maryam > Recent Status Updates

“ she rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, which she would often feel with him: a self affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.” real recognize real. They’re soul mates

“ But his honored English bothered her as she got older, because it was a costume, his shield against insecurity. He was haunted by what he did not have – a postgraduate degree, and upper middle class life – and so his affected words became his armor. She preferred it when he spoke Igbo; it was the only time he seemed unconscious of his own anxieties.”

“Sometimes, like now, he felt like an intruder in his new circle, of people who believed that the latest schools, the latest curriculums, would ensure the wholeness of their children. He did not share their certainties. He spent spent too much time mourning what could have been and questioning what should be.”

A must read, out loud.

“There is something I owe him, though I don’t understand what, and this debt is a gentleman‘s tie around my neck, requiring ballroom manners, that level of care.”

“They think dating is about love, when any New Yorker will tell you that dating is a martial art. It’s basic offense and defense. As with any contact sport, the proximity may coincidentally transform strangers into intimates, but this is not its primary intention. In English, there’s an entire vocabulary for the purpose of analyzing minute tactics and maneuvers…”

Those outside a language, of a culture, see furniture through a window and believe it is a room. But those inside know there are infinite rooms just out of View, and that they can always be more deeply inside.

“ it’s as though the city were deliberately designed to resist comprehension and to discipline those who left for daring to return. You have either lived here, and you know, or you never have and never will.”

“This desperation to refashion ourselves into the most pleasing inform makes fools of us both. We are pliable and capricious, shed our skin at the slightest threat, and ultimately stick out everywhere we go.”

Jamil Jan Bhai, never stop writing

💔

Why haven’t they turned this into a movie yet?

The vampire represents upward mobility through late stage capitalism holy shmoly

“Being a parent means translating the world to your child. Being a mother means getting punished for it.”

“I don’t know yet how to react to life - its sadness and disappointments - without blaming those around me, because I am only half formed and so it feels to that I am nothing but the sun of other people’s actions.”

I love this. Dur e Aziz, you’re so incredibly talented!

This is boring. I can’t relate; but the narrative seems disjointed also. Each character says a few words - a few paragraphs, max, before jumping to the next. The content, characters all of it seems so superficial to me.