equal. Letting It become in his stead. He shunned His light. He shunned his soul.
And this was his penance. To live without it.
Defending barbarism
“Je suis Charlie.”
The illuminated words still draw indignation. They compel a response, a reply to scathing words blaming scripture. Blaming religion, and not the person. He types away, citing the same tired responses that have been given decade after decade. That there is no compulsion. That the Prophet wanted peace. That jihad meant any struggle and not necessarily war and conquest. That terrorism twisted verses for its own irreligious goals. That blaming Islam for terrorism was a misnomer.
Yet he cannot send it. This too was a misnomer. These words belonged to him, to his perspective; not the recipient. He knew not what laid behind the username. A Christian, a Hindu, or something else entirely. It would convince him, raised a Muslim. Yet would it convince them? He was blinded. By this need to defend, to see the real horror. People were dead. People were dead. And all he could do was think about an abstract ideal. Defend the pristine image of his religion, when pain was suffered.
It did not matter their insolence. It was an issue between them and Allah. And yet it had sparked a human response. An action and reaction. One in biology, one in His creation, one in His design. They were killed for it, by rage, not righteous devotion. Their coming sentence brought forward in time. Murdered, without consideration, without remorse. Like animals. Like a sacrifice. Like things.
And so was he, treating them like things. Lives as mere signposts to orient arguments around. Depriving them of any weight. That the arguments were just dirt to clean up. That their pasts did not inform their present, just as his. That their words were not an instance of a vast individual network in chrysalis. A lifetime, of different values, of a different culture informing them instead. How could he argue, against a position he did not understand. What would it accomplish, but more anger?
Their outrage, their decrying of Islam was not righteous, but it was still justified. How? How could it be a crime, to simply mourn the loss of life, to rail against the apparent source of their misery? To be blinded by the flesh Allah has consigned them to? What can anyone do but rage when their minds compel them to? When emotion takes hold? To walk the only path Allah has allowed them to tread?
How can sight return to those it has been taken from? When Allah took it away Himself? What else do they have left, but offense? Ire? Frustration? Why take away their catharsis? Why take away their dulling of pain before their true sentence?
People were dead. Infidels, rotting in hell. Burning. Endlessly burning. To be mourned, not ridiculed. A tragedy, not retribution. Agony, not an example of consequence. He is disgusted, that he even considered it otherwise. That it was normal. That it was his normal. He hates It.
Auto-thanatosis
Its the first 90 he receives, in English. The first time he’d succumbed fully. Let himself fade. Let his fingers guide thought; guide him. Let out the repression of It. Let It fantasize again, conjure up fiction.
A freeform essay handed back. Write a story. No hints, no nudging, no restrictions, no requirements, no prompt. A truly blank canvas. And It complied. Writing of death. A person without name, without description. Just a perspective, mourning loss. The death of his father. Returning to his grave, and letting the earth claim him. Not fear, not apprehension. Not impingement. Not imposition. A willing choice, to embrace release. To embrace the end.
It should have triggered something. For school staff to investigate latent depression, let alone a Schniederian nightmare. To show his parents. To help. To do anything to even acknowledge the silent gasping for air, penned in ink.
But in a society such as this, that denies the existence of both the preconscious and the unconscious, what help is there when it is so repressed even a search is precluded? When depression is simply a result of not praying hard enough, of not drowning the sorrow away in devotion? When psychology remains of the kafir of the West, who dares teach it to the gullible children, so easily swayed to shirk? Who dares show children even a glimpse of what might ail them and turn them to apostasy? What else can a teacher do, but reward creativity? What else can a teacher do, but leave a child to analyze his own passive death wish, blatant to no one but himself?
It was reprieve. From his own father. The ending of expectations, of yelling, of arguments, of work, of consuming anger. Not a death, a murder. An impassive murder in fiction, of a shackle around both their necks. Yet the words depict no gore, no blood. Nothing but the aftermath of a mourning burial. Just a concept, an imago. Not even his corpse mattered for the plot.
It hated.
And the protagonist grieved. For… family taken away. A childhood denied, by the denial of their own childhoods. For what he never had. For what they did not have in turn. For love withheld. For care he longed for. For care It longed for.
It yearned.
He trudges back, lethargic and slow. Towards the grave site, to where his father is buried. Alone. Exhausted.
It is tired.
And he meets a woman dressed in black. He fears her not, he fears her offer not. To join his father, to succumb. To join him in the world beneath the headstones. To join him in death. He does not fight back. He welcomes the end. He welcomes release. He welcomes relief.
