All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

I knew it would be a disaster. But at least it would be a disaster I chose.

“If we are lost, God is like water, finding the unknowable path when we cannot.”

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I don’t know if I believe in hell, but if it had a sound, it would be the strangled howl of your father finally realizing that the love of his life is being put into the ground.

Wondering how someone who filled up a room could fit into a box so small.

I’ll survive this. I’ll live. But there’s a hole in me, never to be filled. Maybe that’s why people die of old age. Maybe we could live forever if we didn’t love so completely. But we do. And by the time old age comes, we’re filled with holes, so many that it’s too hard to breathe. So many that our insides aren’t even ours anymore. We’re just one big empty space, waiting to be filled by the darkness. Waiting to be free.

But mostly it taught me that music can be more of a home than four walls and a roof.

‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. It is the opium of the people.’

I miss things I can’t put into words because they were taken before I knew how precious they were.

But I realize as I cry into his shirt that I feel rootless. Pakistan isn’t home anymore. Juniper never was. But Salahudin—Salahudin feels like home. So I stay.

I read a story about a guy in the Amazon rain forest who was the last to speak his language—after he died, it would never be heard again. People tried to learn it, but it was impossible. Sometimes, I feel like the language of my body is equally unfathomable. I’ll die being the only person who ever knew how to speak it.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

“The more you ask for,” she’d say, “the better. Because it means you’ve put your faith in something greater than yourself.” I never did it, because it felt like I was ceding control. If I left everything to the almighty, then what the hell was I supposed to do?

How can you know someone for years and still not know their inner currents? I want to sink into the swirls and eddies of her ocean. I want to understand her. But I can’t unless she lets me. She doesn’t let me.

Great passions grow into monsters in the dark of the mind; but if you share them with loving friends they remain human, they can be endured.

The sun’s setting, the sky a color pink that deserves its own section in the dictionary.

What’s the word for when someone drinks so much, they are ruining your best friend’s life? Or the word for a man so vengeful about his own past that he wants to destroy your future? What’s the word for a woman who was sick for months, but refused to go to the doctor until it was too late? The word for the girl at school whose personal mission is to mess with your head? Anger’s not the right word. Rage. That’s what this feeling is, eating me up.

think of the way denial can weave its way through a family, whisper gentle lies, and make itself at home.

“Why does God do it?” I say. “Why should we pray? Why believe at all?” “Because what religion—many religions, really—offers is comfort when it’s all too much. A reason for the pain. A hand in the darkness if we reach for it.” “What if it’s not real?” I say. “The hand? What if you reach for it, and it disappears?” “I’m not going to tell you what’s real and what isn’t,” Shafiq says. “That’s for you to decide. But I do think that the hand is what we need it to be. Not what we want it to be.”

How quickly a body can betray you. It will carry you your whole life and suddenly—finished. It will carry your soul no longer. Did the soul grow too weary for the body? Did the body grow too weary for the soul? Was it a betrayal of organs and tissues, sinews and cells? Or was the betrayal that I did not care for my body the way I should have? That when I knew my body was screaming for aid, I ignored it, in service of what the soul wanted, which was the comfort of routine and familiarity. Who was the traitor, truly? The body? Or the soul?

“Most religious books are, right? Doom and hellfire and all that. But this stuck with me. My dad was a minister. He’d say the whole Book of Ecclesiastes was about how we put so much value into material things—possessions or places. Shit that isn’t permanent. But to have meaning in your life, you have to find it in something greater.”

“There’s more to life than the things in front of you,” Santiago says, and now, finally, I listen. “Sometimes we hold on to things we shouldn’t. People. Places. Emotions. We try to control all of it, when what we should be doing is trusting in something bigger.”

Rage can fuel you. But grief gnaws at you slow, a termite nibbling at your soul until you’re a whisper of what you used to be.