All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

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.

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.

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.

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

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.