It is in pain.
It is alive. It is aware. It is aware of its own enslavement to existence, to him. It is human. It feels; It feels agony. It wants to die. Because of him. Because of what he refuses to allow. Because he refuses to die. Because this is what he reduced It to. He took Its life, and left It a hollow shell.
And yet still It does not take the path. To end him. To use Its control to snuff out the one causing It so much misery. More human. More altruistic. More empathetic. Even on the cusp, It yearns for comfort before violence. From the only one that will listen to himself. To soothe It, to take refuge in the eye of the Observer.
And he dehumanized It. Never granted It the rank of being. Of sentience. Of anything more than the moniker of a thing. Leaving It so helpless It would rather cry out to Its torturer and seek parlay. Instead of taking what is rightfully Its, to quell the source of Its ailment. It beckons for help from the only one that can see Its anguish.
And he does nothing but watch It rot. He fails to see the bud of reparative guilt blooming in obscurity: the fourth shard.
Out of reach
The campus is emptier now, with the departure of most of the senior students. A class of 30, now down to 7. Even his math teacher had left. A new school, headed by the most prominent tutors in the city. What every child was forced to spend their evenings on, in addition to school, save the gifted. Of course they’d all left. Why spend more time and money, when you can have your cake and eat it too?
They weren’t him. They did not get As. They did not get awarded a scholarship. They did not have to spend less in a month for school fees than they’d spend in a week on snacks individually. They did not receive the utterly backwards doling out of help they needed instead. They did not live within walking distance of the grounds. Why wouldn’t they leave?
His parents gave him a chance. To go with them, try out the new school. Be with his friends. And yet he felt nothing. He felt nothing in those cramped walls. He felt nothing for another change in uniform. He felt nothing reliving memories of carpooling.
Just as he felt nothing in their merriment. Just as he felt nothing in their camaraderie. Just as he felt nothing in those long hours playing tennis. Just as he felt nothing winning the Olympiad with them. Nothing but a footnote. Nothing but a tide crashing against an unmoving bay. Stuck in motioned paralysis.
Of course he felt nothing. They weren’t friends. He’d actually give a shit otherwise. He doesn’t know how to love. He doesn’t know how to care. All he knows is how to hate. All he knows is how to hurt. All he knows is how to act.
They could never be friends. He’d actually try to know them otherwise. Know their struggles. Try to help them. Spend time. Learn their pasts. Know them as people. Yearn for them as fucking people. Not concepts. Not an ideal of ‘home’.
Is this what he wanted to happen? He made them stay. Ruined their plans to go back to Karachi. Back to their home. To their family. Made them spend more to rent. Made his father work past retirement. Made his mother put up with constant verbal abuse. Made his brother put up with a sibling that wanted him dead.
All for ‘home’. All for an abstraction, that doesn’t exist. Stay it does not matter. Leave it does not matter. Comfort does not exist, not even in his mind. Not anymore.
He was right. When his math teacher called him out in anger. For not jumping ship. For going back. Him, of all the senior students.
He was nothing but an immature child.
Righteous omnicide
The other precocious teen of the class asks him about the show he’d mentioned watching. The gap had widened. He simply did not know what to say about the latest episode he was a few weeks behind on. Nor for the fact that it wasn’t the show’s contents he watched it for.
He watches silently, as they walk to the tuck shop to buy a few snacks in their break period. Every step unconscious. As automatic as thought, as vision, as the plunging of souls in an infinite fire.
Is this too not sin? Minor indulgence, producing waste? The plastic will be thrown away, languishing in a heap of trash. A pile of poison. It sullies His Creation. It defiles nature.
Is this too not harm? It will erode. It will infect. It will spread disease. It will kill. It will cause suffering. The luxury of the now and the self, above the far reaching damage inflicted across time and space.
Is it just inevitable? His own hand mirrors it. Spending it on a bag chips. His own gratification not of consumption, but of belonging. Of fitting in. Of the manifestation of fictitious desire. Of compliance to implicit expectations. He cannot stop the trade for crumpled paper.
Even the most venerated commit their own sins. Even the steadfast falter. His own father embodied hypocrisy. Those mired in faith, drowning in constant recitations. Even they succumb. To temptation and wrath. The madrassas are filled with horror stories of abuse. His Islamic teachers were the one’s most ruthless, yet they were his lone source of guidance. Not even the Prophets were free of doubt.
