alone in a crowded car

I am a different person outside this room with the dusty books and scribbled notebooks. I am another different person outside this entire house, with either the company of music or another person.

Anyone outside my own blood.

Years of being chased by the discipline master for my hair. I've hidden behind it for as long as I remember, and the only proof I once didn't care are the photos of my bangs at six, the centre partings at the age of nine.

After twenty-four years I finally found myself. I believe this is me, with these easy conversations at work and in another person's extended family. I believe this is me, with the kindness to strangers and a distant memory of social anxiety.

But with all the changes that came with a better relationship, I remain the same in some ways. I still turn my head to stare at trains and I still climb on the sides of moving escalators. I still get my hair caught in car doors and water bottles, and trip over the tip of my own sandals.

With a year and three months to go, I wonder if I will adapt well. It took my entire life to find the person I have become, with all the clumsiness and unnecessary depth. I doubt I can continue being this very person after marriage. I have to reflect wisdom and maturity. I have to turn up for family gatherings in a headscarf no matter how ugly I feel, with a smile on my face no matter how much I want to die at the moment.

And even after a day with your family, sitting between your sisters-in law with your nephew on my lap. Sharing a cup of mocha with your father and choosing my engagement ring with your mother.

I return home and everything falls back down. And I am doubting things will get better once I am part of your family. In fact I'm fearing it will be worse because I made this choice of becoming someone's wife, somebody else's someone. I will not be my own person anymore, and I can't stay in my bed crying because that's me being selfish.

So gone are the days of spinning around you or kneeling down to greet a cat or laughing hard with your friends. I will have to find another version of myself to live with, after spending my whole life finding the person I am today.

These are the things I tried telling you in the car today, but they went ignored with your eyes on the rearview mirrors and hands on the steering wheel. And then the car door opened and your mum asked me to squeeze behind instead, where I spent the better part clutching on to your nephew for another part of my life. Another part of me that I have yet to find and accept.

'afraid of time'

I am discovering new fears everyday. 

All the scribbles in my diaries from three years ago, all the cries of being 'afraid of time'. I get it now. Time is my captor, I'm scared of getting heavier with fear as I grow. I'm scared no amount of my kindness can erase all I've done.

The farther I run the quicker the past catches up with me. No ghosts by my bedside, or abnormal heartbeat rates, or past loves calling again. Nothing is chasing me but I am weighed down by everything.

What do I do when I'm thirty and my life revolves around the one person I want to see everyday? When I have a breathing child with him, looking at me with curious eyes that turn angry down the road. 

What do I do at fifty when my child starts coming home late? Or learns to answer back to her father and I have to watch the two loves of my life fighting? What do I do when she wishes someone else was her mother instead? 

What do I do at sixty when I am tired but I have to watch a new set of kids come into the world and grow again? 

Seventy, when the words on my books are suddenly too small for me to read. When my favourite songs from decades ago start to fade out and become white noise... when you start to forget what year we are in or where we live or who I am...?

What do I do at eighty when you are gone? You say I will have our kids, our grandkids, which just bred more fears; what if they don't like me? What if they don't want to hold my hand or even sit next to me because I smell of oil or I mumble too much? 

What do I do if I'm still alive at ninety and I've only spent my whole life wishing I was dead? 

After twenty-four years of dark, I admit my fear of my past. It will catch up to me one day. So what do I do when I am under a roof with the only person who knows how to calm me down, but I still awake to accelerated heartbeats and voices screaming in my head and fire on my skin?

I'm scared, Faruq, and I'm scared having you with me every day doesn't help. The world is still too loud for me and no wedding band will change that.