16.11.2025
I made chocolate banana bread with this recipe which Leena shared with me. However, I lessened the amount of semi-sweet chocolate chips which the recipe called for, instead opting for dark chocolate. I think that is why the banana bread was not that sweet and even a little bitter, with an after taste which was kind of sour. I substituted the 1/4 cup unsalted butter with oil and I think it did not change much. We only had a pinch of baking soda left, so I think the texture of the bread was not the best and could have been much much better. I could not really taste the banana, except some of the chunks here and there. Overall, it was fine and I loved how crispy the exterior was. It tasted the best while it was warm out of the oven. I might make some changes next time. Also, I do want to try making a banana bread without chocolate + cocoa powder.
17.11.2025
On the way home, I was seated beside the open window after a long time. The winter air feels new but empty. The entire sky felt washed under the warmth of orange and every single tree looked like it was preparing for something to happen. I looked at the watch of the person sitting in front of me. I wonder if we say things after we are influenced by others or if the things we say are truly ours. I keep rereading sections from c&s; obsession goes well with non-chalance. I ate the last chunk of sweet potato today with salt and red chilli powder sprinkled on it. I wanted to eat a persimmon but it can wait for tomorrow; the riper the sweeter and pulpier. I keep slowly reading the short story Visions which is a part of the anthology Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo. How memory cooperates and is coordinated around space and presence of what is within space is always fascinating. What if everything is not just a superimposition of everything that has come before.
19.11.2025
In my dream last night I was in a train and it was strange yet comforting. I slept in the train and felt the weight of everything slip away from me. It landed where I had not been. I want to sit in that gloomy and insincere train again. The train stopped when it wanted to and looked into the faces of everyone who stood on the platform. I was with Ibrahim on that train and our parents kept looking at us from beyond the windows. While in some sense it felt familiar, it felt like I had gone back in time to the wrong place and with some misplaced emotion nudging its way in. Abstract talk gets me nowhere, but the darkness of that train, its difficult seats and its eating up my memory will stay with me for a long time.
22.11.2025
I had a strange dream yesterday, I was standing at a window and I kept looking at the snow that was piled up at the edge of every window away from me. It looked like the back of nano's house, and it was cold, so cold that it never felt like I was standing in the cold and everything around me kept fluttering onto my face. I was looking and yet everything was obscured. I was hidden behind the clothesline, as I hung all the cold clothes in a winter dawn, the damp clothes wet against my face as I leaned my chin on the clothesline, smoking a cigarette. It all held a feeling of wistfulness and melancholy, something out of the film Maborosi (dir. Kore-eda), the purple outlines, the grey long landscapes, the small burn against the vaster and opening skies. It kept swaying around me, and the cigarette burned, for long, and it kept furling around its straight edge without falling away. I have been reading this for the past few days before going to sleep, and it fills me with unutterable melancholy, something to hold onto for a long time, that feeling of slipping away & slowly gathering everything in one place and then to let it fall away in that place itself. For how long can one rely on dreams to keep the love going, for the fantasy to remain, the emotion to linger and stay?
02.12.2025
I have been free from assignment obligations for the past 3 days. I have watched 2 movies; the innocents (1961) & late spring (1949). I cannot stop looking at what failure one brings into the family being a part of the family, wanting to emulate the part of a family, having to socially amend your life so it fits the narrative of the family - in its violence and resignation, in its deception and abuse, in its suppression and detestment. I wonder where one is trying to reach when reconciling witn the socially acceptable form / structure of the family. The savior, the wife, the mother, the fitted, the vase, the candle, the falling petal. Why do we insist on losing ourselves because of our suppressions? What guilt holds us back? What self-sacrificial nonsense do we think we are a part of?
03.12.2025
I keep thinking about Noriko's bowed body and head, her pushing her body into itself, moving downwards and inwards as she keeps accepting the, perhaps jarring to me, words which her father keeps saying -- almost a circulation of words than a coherent expression of what he wants to say. I keep thinking of resignation and the fear of submitting to something that comes from this impatience that is impossible to explain. I keep thinking of how my self-imposed reflections distorts how I see the movie. I keep thinking of lines from the poems I have been reading and listening to: Agnes' Song, saw an angel kick a snail and Still. I keep thinking of all the violence and beauty that is intertwined in all our lives. The filth which follows; the love that creates, the gutting, the defining, the molding. I keep thinking of the beautiful vases in the innocents and late spring, they give a clarity to the people, the object gives meaning to the subject which has turned away from it, hasn't seen it, does not see it, keeps away from it. What objects are we all controlled with? Each time I listen to Agnes' Song I cannot stop my tears; all that we notice in life comes to an end. All that we have seen has an end to it, even if we continue to see it or seek it.
