Haania Khalid
The grates separating the classroom and the outside world from each other, a physical boundary between her identities: that of a student, that of a girl, declare themselves to her almost suddenly. Her city is a full place, one that lacks the melancholia and the neon lights of a noir landscape but still possesses the total bleakness of one. But the rain softens it, turns the bleakness into gloom that seems to be entrapped within the very air, into delicate gossamer-thin silk strands that smother her, like a shroud. It is almost enchanting. Her classmates cluster around that one window, trying to see past the grates. She can only hear the soft pitter-patter of rain against the pavement.
She cherishes the rare moment of peace.
Her life seems to be turbulent and monotonous at once. She wonders when things went askew, when she went askew. She has a mountain of responsibilities on her shoulders, a burden that increases day by day, and yet she finds herself obsessing over the simplest things. What clothes shall she wear? Is her hair fine? What music shall she listen to? What will she eat (or rather, what will she not eat?) At times she feels a curious hollowness within her heart, a numbness she cannot pinpoint the cause of. Everyone around her has been changing, except for herself. She alone feels like a child that’s been left to sit alone while the adults talk, one foot in and one foot out of the conversation.
She has memories of times when she felt her presence in a room, and now she feels as if she has dwindled herself away to almost nothing. Her sense of self is barely tangible; she has become a spectre of a person, not truly a person at all, her body turning to mist, barely real, her sense of self slipping away into the dark. She is but a spectator of her body rather than an inhibitor of it. Half-formed, transient, clouds and Chantilly lace and perfume masquerading as a person. Her sheen and lustre are gone, replaced by a sense of melancholia that has sunk deep into her bones, something that can not, does not, abandon her.
Was it inherited from her mother?
She knew she was not made whole, that she was a collection of borrowed fragments. She wondered if the glass shard that cut through her, the core that lay deep within her bones, was that of her mother’s. Like a blurry picture, a reflection in a fogged mirror, her qualities were discernible within her soul. The sharp edges, the soft vulnerabilities, all are hers, generations of lamentations passed down from one woman to her daughter, and hers before that. The greatest inheritance from her mother is her sorrow. Did her grandmother have the same sharp agony in her eyes when she looked at her daughter and realised she was a woman now, not a child, defenceless against a world of hurt?
Is she but the shadow of her regrets, and her mother’s before her? Her child. Her daughter, hers. Not her own. She has never had full ownership of her life, always it has been divided amongst different people. Everyone seems to know what is best for her. She cannot bother to fight back against them because she barely knows what would be good for herself. Her body has never been hers to own.
Even within the overbearing solitude of her room, she feels like an evaluating watcher. When she raises her hand to caress the contours of her face, to trace their outline, see if they are still tangible, she is almost shocked to discover they are her own and not that of another. She cannot discern any beauty in her features. They are trapped within the lands of neoteny, too much like a child’s, yet contrasting with an unnerving shade thrown over her eyes, an intensity that is dampened only by her age. She feels like an awful, half-formed thing. Like a half-human creature straddling the line between the mythical and the real, between the child and the adult.
She is sixteen and horrendous. She is sixteen and a child, a woman, both. She is sixteen and a paradox.
Her mother wants her to remain cloistered within that cashmere blanket of innocence that has long enveloped her mind. Maybe she regrets not keeping her on a tighter leash, maybe she stares at her with disapproval and bitterness because they are reflections of each other, caught in different times. To her, she is only a girl, a child, and she wishes that she too could remain a child forever. But time moves quickly, dragging her along with it and forcing her to accept her new reality. Responsibility is a word that intrinsically carries a burden with it, one that is placed over her heart, a burden that she cannot conquer. So she watches everyone move on with their lives with no envy, only with the same curious numbness. The world has moved on without her.
Everyone seems to be aware of what they want and how they could achieve it. But she stumbles at every turn and finds herself relying heavily on others to make the most basic decisions. Amid her friends, well-accomplished, and ambitious, she feels like a stunted child. When was it that her sole wish became the desire to sleep, simply sleep for days, months, years? The exhaustion crept into her heart day by day, undeterred, and now she lives under its invisible, omnipresent weight. Her greatest wish is to slip away softly into the land of dreams — of childhood, of a youth that wasn’t weighed down by a hundred impossible burdens. And she tries, she truly does, but sleep never claims her.
The closest thing she can find to it is silence. Total solitude, abandonment. At times, she sits in her room quietly, wrapping her arms around her knees in an attempt to hold herself together, in the way that a child may attempt to push together shattered pieces of glass to make them anew. A gentle hush descends over the room, almost suffocating. She would steep in that enveloping, pitch-black darkness with her mind empty. Full of nothingness. A darkness so thick it was almost tangible. She could almost reach out her hand and grab a thin delicate spider web of gloom, tangle it in her pale fingers, the inky blackness smooth and viscid. It was a silence that was comforting in its stillness, the nearest she would ever get to a complete exodus.
She wonders if things will ever change. She wonders if she will ever wake up one day, and feel that her body is her own, her spirit and mind are her own, and not just borrowed pieces of other people. One day she will be able to look in the mirror and find a clearly defined face, look into her soul, and find that she is, finally, not at odds with herself. Tomorrow she will wake up to find the rain gone, the lingering petrichor is the only evidence of its presence. The city will once more be painted in its bleak palette of slate grey and black, and instead of despising it, she will cherish it, every part of it. Because it is her own. She will wear her uniform, brush her hair out, eat her breakfast and she might argue with her mother about something stupid (like whether she’s allowed to use sweetener or not). And later, she will say sorry to her with a hug and by allowing a conversation to flow between them, and her mother will give her a bowl of fruit and a cup of tea carrying all of her unexpressed warmth; I’m sorry, I’m sorry too. Her life might be defined by that simple routine. And perhaps, just perhaps, in a few years, she will change and grow and become a different woman. She will have something more. Not a girl, a maiden, a child. Tonight she may dream of something beautiful.
When she stands at the window and puts out her hand to catch the droplets of the rain, she feels as if the world is astonishingly simple.
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Haania Khalid is a sixteen-year old writer from Pakistan. She has an avid interest in French cinema, classical literature and philanthropic causes.
Diamond Gazette 