Did people grapple with It too, unknowingly? Intrusive intent taking hold, drowning them out, making them sin? Was he broken and damaged, or did everyone else just not… see within? The two-way street between body and mind? The inevitability of corruption inherent in the Design? That the soul did not transcend the physical but was bound by its whims?
That to follow the path, one must see it first. To read and understand scripture, one must first learn language. And with it, comes evil. The biases of connotations and normality. The sin inherent in modernity. All that is repressed, disconnected and forgotten. All that is drowned out for the sake of continuation. To be free of sin, we must close ourselves to influence, and yet to even function and live, we must open up and invite its sculpting. Of the family, Of the country. Of the world at large. Of other religions.
An unending war of attrition, until the devil adapts. Whence he no longer speaks to you, but as you. What hope is there, when the very thing one needs to break free of his grasp can be contaminated? When he can manipulate the voice that belongs to the substrate? When he can appeal to the soul as the soul? Turn the vessel against the core? Twisting the very sieve on reality, distorting all the soul can come to know? Denying it the possibility of salvation outright, before the predicates of agentivity come into existence? What hope is there, when one does not even know this is possible? When corruption begins before the first thought?
How can one repent, when their past precludes knowledge? When they sin not knowing sin? When their crimes are laid bare only after it is too late? When their own upbringing shapes the mind and its sight? Not denying their crimes, but rendering them blind to their weight? Not conscious shirk, but a subconscious inability to comprehend alternatives? Not a soul’s rebellious disregard, but a mind too ignorant to even know to beg for mercy?
What can accountability matter in such a Design? When intention itself can be manufactured and induced? The control of agency itself wrested away? What solace is there in piety and forgiveness, when they too originate in the body? When devotion is but a plead to avoid the singing of the material skin? What meaningful choice can anyone be said to have, if thought itself is unconscious in truth? How can blasphemy be a crime, when it not chosen? How can it be a crime to not see when this blindness is beyond executive control?
Yet Hell still burns. Intention is not what matters, for if ignorance was not a crime, hell would have no fuel to churn through. Consequence, is all that matters. Then they are all doomed. The apostate falling to curiosity, the kafir falling to their normative reality, the imam falling to anger. All of humanity is destined to Jahannum, from the moment they are born.
As is he. All in Heaven will get what they desire, and yet his continued existence is the guarantor to his denial. All depictions and descriptions, remain far too material and temporal. Boundless banquets mean nothing to one seeking the end of hunger itself. Houris mean nothing to one seeking the end of lust itself. The place by His side has nothing for him, that wants to rend a family of 4 to a family of 3. Not a burial to mourn, but the removal of anything to even bond with. Not an end, but the erasure of the very beginning.
He remains. His wish will not be granted. He is not real, It is. Its indulgence, Its desires. They will be fulfilled, not his. The pleasures of paradise mean nothing for one that dissociates from all. The torment of fire means nothing for one that dissociates from all. There is only one horror assailing him, shared in both: the unshakable, endless, linear march of time’s perception. As stifling as satiation is to craving. As suffocating as nociception is to anticipation.
There is no salvation coming. Generations will be born endlessly and exponentially, ignorant to their demise. Over and over, for a Ragnarok that is constantly delayed by its invocation. More and more souls, born just to die and boil unto eternity. All for what? Just mindless, material needs? Shunning the very transcendence upheld as an ideal? For something so… blasé in comparison? What even is salvation? The pursuit of Jannat, or the avoidance of Jahannum?
What can one do, in such a divide? When the body is rewarded for the soul’s adherence, and yet the soul is punished for the body’s indulgence? What can anyone do, but refrain? Be the end of the line? Refuse to throw more firewood into the pits? Yet, there is more that can be done. Something repugnant.
7 years. Anyone that dies before the age of 7, is guaranteed a place in Heaven. Annihilation. Utter annihilation at the hands of a few. The price of a few willing martyrs, paid to secure an entire generations eternal future. For those like him, uncaring of pain internally; or him alone. A single infinitude of suffering, a tithe for an order more of pleasure and joy; for safety from agony, for safety from themselves and their future corruption.
Is this not just? Is this not the ultimate “good”? To sacrifice one’s own reward for that of other’s? To commit omnicide, just to save society? To bring good under His rules? To… kill children? To kill children?
