I miss you as much I miss myself when you were around

As I celebrate Eid this year again, I feel a sense of loss and pain indescribable as I look at his heart warming pictures, his empty bed and even his empty chair

They say time heals every wound and eid is the moment when we rejoice amidst the presence of our loved ones. The day passes by with the memories, tearful eyes, and a broken heart with the wish that they were still there. It is a known fact, that you are never ready for your parents to leave your side, let alone this entire world. Their memories are so beautifully etched within your soul that you are never ready to not having them by your side.

Dear Dad,

It is the third Eid I am celebrating without you. This year, I decided not to go back and visit you since everytime I visit Lahore, I am in turmoil of my thoughts about you and miss you so much that I hurts. I visit your family, your relatives and friends in the hope that they miss you as much as I do, cherish your memories.

However, with every visit to Lahore, the void that I feel with you gone, keeps getting bigger and bigger. The plethora of the thoughts of you leaving us, how I felt helpless when we were trying to breath life into you comes back with haunting memories.

I wish the good memories we have replace the aweful and soul shaking experience I had of you when you left. It indeed felt like the earth shook for us and the sky fell apart. Maybe it is normal for every human being to face this at the time of the death of their parents or maybe I felt it more since I always took you being there for granted. Minutes before you left, I was there by the side not to offer the consolation but for the help I needed the most at that time. Little did I realize what you were going through. I wish for that night to be back and for me to notice what were you going through and take you to the hospital instantly.

I realized with every inch of my body, all the mistakes I made. Little things I did to make you sad . I was your little girl back then too, adjusting to the idea of having you around, feeling your presence and asking you whatever I needed.

How much I pray for your forgiveness only Allah can let you know, how I wish I was cut into pieces a million times before hurting you with my words and actions. I was lucky to ask forgiveness from you but I do know it was not heartfelt.

Days have turned into months, yet the space that you left behind is as dark as the pall of gloom that descended some 3 years ago. Every corner in the house makes me feel your presence.

Life does moves on , however every passing day a bit of me wants to be with you, hear your voice, wants you to stand with me and say I am here, I know you are there , but this feeling of loneliness engulfs my soul like a fiercely raging fire the flames of which cannot be abated.

Your benevolence and exuberance was a match for anyone.

I remember the last time at Anum’s wedding, the first time we gathered for a family photo with one less, and every time since, we can all feel your  absence so strongly and I know how much sadness with curtail over us, once your  grandchild makes his way into this world again later next month.

The first time I did something that I knew you would be proud of and I had to feel your pride in my heart because I couldn’t hear it in your voice or see it in your eyes. The times when I need to ask you a question and you aren’t here to give the answer that only you knew.

I’ve come to realize that when someone you love dies, you don’t just have to say goodbye to him at the time he passes away but also at every crossroad.  I’ve discovered that there are endless firsts and tough moments to get through, not just obvious ones like holidays and big events, but many others that are equally if not more challenging to struggle through under the heavy blanket of grief.

I just cant love you enough even after you are gone . I hope this angelic face of yours would have a big smile right now as it did when you were here

Love you

Mash

Reminiscing my days with my dad

It has been a while that I have not written about my dad , Karachi has kept me on my toes all the time. However, there never comes a moment when I don’t miss him dearly.

He was the best cook too , something that I can get hardly my hands into.He always wanted to share his love for cooking with those that he was closest with.

I remember I would often say “I love you”, and receive the response of “I know”. I knew my dad loved me and had always accepted but that was just not his thing to express his emotions. However, in the last little while, he had started saying “I love you too”.

If I know my dad, he is probably reading this blog right now. That’s what he always did, reading through my blogs, reading through my posts, my tweets, my articles and everything I wrote. This was just so him

“Dad, I want to thank you for ensuring that I had every opportunity in the world , for letting me be myself. Thank you for always laughing and having a great sense of humour. Thank you for showing me to connect with people and for inspiring me to work my hardest at whatever I do. Thank you for teaching me to be generous. Thank you for showing me to stand tall and be a tower of strength for my family even when life strikes the hardest and make the most out of it and to love and be affectionate.”
I love you and I miss you till I see you again.

Remembering A SPECIAL DAD on the New Year

Thinking of you this New Year’s Night

And how nothing is quite the same

Because there is only one lifetime heartache now

When someone speaks your name

Sadly, no gifts for you this year that I could buy

Unlike the last new years eve,

where only silent tears that my eyes cry

For every moment  without you

is the hardest time of all

Because the extreme pain of losing you

just seems to linger still

And since you left, there has been a space

that no one else can fill

Amidst the ordeal that we go through

I just smiled as I was reminiscing  over the years

as the best times that we had

were just down to one special man

and that was always you, Dad

Mistakes probably YOU would be making too

At first it was easy for me to point every single finger and toe at my relationship for obliterating our 13-year commitment. I always thought he’s the one who walked out without looking back. Even long before that, he repeatedly shut me out, choosing to bury himself in his work, his routine to avoid what was happening to us at the moment.

Blame was my coping mechanism to get through the first difficult days of our separation, and “how dare he (gasp!)” was my mantra. I rallied an entire army of supporters who, like me, were totally, utterly and completely aghast at the nerve — the gall — of this guy.

Because obviously a stubborn egoistic and name calling person that he was . Right?

Wrong.

I deflected any and all culpability in the failure of my relationship for months, holding on to the picture I painted of myself as the gentle, selfless and long-suffering individual because of this relationship . It wasn’t until I found a friend cum therapist who called me out on my bullsh*t that I was forced to take a long, hard look at my shortcomings.

