Sweet Dreams, Ladybug (Alternative Ending)

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

I wish I could have done it differently,

I wish we had more time.

I wish you and me together could have been enough to survive the world, the times, the people.

I wish effort alone could have been enough currency for survival.

Do you still call out to me in the middle of the night?

Do you still stay half-starved because dinner alone never felt like dinner at all?

Do you still replay those sleepless nights of conversations

held together with my inappropriate humour,

like something you shouldn’t have laughed at but did anyway?

You said it was my paintings that stole your heart.

We both knew it was the jokes.

Paintings only got me through the door.

The jokes kept stealing the keys.

Like all those times I told you it was your out-of-place canine I stumbled on, 

but teeth were just an excuse to watch you smile;

that sheepish laugh you had, like you got caught existing too honestly.

Like all those times you moved across tiled floors like a clueless penguin on thin ice,

like all those times you scolded cups and mugs and bowls and dishes

like they were emotionally available enough to listen,

like all those times you spoke to cats and dogs and plants and concrete roads

in your mother tongue, with absolute faith they understood you better than people did.

If I could, I would do it all again.

Not differently. Just again.

There was too much left unfinished.

Too many sentences abandoned mid-breath.

The only regret I have is I left carrying the leftovers of regrets;

living with regrets isn't easy, but ladybug —

dying with them is hard.

The dreams we almost believed into existence,

the snow-capped mountains we once stood beneath,

you pretending altitude was negotiable,

your vertigo arguing with the idea of height itself,

the prawns I nearly got killed over,

your allergy acting like it had legal authority—

the son we almost had, the daughter we almost named,

they are gone now,

like fingerprints on borrowed glass.

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

You know I’ve always found closures overrated.

Besides,

we were never good at goodbyes. 

We were better at interruptions.

At conversations that wandered past midnight and forgot to come home.

At making plans neither of us could afford.

At arguing with maps.

At promising ourselves one more year.

One more story.

One more chance.

One more ridiculous story we'd laugh about later.

Maybe that's all a goodbye ever is:

a conversation that ran out of tomorrows before it ran out of things to say.

Sweet Dreams, Ladybug

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

I wish I could have done it differently,

I wish we had more time.

I wish you and me together could have been enough to survive the world, the times, the people.

I wish effort alone could have been enough currency for survival.

Do you still call out to me in the middle of the night?

Do you still stay half-starved because dinner alone never felt like dinner at all?

Do you still replay those sleepless nights of conversations

held together with my inappropriate humour,

like something you shouldn’t have laughed at but did anyway?

You said it was my paintings that stole your heart.

We both knew it was the jokes.

Paintings only got me through the door.

The jokes kept stealing the keys.

Like all those times I told you it was your out-of-place canine I stumbled on, 

but teeth were just an excuse to watch you smile;

that sheepish laugh you had, like you got caught existing too honestly.

Like all those times you moved across tiled floors like a clueless penguin on thin ice,

like all those times you scolded cups and mugs and bowls and dishes

like they were emotionally available enough to listen,

like all those times you spoke to cats and dogs and plants and concrete roads

in your mother tongue, with absolute faith they understood you better than people did.

If I could, I would do it all again.

Not differently. Just again.

There was too much left unfinished.

Too many sentences abandoned mid-breath.

The only regret I have is I left carrying the leftovers of regrets;

living with regrets isn't easy, but ladybug —

dying with them is hard.

The dreams we almost believed into existence,

the snow-capped mountains we once stood beneath,

you pretending altitude was negotiable,

your vertigo arguing with the idea of height itself,

the prawns I nearly got killed over,

your allergy acting like it had legal authority, 

the son we almost had, the daughter we almost named,

they are gone now,

like fingerprints on borrowed glass.

Don’t wait up on me, ladybug.

You know I’ve always found closures overrated.

Besides,

we were never good at goodbyes.

Look at me:

caught in transit; not between leaving and being left,

but between what was real

and what we kept rehearsing until it felt like it was.

Safe Word

You say my safe word is "fuck you,"

as though I should be embarrassed by it.

Not realizing

it's pests like you

I reserve my "fuck you" for,

the way sane people reserve rat poison

for infestations,

not houseguests.

You hear "fuck you"

and mistake it for participation.

Which is adorable.

Because parasites have always confused survival

with relevance.

You flatter yourself

into believing you're troublesome enough

to occupy real estate in my thoughts.

You mistake irritation

for significance.

You mistake acknowledgment

for respect.

You mistake being noticed

for mattering.

A mosquito can interrupt sleep.

That doesn't make it memorable.

The problem with vermin

has never been appetite.

It is imagination.

Stay long enough

inside someone else's walls,

and eventually

you begin believing

the house was built around you.

It wasn't.

You arrived later.

Hungry.

Uninvited.

And immediately mistook consumption

for contribution.

That is the tragedy of pests.

Not that they feed.

That they mistake feeding

for purpose.

My beard bothers you.

Which is strange.

It has survived longer

than most of your convictions.

It grows in one direction,

year after year,

without rephrasing itself every season

to match whichever outrage

is currently paying dividends.

You complain the music is too loud.

It isn't.

It's the lyrics.

Volume never frightened you.

Meaning did.

Because noise can be ignored.

Recognition cannot.

You wanted to be seen.

You wanted to be heard.

You wanted to be important.

And yet somehow,

despite all the shouting,

all the posturing,

all the elaborate theatre of indignation,

you accumulated

the way dust accumulates:

everywhere,

gradually,

and only becoming visible

when sunlight enters the room.