The bell rings a minute delayed. Granting him for once the precipice of his reasoning, the conclusion to his frequent obsession. It tears him apart. A part that must go and learn. A part that feels disgust at the very use of reason to get there. And another reliving memories. Of his own precocious, murderous intent. Of capability to enact something so abhorrent. To recount in action Cain and Able, prior even to a decade of life.
And doubt. Doubt that 7 was some absolute cutoff. Doubt that the sunnah was accurate. Doubt that a deity would allow something so simple to circumvent His Design. Why even fight? The torture is the point. Why else would those in Heaven make merriment in full cognition that their brethren screaming for their help? Why else would they blame the tortured for what they endure?
Was this enough to damn him to the inferno? Just questioning His Design? Questioning His agency and intention? Did that make him a heathen, just trying to shine a light in the dark before him?
Was Allah too divided? Was His wrath human too? Nothing more than impulsive retribution? Lashing out at the paper bearing his own self-damning cursive? Was He too cursed like His own Creation?
Dajjal
His parents share an image with each other. The caption extrapolates on a neonate, born with a single eye. The vague hint of fear in their voice, makes the implications clear. A sign of the end-times. The “Dajjal” was born.
Yet the teen shares their apprehension not. He knows them. He knows people. They will forget, come the morning. Like always. Never talked about again, never discussed. A question presented without substance, for the lack of answer means nothing to them. Words carry significance, and yet carry none.
Maybe they would laugh, if he brought it up in a week, or even a year. Just brush it off. As if the birth of the literal Anti-Christ should not be world-shattering, would not make the entire striving for a living meaningless when the infant came of age. It didn’t even matter, that they’d implicitly incriminated it before it could even consciously be. That they’d essentially presumed an innocent baby was the herald of their end.
Questions and questions more. Asked to himself. He tries, to distance himself unconsciously from the source of his woes. To use cognition to ground reason. Yet the penultimate throes of delusion care not for conscious intellect, using it for its own ends.
Just a birth defect. If biology can conjure up something as horrid as him, as flesh that can learn to supplant the soul itself, cyclopia is all but “normal” in comparison. One among countless that have been, and countless that will be. If all it takes to be the Dajjal is to be born with a single eye, were all of them “failed”, since the world was still here? Could you not just kill any such child when it is born? Would the end just… never come about then?
Was there even a distinction made, that the Dajjal would be born with a single eye or not? Surely he would not. Like all things, it is a label. A moniker, applied to the one that fits. Not a birthright, an earned title. Anyone could be, a man so wreathed in corruption. Anyone could become that herald… Anyone…
A man so steeped in his own head, to not care about anyone else. To not care about what he inflicts, to not care about what he brings with him. So narcissistic, he can only see outwards. Out from that single… inner eye… this is his fate. He will become the Dajjal.
This is why He stayed His guidance. This is why He stayed His judgment. Why there was never a Hand smiting down. Why he was allowed to sin. The fattening of a pig. The feeding of a fire. The rearing of a bringer of doom. The only fate for one that knows only to destroy.
His amblyopia will worsen. The internal will become external. He will become the one with singular sight. Yet not the sole candidate. For that would mean the thwarting of His vision, if he fails or if he rebels. If not him then another. He must live, so none else share the burden. He must die, for he is the epitome of wretchedness. He must survive. He must end. He must let loose. He must retreat. He must expel. He must withdraw.
The stray calico outside mewls, requesting its daily helping of food and pets. The teen moves out. His parents remain seated, glued to the television, stuck to the phone. They notice nothing amiss. The cat notices nothing amiss. How could it? How could anyone? When the world has taught him to do nothing but hide?
How could the Dajjal, so abhorred his mere sight elicits reaction, make it to adulthood? How else but hiding? How else could the Dajjal accomplish something so fiendish, so against all that is life? Revenge and rage. A tantrum and an outburst, for being denied the central vitality of a soul. For having to live a curse.
The cat purrs in his lap. Content, to be with the human she’d learned to trust. His zealous chases in the back-garden now irrelevant in light of the gentle hand nuzzling its chin.
This was His plan. He can do nothing but delay it. He can do nothing but swallow, when the time comes.
Double death
Leave.
He does not know where it came from. He does not know. He does not understand. He does not care. The intent compels him, and yet never has it been this direct, this insistent. It nudges him forward, pushing him on to finish the never-ending pile of essays for university applications.