31.12.2025
It is the last day of the year and I am not sure why the watery tiredness in me, the separation from language, the want in me, the imagined inside me, all won't become suppressed. I wish they could, I wish there was retribution for the things which have left an impact on me; I wish the things which have swayed me would go otherwise. I am always waiting for myself to write the way that I used to and yet it has become tiresome, I have left this place thats blank in my head and it lays inside me untouched, unscathed, unrefined. It doesn't have any language or image, no object sits in it except a vague feeling that can never become a word. I have regretted a lot, I regret still. I have lost a lot of myself, I don't wish to bring myself to another year and it keeps feeling more hollow the more I fix myself to get onto the next day. I am nothing. I am everything that has ever happened inside me. All that exists outside me becomes transparent.
26.01.2026
today was tiring yet so full, full in a way that i don't feel very often in the routine that comes with office -- gushing, tumbling, escaping happiness, shock and sadness all at once. i went to my friend, leena's, house & all that we really did was talk and talk, about our households and happenings, dreams and their own already experienced future and a reality unreal to us in time, the time of eight years that has passed since we have known each other; the four years from graduation not knowing what to do, haven't have done all that much except what comes with the slow eventual passing of time, lagging -- it all feels like a big disintegration when i sit with that time and all the lack in it alone. her mom made soup and leena warmed it up for us, it tasted just like my mom would make with a tad bit of more vinegar than we add in our recipe. her dad handed us half two maltas and they were so juicy and soft and wrinkly, i love their sunny taste ... i will miss her, strange, i feel this dwelling saturated excitement in me, yet its so mired with sentimentality and the need to separate myself from emotions as they come -- with all the substantiality of my life falling away from me. i had the orange cake mama made, and she packed gajar ka halwa for colleagues tomorrow, i wonder if its to let them know something that they wanted to show with the gajar ke halwe they brought today -- im always aware of this underlying current of competition when it comes to food
26.02.2026
it has been slowly growing humid, ive been having a difficult time writing anything down without it dissolving into some mess of words, even writing a small diary entry feels like i am pulling a rope somewhere from inside me where it has wrapped and folded and tucked itself into. i reread some pages of aoi uroko to suna no machi and was struck by the elongated paneling, the entrapped feeling that gives way to emptiness, the flowers and plants, weeds and trees that erupt from above and below panels, from between staircases and above houses, from rooftops and classroom windows - everything in this world is brimming with the sketch-like feeling of the style, and yet the panels contain and break and open and close with so much certainty that everything comes to feel solid, and grounded, even for a work that's about water, it's depth of dakrness and its eternal shifting presence. its a humid work. these days my hair keeps getting frizzier everyday, perhaps i am missing the sea myself and want to keep seeing it again in the work as a substitute for the real thing that has gone under rubbish and rubble & the only places which exist aarare faraway and require payment to visit; i miss and sense in the work the lap of water at the feet, the dismissal of what is around you as soon as the water comes up to you. the days are getting longer and wider, i am hanging by some invisible thread of a lamp that refuses to click open. somewhere inside me, the mechanism of living everyday has stopped. and i am too tired to go back and fix it.
08.04.2026
it has been quite a few splintered and scattered weeks, i am trying to reconcile myself with my writing and yet i find that i am not made for writing as that act and process of writing itself requires one to come back and contemplate with oneself, and at the moment i remain too hesitant, cowardly even, to return to myself and contemplate what i had written. and perhaps this is why i cannot seem to bring out what i want to write about seoha as a work (perhaps a short 500 word essay) digitally, and yet as i wrote on in my diary about a film i watched two days ago, everything spilled onto the pages quite easily & i again suppose it is because i don't obligate myself to return to those pages, specifically because my handwriting is ineligible even to me and moreso because i haven't ever spent time flipping back to pages; what i remember can remain with me, and what i forget can leave me unless it wants to come back to me. looked at from afar, this seems dismissive of writing and reading, but both require confrontation that i cannot bring myself to see through digitally, i want that revelation to be perfected without understanding the placement of anything. and that is primarily why i don't write as much anymore. though i should, it brings me closer to myself than when i remain alone with my thoughts. i am however utterly fascinated by the language of on the beach at night alone and how it resists confinement and/or division, how it places love and life as antonyms to each other, and dream as a synonym of life with love being that of death.
24.05.2026
i feel at quite a long distance from myself these days, ive been standing at an edge somewhere looking away from my life again and again and cannot bring myself to grab at anything from my life, that despair really keeps lingering and disappearing; yet in the midst of everything ive been confusingly enjoying getting sick - mostly a series of pains in my body, some recurring from last year, some from years back, some new, some dull but insistent. being in pain lands me somewhere, i can bring myself to be somewhat aware of my body, and the way im with other people when im aware of myself, it gets me somewhere that the eroding precision of my daily routine cannot. as i live more, and think more and meet more and love more, i feel a sense of loss that keeps rushing in with everything, not in the sense of a creation of gaps but moreso the clarity of a hole that has already been there, wide and warm yet enough behind me that i could have, and had, not chosen to look at it. i keep seeing myself disappear into those holes again and again, i have lived a meeting or a loss once and the repetition of it brings me more nervousness than anything else, i am repeating the same ways of doing things, but i can never do them as i had first seen myself go across and into that thing; its not the newness or the change which frightens me, but more how i can do it differently in a way that makes me forget the previous ways in which i had done it. its a small thing, its a tremendous, enormous thing that keeps tangling itself inside me. i am away and not there, i am away and not fully where i had previously been. everything from behind me keeps falling into that same gap, and i find the widening hole remove all the vulnerability that i had accumulated over the years into myself.