It wasn’t pretty and ugly to be honest.

Here’s what I now know actually screwed up my relationship.May it serve as a warning to you. Before it’s too late.

1. I put my work and friends first.
It’s easy to love your friends and your work. It takes very little effort, and they adore you no matter what. You get appreciated. Work gets along even in your bad days.

However relationship between two individuals is the polar opposite: it’s work. And whenever my relationship started to feel like work, I would check out and head to Lets-Have-Coffee or the long walk with friends even alone in the park in tow. I’d often plan these adventures when I knew he couldn’t go (and spoil my good time). I told myself it was OK and that I needed time to vent out because he preferred to work anyway and sometimes was glad on my outings that I am not pestering him for anything and I am busy in my own activities.

I chose most nights to go out with my friends, sometimes it was my work colleagues and others mostly family, blaming his vileness to drive outside his comfort zone or simply his inability to spend time. I felt awfully neglected since he would always talk about me as giving priority to my problems more than the relationship.

As a result, we were hardly alone together and never had date nights or lunches.  Well, maybe once a month or twice hardly.  Days passed into weeks and we never talked about US

2. I didn’t set (or enforce) boundaries with my family and even work
They were a constant source of distraction for me, sometimes I was upset of not coming up to their expectations to help them with the house allowance or sometimes it was when they were upset and got sick . My own fears of upsetting my family kept me from drawing a line in the sand and asking them not to cross it. The few times I did stand up for my family’s autonomy with him, I didn’t hold my family to the same standards in future. He was , quite literally, in relationship and committed to my entire family.

When my father passed away, all  I wanted to do was empty my load of emotional emptiness on him , Idid try to come to terms with his inability to understand my grief, or even accept it , but some way or the other it was etched on my heart and hurt me to the chore that he never even made it to his funeral (which would have meant a lot) and it came out in the form of fierce anger whenever we disagreed or had an argument.

Somehow deep down , I just wanted him to empathize with me and help me rebuild  myself again but I always found him to be snorting out on my worries and made me rethink of our relationship priorities from time to time.

I don’t blame him now , since he needed my time , my care, my conversation to buck him up too since he was going through the rough patch of  his life as well.

3. I emasculated him.
I thought love was about honesty, but we all know that the truth hurts. As we grew more comfortable (read: lazy) in our relationship, I stopped trying to take the sting out it. I talked smack to my girlfriends, my mom, my co-workers. All. The. Time. “Can you believe he didn’t do this?” and “Why in God’s name did he do THAT?”

Instead of building up his ego, I trampled all over it. I belittled him often, berated him for doing things wrong when, in all honesty, he just wasn’t doing them my way. At times I spoke to him like a child, in fact looking past now , I was being one as well.

As our relationship crumbled, I found myself constantly looking for faults and mistakes so that I could justify my superiority, without even realizing what he must be going through. By the end, I had zero respect for him and I made sure he knew it and felt it every day.

4. I didn’t bother to learn to fight the right way.
I know it sounds odd to suggest there is a right way to fight. But there is. I tended to keep the peace in our relationship by keeping my mouth shut when things were really bothering me. As you can imagine, all the small things that drove me crazy grew into a giant suppressed ball of anger that would erupt occasionally in a huge, really frightening fit of Hulk-like rage.

And by rage, I mean rage in the clinical, mental-health definition kind of way. After the fact, I’d justify my anger by saying that a woman can only take so much. Looking back, I was one scary b*tch during those “My parents were right about you” episodes.

I write this mea culpa not with the hopes of winning my ex back, or even wanting his forgiveness. Although I would love to have him back and start afresh without having to look at the past. But I understand that  daemons of the past always creep through in your PRESENT and reflected in the future, unless deep love and affection for each other holds it back.

I don’t know where my belief in “us” vanished, because of our inability to work through our problems. I knew we had never faced a challenge so difficult before, but at the back of my mind i did feel that we have been with each other long enough to know how to try. We knew how to lift each other, forgive each other, and end up stronger. That ability only came from love that was deep ingrained in the figments of my imagination and just refused to come out at that particular time .

I write this because I can’t believe how long I kept my head buried in the sand. I hope other girls  out there will yank theirs out and take a good look around. In the end, its all about respect, care, affection that you have for the other person and the understanding of the work and efforts required to maintain that space. In doing so , some people find their way back to their soul mates whilst others are not lucky enough and have destiny pave their  own paths.

And while I’m still hurt that my partner chose to solve our problems by walking away when some conversation and counseling might have helped,  I absolutely know that my behavior was part of what pushed him there.  We could have made a strong couple , but I guess fate had its own way .

Maybe some of you reading this ,will still believe that i was right in my own way but when  it comes caring for someone from the bottom of your heart, it eventually comes out as a two way process.

Sometimes I can hear him saying this to me in my head , eventually he did step out .

Soon Enough

Soon Enough, 
I wont think about you
every single day
every single moment

Soon enough

I may even forget
to mention your name
as I kneel down to pray

 

Soon enough 
I will know I loved and I lost
and I will not feel the same way again

Soon enough 
I will forget to shed tears
I will not reminisce your presence everywhere
and forget to read through our past conversations
again and again

Soon enough 
I’ll crumble on my knees

I know I will not be able to survive
even if my actions suffice my grief

And when the time comes
and hopefully soon enough, 
I’ll forget why I ever loved you
why I was happy with you
in the first place

But in the meantime
Soon enough

is not so soon enough

it is a lifetime away

Source: unknown

Tis the season of Grief

Tis the season of Grief.