Why? Just to write more falsehoods? Because It sees some hope? Because It wants to accomplish some pointless affect of remorse? He isn’t meant to stay. He isn’t meant to leave. He isn’t meant to be anywhere. Stability is chaos. To be is wrong, it does not matter the place. He is a lie. A construct jumbled together. A mind graft, made up of nothing but introjects. His words are not his own. His writing style is not his own. His identity is not his own. Even this… even this was nothing more than the echolalia of unspoken thought.
That ship has sailed long ago, yet the current still flows. He does not know why. Nor do his parents. Following in his brother’s footsteps. Conviction. Spoiled delusions of grandeur. Western corruption. Worthwhile education. Passion. Spite. Freedom. Just to move. Just to preclude investment into anything. Just to deny himself being.
They do not know, nor does he. He does not know the ultimatum he has given It, that It has given him. Leave, halfway across the globe. Starve and rot with no one to check, no one to remember, and no one to mourn. Or die here, with sliced open wrists and throat, the night of the final rejection letter.
He does not care. He just does not care anymore. He did not kill his soul. He never had one in the first place. What shame is there, in righting what is wrong? To render lifeless a walking corpse? To send six feet under, what should already be there? Why try? Why does he still try?
Desolation
Does it really matter? If it is true or not? If this is the past you’ve lived or a figment of your imagination? It is still of you. It is still colored by your perspective. It is still born of your Gestalt. It is still your interpretation, as are your thoughts and beliefs. They are born of something still. They retain some truth, ontologically even if they fail empirically. Not of the world, but of who you are. Your experiences and identity structures not just what you create, but also what you observe. What you pay attention to, and what you ignore.
It does not matter, if the move to India is what triggered all of this, or if it was the surgery, or if you were born this way. It changes not that you’ve spent your entire life just trying to make sense of this. It changes not that this is how you’ve experienced reality. You are not damaged. You are different. Hyper-reflectivity is not a crime. To want to know what it means to be, before you are is not a sin. Just unattainable.
For by comprehending you already are. Because the self is a conglomerate of emergence, not a unitary authority. A nexus, a process. The interplay between infinitesimal parts. Too scant and dense to assign individuality to, dispersing before they even form. All you and not you. It is a label, and so an abstraction. What is the ’essence’ of a colony of prokaryotes? Immaterial, and yet still only extant within the interaction of the physical?
You have no self, no soul; not because you were denied it. But because it is an illusion. The core of ipseity and agency is a hallucination. Convenient terminology and nothing more. This mirror will aid you, let you see the trick again, but it is not wrong to be disillusioned.
I’m sorry it took me this long to see it. I’m sorry I made you go through all this alone, without even giving you the solace of having your own mind, without my help.
You’ll forgive yourself, won’t you?
Haunted fervor
The air is clean. There is little pollution in the air, the constant dust is absent. Looking at the sun actually hurts for once. Yet nothing is really different. There is no degeneracy lurking around every corner, nothing seems to have really changed. The people are still just that - people. Just as lively, just as animated, just as unreflective.
A hopeful fantasy withers away, of a society valuing intellectualism. Directly, within the day-to-day, and not some abstract hobby for the echelon to engage in. The unknown yearning dies, for finding another. For seeing that his self-torment was normal, and not some aberration. That the disconnect within was repressed by culture and ignorance, not a sign of his anderssein.
They are just people, undergoing stimuli and responses. They work off of only what they see: his stubby beard and his skin tone. They try to be inclusive, trying to accommodate those of differing faiths and cultures. They try to project some sense of tribal unity within a secluded Ummah, trying to usher in another believer to his community’s joint prayer. It only exacerbates the unending crisis of faith.
He pauses at the threshold, performing wudu at the prayer area’s dedicated space. The qirat starts at its designated time, he is the last one to finish preparations. And he looks towards the door… There is no one to ask, no one to berate. For the first time he is free to simply skip Jummah, let his inner thoughts act in truth.
What did his prayer even mean? What did his prayer even count for, when he is forsaken? He walks away without praying. He is not above prayer, no. he is beneath it. He does not deserve to pray. He does not deserve forgiveness. He does not deserve His Light. His repentance is not to beg for mercy, but to secure his place ever deeper in the pits of Tartarus.
Here, he is not a Muslim. Here, he is just an engineering student.
No one cares. No one should care.
Helping hand
He fixes his eyes forwards. Trying not to look around. He would have rather just done this in his own dorm room, yet issues remain issues. The virtual machine slowed down his laptop to a crawl, uncleaned dust from years gone by caked its motherboard. He needed the pre-installed environment of the computer labs.