24.06.2026
i am not sure where to place myself these days; amidst everything i feel wholly dishonest with who i am showing myself to be, and how distant that feeling is from how everything keeps regurgitating back against the repeptivness i have let have access to me. more than anything, i am thinking about why i flew out to lahore for perhaps no reason at all but only as a way to be away from everyone for at least a day and a half. but that thought itself feels like a postponed imperative to put my impulsivity in some sort of sensical box. if we look at the technicalities, it was just for an interview - that i am not sure i even had an interest in (i keep trying to categorize my impulsive decisions as necessary), but when it came down to it, i left the interview building feeling more displaced from the experience than anything else. the city kept bumping and pushing against something in me; perhaps my expectations had been terribly high so to visit someplace that did not seem much different at all -- not in color, neither in people and not even the buildings nor the restaurants nor markets -- i felt even more disoriented, despite everyone's insistent that it was a much different city than karachi. i keep thinking of wanting to get away from this city but if i keep feeding my imagination more and again, it would maybe just echo the same disorientation i had felt two weeks back. the best part about it all was to be sitting amongst everyone, none of whom i knew at all; from my 8 walks from my apartment room to my interview building, to the restaurant and to the gate, i recognized nothing, everything kept itself safely similar and yet nothing jumped out with familiarity to me; and yet nothing jumps at me with familiarity in this city either. everything touches me; nothing moves me in any way i want it to; when it comes to politics and morality i can clearly create a demarcation of what i believe and understand to be wrong and right; but when it comes to, for example, my own fears or limits or ambitions, everything turns into a vague sense of frantic and substandard uncertainty; all the lines from me and in me dissolve and i do not where to place a certain moment in, on a scale of how much it dislodges me from my usual place and where it can lead me to if i keep it at the forefront of my affectations. what should remain as mundanity to me; what can be recalled as miraculous and where do i start creating distinctions.
04.07.2026
my days remain unconsumed by anything substantial, i keep forgetting the little things; i think of a phrase that recognizes me as much as i recognize it and the next minute i have forgotten my affinity towards it or the feeling that arose for a short moment and then dissipated without any resistance. last saturday, i went out to eat with a friend and she mentioned the necessity of depending on small happinesses to go through some days, or even everyday, and i nodded along to her sentences but somewhere in me there is always this lingering dissatisfaction with my own happiness, and the room i make for it or what it makes me forgive; it doesn't feel mine at all, in the way my memory flinching does not feel like mine in any way.
i have been hoping and trying to finish an essay on the manhwa seoha (wr. yakkuk) but my words don't sit still anymore, all bouncing bubbles trapped in some sort of container where they neither burst nor stick or bump into each other to form something coherent nor give in to anything that surrounds them; i have been pursuing after this essay since march but it still remains loose, like waking up after a mid-day nap and feeling like a chunk of your skin is hanging off of you and has stuck somewhere on the floor.
speaking of floors, i could not sleep at all the other day after a long-winded call-conversation with a friend [about my greed, our new yet explainable fear of plane crashes, lakes and lobsters, and a lot else] and in between my thirty or forty tossings around the bed, i had tried to think of a short story which revolved a vanished sound of footsteps in the upstairs apartment. but other than that i couldn't place the main character anywhere, why did they obsess over the vanished footsteps? could they think of into why the footsteps disappeared? was it a specific time period or forever? could this all be not leapt into a simple explanation of leaving and/or dying? does a bland routine make one more hasty or more unsettled to the little missteps? does a blasé attitude compromise on their morality? what sort of morality is this character hinged onto? after asking myself endless questions i remembered i haven't written a short story in eight years and probably will not be writing one anytime soon; but i would like it to stay in the drafts somewhere; even that little lancing of my curiosity might reconcile me with whatever it is that i keep scouring into myself for; maybe this once i will stop this thorough futile search for what i have to become and instead look towards those seemingly silly questions again.
i have also been reading another anthology of kiriko nananan's; itaitashii love. this time i have been captivated by the obscurity of faces within all the stories: some turned away fully, some so zoomed into that the expression becomes indecipherable or sometimes the body parts start blurring into each other, looking far away, a body at the corner of a street or holed up somewhere in an apartment, crumpled away by clothes or their lover's faces. the stories become repetitive at one point however -- lovers fighting and drifting, slipping back to each other, or a lingering feeling inappropriate to stagger forward with in the present, the embrassment that comes with exposure and vulnerability and a lot else that her previous anthology already explored and so i think that takes away some of their charm even though they retain their fluidity and intensity. but i still cannot help but open the anthologies again and again, and see how love or sex makes one move away from the normativity they have settled for; origination of a certain capacity the characters find in themselves either ends up becoming a halt in the trajectory or a reinscription onto their palimpsest.