Tag: zaidismail

  • Prisms of beauty

    Prisms of beauty

    If you keep chasing rainbows, you won’t find the time to notice that you’re the prism creating the beauty that you so desperately court.

    Breathe beloved, and pause for long enough to appreciate the beauty of you, despite the ugly of them.

    (From the sequel to An Incomplete Love Story that may never be written)

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • Chasing ghosts

    Chasing ghosts

    Of the multiple lifetimes that I’ve endured, reality flirts between the beauty that I saw, and the ugly that I experienced. Sanity was relegated to an after thought when what I saw was a vision uniquely experienced by me. Too real to dismiss, but too fantastical to be believed.

    It’s the belief that I need to share it with others that taints the experience. But I often wonder if it’s really a belief, or is it a dictate of nature that I will remain incomplete if my experience remains my own. Is the purpose of life not to share our wonders with others?

    The pervasiveness of ugly has revealed the ugly side of ugly to me in moments when I was distracted by the beauty of a being. My fixation on beauty was never enough to turn their gaze away from the ugly that gripped their lives. Unfulfilled vengeance shreds a soul with the promise of making it whole.

    Fighting the shredding has left me chasing their ghosts of beauty while they invested in the ugly of being. But my ghosts, despite being beyond reach for an embrace, are mine to behold, and mine to court. Offering shards of light into their darkness, teasing them into the light for a few brief, magical moments, before they recede again, the fear of the light turning to darkness echoing the horror of hopes so often destroyed by the ugly of their past.

    This tug of war. This wretch between beauty and pain. If not for the beauty of the ghosts, sublimely serene and mesmerisingly aching with the promise of peace, succumbing to their ugly would have overtaken my tender soul. But tenderness is not formed through frailty. It is the deepest gashes that revealed the tenderness within, without which the hardened crust of my contact with the world would have had me convinced that my ghosts were mere apparitions, and their ugly was the only truth.

    The ghosts of the betrayers have unwittingly gifted me with the vision that they spurned. A vision of wondrous enchantment, seeing the tenderness of their soul, while they focus on the crust. Hope feels like a threat when the lifetimes that nag at my back remind me of the many occasions on which the ghosts were defeated, and the crust grew thicker over the beauty that I courted.

    Until now. Until my latest skirmishes with their darkness revealed an intensity of light so beautifully complete, that my strongest resolve to abandon it proves futile. A new tug of war has been birthed. This time, between my resolve to block out the ghosts and the beauty that they keep revealing in the silent, taunted moments when the world is asleep, and my unfailing desire to surrender to the ghost before I give up my own.

    The end is not near enough, and peace too far away.

  • It’s not always about you

    It’s not always about you

    The truth is, if you want to matter that much to someone else, shouldn’t they matter equally as much to you?

    If they do, and you find that they don’t have as much time for you as they used to, or are behaving differently to what you know them to be about, do you claim your privilege to be treated better than that, or do you show sincere concern for what they may be dealing with?

    Busting mental health myths is essential to break the cycle that feeds toxic victim mindsets.

    The problem with this meme is that is encourages self-centered perspectives and denies the struggles that someone else may be going through.

    Sometimes the ones we love may be so overwhelmed by what they’re going through that withdrawal from the world is the only way that they believe they can cope.

    It’s not about how much you may want them to lean on you, or take comfort from you. Sometimes, their battle with themselves drives them to want to protect others from the impact that it is having on them.

    Don’t be so quick to write people off. When you do that, you lose the right to ask others to give you the benefit of the doubt when you’re going through a struggle that no one else understands.

    Sacrificing what you need in favour of understanding someone you love, is sometimes the greatest gift of love you could give anyone. Even if they don’t realise it at the time.

    It’s about what you want to gift to them, not what you need from them that matters.


  • A silent betrayal

    A silent betrayal

    The betrayal of trust is not always due to blatant acts of dishonesty.

    Most often, it’s the silence or the restraint from a loved one when their words or their embrace is most needed.

    It’s the shrug when we reach out to them or offer them support, or the deliberate obliviousness when we express our need for them.

    It’s the trust that bonds hearts that is more fragile than the intellectual trust.

    Reconciling dishonesty is easy because we have tangible evidence to work with.

    Understanding what’s in someone’s heart when they keep it a secret, or when they become subdued after having been expressive, leads to more anguish than any lie of the tongue.

    It is the not knowing that tortures and tests the trust we once placed in someone, especially when all the evidence conflicts with their claims.

    That’s when breathing becomes a labour in search of love, and exhaling feels pointless.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • My silent scream

    My silent scream

    When rage is all you have left in you, know that you’ve surrendered yourself to the betrayal of the world.

    When rage becomes a silent scream or a deliberate protest, despite your best intentions, you are still defined by that betrayal.

    When rage colours your view of the world, you see demons in angels, and persecution in love, because they both, the angels and the love, carry with them the threat of a broken trust.

    Worse still, when rage defines your response to life, you not only reject anything that demands trust, but you strike preemptively at the hint of what you once courted, hurting the ones invested in your peace.

    When we view the world through angry eyes, innocence is tainted, sincerity appears as manipulation, and affection feels like a self-serving act of the one offering it.

    Discarding the good doesn’t only deny you that good, it also creates space for the festering wounds of the past to contaminate even more beauty and innocence that once filled those spaces.

    Breathe, beloved…

    Just breathe…

    Don’t let the betrayers of your past cause you to betray your future.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • Thus, is love lost

    Thus, is love lost

    In affection, we focus on our beauty

    In rejection, we focus on our deficiencies

    Perhaps that’s why the world is so harsh

    Too many are waiting for their deficiencies to be accepted before they share their beauty

    Or need their grievances with one to be compensated before they accept the beauty of another.

    Each time we wait for the past to be redressed before

    we invest in the future

    We are discarding the future in favour of the very past we wish we could leave behind

    Thus is the gift of love discarded

    And bitterness courted.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock

  • To be heard

    To be heard

    When moderation is surrendered in protest against control or oppression, vulgarity seems like the only reasonable way to be heard.

    Rather than focus on the need to be heard, we should consider why our voice may have been lost to the noise around us.

    Adding to that noise further erodes rational thought and expression, creating a polarised environment rather than an inclusive and nurturing one.

    The more we give in to the need to be heard, the more we lose our voice, and our sense of self.

    That’s when vulgarity becomes acceptable to us.

    Because in the absence of moderation, vulgarity becomes the only effective expression.

    Unless, of course, we’re mindful enough to realise that making a point through vulgarity destroys more than it achieves.

    And what it achieves is rarely the good that we hoped to create.

    Reclaim your voice.

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock










  • Dancing with destiny

    Dancing with destiny

    A snippet of a thought from the sequel to my novel, An Incomplete Love Story.

    We’re living in such uncertain times, and the uncertainty seems to be seeping into my thought processes.

    “Whether we were cut from the same cloth before time began, or we were shaped by life to be perfectly matched, it doesn’t matter. Destiny doesn’t always win. Sometimes, we avert destiny because we prefer the familiarity of our fears rather than the uncertainty of hope.”

    This, if ever it is written, will be central to the theme of my next novel, Taqdeer: A dance with destiny.

    Tell me what you think. Should I write the sequel, or should this be one of those love stories that should forever remain incomplete?

    Photo credit : Adobe Stock