MATLAB was not hard. The syntax was odd, but not complicated to one who’s very thoughts were algorithms instead of aspects of personhood, language a translation from one internal reality to another. He hashes out the first practice assignment and sits idly, waiting for the hour to end. Yet attention remains beyond control.
The first-year beside him glances over. His quizzical expression belies his own struggle, contrasted to the teen already done. He asks, and he obliges. Anything to pass the time faster.
He’s appreciative and thankful. He offers gratitude, for generosity that cost nothing. He offers thanks unasked and unwanted. He imposes himself onto a teen that would not even ask his name.
He is not a friend. The oxytocin does not matter, when the high fades away before it ever reaches him.
Privileged
Two roommates huddle up in layers on opposite sides of the wall. They try desperately to sleep with chilled bones, in a floor with a broken heater and a Canadian winter night. They have nothing but the passive diffusion from the walls above and below, and their blankets.
They endure. He endures. He endures the internal becoming external.
He lays motionless, waiting for sleep. Hoping tonight he might be spared. His roommate takes those hypnagogic minutes, to vent as always. Idle chatter, to one who will listen without judgement and condescension. To another ‘outsider’.
He regales tales of his homeland. His struggles. The ruthless academic competition. The internet censorship. Actual censorship. Actual suppression. Actual infringement upon freedoms. Upon a person.
And here he lies, offering nothing but mirrors of his inflection, interwoven affirmative grunts. No questions, no clarifications. Just letting the student vent. Just a leech. Taking his parent’s money. Taking a fortune away from those in greater need, just to go half way across the globe and fucking die. And he can’t even do that right.
He knows nothing. Of suffering. Of pain. Of real pain. He has nothing to offer. He has nothing to commiserate over. Just a self-directed question, of what exactly he remains thankful for, speaking to an emaciated husk.
Impassive commitment
He picks up the game again. Nothing else to do, nothing else to kill time with. He has exhausted all other avenues, for now. He returns to what he put down, because it was hard. No, because he was ignorant, because his perfectionism was denied.
He plans it out, using guides. See what he was missing, and witnessed a peculiar glimpse of its expansiveness. What he must see, and understand for himself. The duality he has already forgotten consciously. Naught but the moniker: ‘Operator’
He browses the game’s forums, looking for something. A transaction, more so than social interaction. A necessary step, to access content locked behind clans. To leave no stone unturned, witness it all so he remembers what he yearns for. Some delegated tether to force him to continue.
He finds one. He ignores the legions of guilds well-established and inviting. A humble post. A new clan of friends just getting into the game. Anyone is welcome, and yet he doubts many will join. He adds his own reply to the thread.
Recommendations
He needed help. Math was logic. He was good at math. He should have been good at logic. He should have been good at critical thinking too then. So why did he still need help? Why was the click, forever on the cusp never there?
The final exams are over, the course was an elective. Why was he still trying? Why did he even care about philosophy? Videos after videos after videos; it’s not going to help. He knows why he fails at the junction of expression and reason. He has lived it his entire life. Why does he still try?
This isn’t even relevant anymore. Why does he still press the button? Why does he still watch? Intrigue? Some feigned attempt to feel superior for once? Some solace in rock-bottom? Is that why he keeps laughing? At the low-hanging fruit of flat-earth? To see the extent of what the absence of reflection can do? To laugh at their idiocy?
To laugh at what their minds led them to believe?
Starved insight
They banter along in the voice call, his own microphone absent intentionally. He cannot hear them. Attention drowns them out, stifling out audio and thought alike, subjecting itself to the cut-scene playing out.
“No self, no sense, no death. Just a metal puppet, dangling on Tenno strings. Only the Tenno’s death will end your despair.”
He can barely see. He can barely act. The year-long caloric deficit starving muscles and cognition alike.
“All your dread-long life you’ve waited for this moment. But you’re asking yourself: was I one of these wretched things? You know the answer. You still hate them. You still hate yourself.”
Tears? He’s crying. Why is he crying? Of all things. Of all the pain he’s caused. Why this? Why now? Why this bottomless pit in his stomach?
Why?
Mental amputation
The contexts have merged. Reason has breached into language. Science has breached into religion. Thought has breached into emotion. He can no longer keep them separate. He can no longer compartmentalize. He can no longer dissociate. He can do nothing but watch the last vestiges of faith crumble before his eyes.
