All My Rage

by Sabaa Tahir

Basically, Gödel is saying that most theorems are bullshit. Which I hope is true. Because Chachu has a theorem about me, too. Chachu’s Theorem of the Future, I call it. It’s pretty simple: Noor + College = Never going to happen.

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.

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 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 bottle my rage. Shove it deep in my head. Anger won’t help anything. I don’t even know who I’m mad at. Chachu? Toufiq Uncle? Jamie? Misbah Auntie? God? Myself? Forgive, Misbah Auntie told me when she was dying. Her last attempt to guide me, to help me. Forgive. But it makes no sense to me. Who do I forgive, Auntie Misbah? How do I forgive?

All my rage seethes inside me and there’s no place for it to go.

I 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.”