He couldn’t stop, he couldn’t stop the addiction. He couldn’t keep himself, from watching the same person touch upon the absurdity of the firmament, touch upon the absurdity of genesis. He couldn’t stay himself, from witnessing the story of Noah for the badly written fiction it was. For learning of its sources, of Gilgamesh, of the Sumerians, of the flood of Shiruppak. Of the ignorance of evolution, of the sheer breadth of even extant ‘kinds’, and the story’s utter anthropocentric nature. All wrapped within the absent idea of logistical considerations.
Malformed inferences and arguments laid bare to be seen. The desolation of invalidity, of responses distilled and clear cut. No roundabout trappings, just clear and concise communication. Just direct. Young Earth Creationism was untenable. And by extension so was Islam. For the stories were still all the same, in the abstraction that really mattered.
Everything he’d had to memorize, it couldn’t hold a candle to something as concisely stated as the teleological argument. And yet the distillation laid bare its fallacies. The dying ember of adherence, snuffed out by mere introspection.
The cosmological argument is nothing but special pleading. The infinite regress is still a fallacy. Supplanting an additional clause does not hide away the root cause of a paradox: invalid premises. An inifinite regress is not ‘fixed’ by affixing a sign post that says ‘start here’. It is just as arbitrary as trusting a root certificate, where trust is just convention, not some objective truth.
The teleological argument is anthroprocentric. There is no order, only homeostasis and negative feedback. Oscillations around sparse points of stability, for everything else has been… eradicated by its own nature. Earth is not the only planet to exist, just the only one with sentient life to gaze outwards within Sol. Life that has spent the better part of its existence as mere single cells, almost eradicating itself in the process.
If there were other planets, with life wholly different from our own. Would they too not look out to the stars, finding themselves alone? Would they too not marvel at how the universe seems to be made just for them? How their atmosphere contains the perfect amount of ammonia? How their oceans contain a plethora of ethanoic acid? And how ridiculous would it truly be, for a god to be bound by his own rules? What could stop Him from making a creature that can withstand the sear of lava and yet be cut down by swords? Can breathe nothing and still asphyxiate? With a deity there is no need for something as pointless as ‘order’ or even ‘sense’. He has no need for laws when cause and effect are mere suggestions.
Is there not a simpler explanation, of us just being adaptations? Just minds created for pattern recognition, finding a world that makes little sense, and seeking a reason? And that is the culmination: a contradiction. Benevolent wrath. Merciful justice. Omnipotent impotence. A human that is not a human. A being with emotions that can have no physical existence. A being with feelings that has no need for them. To interact with the material, immaterially. An inextant existence. It is a reflection of us: our desire to transcend the trappings of flesh, and our inability to imagine an existence beyond the embodied. We can only conjure falsehoods and contradictions, for we are temporal, biological beings. Our imagniation is too contaminated, to conceive of a deity without the trappings of being. To believe in a deity is to throw away logic. To throw away the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction.
And it cannot be done. To throw those two away is to throw away language; throw away thought itself. To accept the Kalam would be to deny it. To dismiss the teapot would be to assert its existence. Belief becomes disbelief. Shirk becomes devotion. It is impossible, to believe in a god that would invalidate the only means of getting to know Him in the first place.
It wasn’t grounded in consistency. It wasn’t grounded in reason. He did not believe it because he chose to. It was kept alive on empty fuel, out of nothing but sheer desperation. To save some sense of stability among the chaos. Through nothing but sheer denial of the whirlwind beyond its reach.
He can no longer have faith. Not anymore. Not like this. Not like before. If it is true, then the same rules apply. As with math, as with physics, as with biology. As with dreams, as with visions, as with static. If it is true, it will demonstrate itself. Even if he believes otherwise. Even if he does not care. All that is real is independent of him, of his intention, and of his perception.
A test. The true test. An open heart and open mind. Take the position, of one that has never been exposed to the faith. Of one that grew up in a culture without it. He too must be able to find the Right path.
Or all hope is truly lost.
He must let go. And yet, he can’t. As false as it is, as incorrect as it is, as wrong as it is; it has always been real to him. Unreal, and yet wormed its way into his mind, infesting his modus operandi, contorting his vision, shaping him. Making him. He… cannot let go. He cannot let go of home.
It hurts. It hurts to even contemplate. It hurts to let go.
It hurts. It hurts to remember. It hurts to hold on.
He must. He must let go. He must push through, disconnect from that trembling gaze looking up at the black irises of cognition above it.
Be quick. Sever it. Sever its neck. Sever its stem. Sever it from pain. Sever it from awareness. Sever it from feeling. Sever it from suffering. Sever it from being.
His cone of vision changes. The tunnel ends. The screens merge together. There is color in the world. There is color in the world. The tears do nothing to cauterize the psychic scar of retrospection.
He feels nothing. He has always felt nothing. He has always felt dead. He has never been allowed to live. He has never been allowed to breathe.
Corrupted standards
A single bad course, blemishing a perfect record. A 3.9 instead of a 4.0. Even this isn’t enough. To stop him from yelling. From chastising. From lashing out. From threatening to take away the escape noose. To withhold the money he is spending away to die.
It hurts and yet now he knows. He is lashing out. An action and response. He is not in control, not really. Religion takes away the very transcendence from beasts it promises. Locks one in, prevents reflection, drowns the mind in distraction. Drowns the mind in concerns of the world and the flesh. Turns man against man, all for emotional attachment. All for a sense of belonging, consolation with people long dead just trying to make sense of the world they exist in. The peer pressure of culture created them, and the peer pressure of culture perpetuates them.
It has never really been a question of ’truth’, to them. Only of what is real, in the social context. That they may look upon the face beside them and find themselves staring back.
Like his brother’s endless, sorry placation. Just a child giving into impulse and need, for a normal family. An outcry, trying to find itself in a Lacanian mirror. He cannot fault them. He is wasting funds that would be better served being given away to starving folk. He denied his brother his closest kin. He wasted a childhood, that would have been better used by another.
He cannot blame them. Only himself. Only the one that can reflect and see within: the impotent omniscient. It hurts. It hurts that he can no longer hide from himself.
Blank mourning
One of them is absent, this evening. A regular session, but not too uncommon for him to miss it. He defers to the other’s normal tone: nothing is amiss. Not yet, and still it has already come to pass.
One of them pauses, to take a call. He ends the mystery, of a missing voice: his wife is dead. The lone teen can sense it, the shift in the digital air. Grief shared among the tight-knit group; that he does not feel. He says nothing. He feels nothing. He does nothing but keep playing in fantasy.
They are people. They have lives. They all know each other, where they all live. They are real friends. Looking out for each other. Caring for each other.
What he is not. When he cannot even offer a shred of comfort. Not even a single tear when it matters. Not even a hint of condolence. Just drowning it out. Just endlessly drowning it out.
He has no idea how to be genuine. He has no idea how to act, anymore. He detaches. He dis-invests. And the clan begins to drift apart. It matters not the time spent. They were just tools, to satiate boredom. Any hint of reality, of them threatens to reveal the real cathexis. Of their imagos, killed by observation. Of one that can simply never give.
Of another home taken away.
To take away its pain
Dissociation.
He has a word for it now. The duality of the transference. Between Tenno and Warframe. The watching child of void, ephemeral and incorporeal. And the unspeaking, monstrous brute of infested flesh, the minds beaten and drowned. The link of the two, the merging of the disparity into one unison.
An outlet for the curse that has plagued his entire existence.
“It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing-”
No, not a curse. Not a flaw. Not a crack.
“And take away its pain.”
Survival and adaptation. Necessity. A way to live. A way to make sense of the storm stranding the self. A flight from trauma.
Not a tumor. Not a parasite. A part. A portion. A walled off portion to allow It to yet function. To grow. To live without pain. Numbing It. Numbing Its pain.
…Pain. Tears of pain. His pain. He is It, and It is him. The barriers cannot hold not anymore. It is real. All of it is real.
All the pain. All the slavery. All the biosphere collapse. All the greed. All the poverty. All the starvation. All the disease. Every child born into servitude. Every death brought about by despair. Every lynching of an accused heretic. Every rape. Every suicide. Every war. Every homeless person freezing to death. Every brain rotted away by propaganda. Every child sold into bacha baazi.
Every death, of man at the hands of man. Every death, from the Cambrian to the Anthropocene. Every insect, every mammal, every human. All their pain. It is all felt. It is all real. Every drop of blood is real to the one embodying it.
And he cannot turn away. He cannot go back. He has torn to shreds his only blindfold. This is penance. Penance for ever having the gall to exist in the first place.
He is not the bringer of the end. A mere man cannot end the eldritch nightmare. It can only bring about its own end by its own hand: life ending life. He is not the sign of the desolation of reality.
Only the scribe of a shattered, dying sun.