That is why my "fuck you"

offends you so deeply.

Not because it is cruel.

Because it is economical.

It denies you

the one thing

you have spent your entire life demanding:

importance.

So yes,

for your sake,

let's agree

my safe word is "fuck you."

What is yours?

No —

don't answer.

I already know.

Victimhood.

The difference is,

mine ends conversations.

Yours starts them.

Mine is a boundary.

Yours is a business model.

One asks to be left alone.

The other cannot survive

without an audience.

And that,

more than anything,

is why one of us sleeps

and the other 

keeps crashing into ill-lit candles.

As for safe words,

I don't need one.

Safe words imply mercy.

Mercy implies negotiation.

Consequences do not negotiate.

They arrive: 

no disclaimers, no statutory warnings.

And I am the consequence.

Welcome To The Sisterhood (Unabridged)

I’m a small-town girl from a big damn city.

My mother sells overpriced, undercooked food for breakfast

to people who sell the poor, skin and bone,

over whiskey on imported dinner tables.

People like my father.

My grandmother, born when the 20th century was still learning to speak alphabets,

could never voice her opinions.

So I, her befitting 21st-century granddaughter,

peddle her struggles as mine,

because what good is pedigree

if you can’t inherit convenience?

Convenience is currency for the entitled.

And what good is entitlement

if you can’t package imagined sob stories

and sell them at twice the price?

But dare you call my bluff,

dare you question my bias dressed as fact,

dare you disagree with anything

I have already anointed as the only acceptable truth,

you’re a fucking monster.

I come from a state the country considers irrelevant,

so I learned early how not to be.

How to make my existence as visible as daily news.

I learned to camouflage as seasonal fruit;

different seasons, different selves, 

because trading spines for reptilian malleability is the only language

that passes for significance, in capitalist economies.

And when you don’t come from generational wealth,

and the only way to monetise your paper-rich education

is to preach disguised as teaching,

because that is all survival allows,

you learn something else.

You learn to intimidate what intimidates you.

And so I did.

And strangely, it works.

So I repeated it.

Like addicts repeat chemicals.

But dare you see through it, 

dare you look past borrowed culture,

plagiarised intellect,

inflated certainty stitched together from necessity, 

you become the abomination.

I tell people I am a doctor,

because truth alone does not carry prestige.

What good is a doctor who does not save lives;

only grinds herbs and plants into meaning,

calling approximation healing

because language forgives uncertainty?

I tell myself I am a poet,

and repeat it often enough

for repetition to resemble identity.

Because subtleties die easily

in the noise of mediocrity pretending to be volume.

And I have learned this much:

when you cannot convince them,

confuse them.

But do not mistake confusion for credibility.

The moment you hold up a mirror,

you stop being a storyteller

and become a fabrication under observation.

I am not defined by profession.

No one is, 

until they have to justify themselves.

My teeth are stained in phallic hatred, 

my gums reek of blood and testosterone, 

from all the penises I've have rid men of, 

my voice sharpened into argument

because softness never paid rent.

I find problems everywhere;

from my father's dentures to my mother's sarees.

I name them, shape them, expand them, 

until even coincidence feels like conspiracy.

And I call that clarity.

I call it truth.

I call it survival refined into ideology.

But dare you call it what it is:

a carefully maintained illusion of authority, 

and I will make sure I dismantle you

before you dismantle the story.

We are four sisters.

Of the many.

Of a sisterhood.

A sisterhood that swears to erase every place it enters

of men —

because men do not make good sisters,

and anything that does not make a good sister

is not inclusive, and must be misogyny.

A sisterhood that swears to reduce men to ash,

because we descend from the witches your patriarchy couldn’t burn.

Our grandmothers’ suffering is our inheritance,

and your grandfathers’ sins, your lineage.

So what if a century has passed?

So what if you had no hand in it?

We will burn the whole herd of you down anyway, 

and from its ashes, we will build bricks.

Bricks for a sisterhood that sees nothing,

hears nothing,

says nothing, 

except what it believes to be true today.

And dare you call it a facade, this revolution of ours, 

we will rebirth you just so we can burn you again.

And when law enforcement finally arrives,

running awfully late, because old habits die hard, 

we will call it proof of oppression.

And ourselves, 

the martyrs of a forgotten history, 

the lesser witches who were dead in skin but kept breathing in soul.

Welcome to sisterhood, Adolf.

Welcome To The Sisterhood

I’m a small-town girl from a big damn city.

My mother sells overpriced, undercooked food for breakfast

to people who sell the poor, skin and bone,

over whiskey on imported dinner tables.

People like my father.

My grandmother who was born when the 20th century was still learning to speak alphabets,

could never voice her opinions.

So I, her befitting 21st-century granddaughter,

peddle her struggles as mine,

because what good is pedigree

if you can’t inherit convenience?

Convenience is currency for the entitled.

And what good is entitlement

if you can’t package imagined sob stories

and sell them at twice the price?

But dare you call my bluff, 

dare you question my bias dressed as fact, 

dare you disagree with anything

I have already anointed as the only acceptable truth, 

you’re a fucking monster.

I come from a state the country considers irrelevant,

so I learned early how not to be.

How to make my existence as visible as daily news.

I learned to camouflage as seasonal fruit;

different seasons, different selves, 

because trading spines for reptilian malleability is the only language

that passes for significance, in capitalist economies.

And when you don’t come from generational wealth,

and the only way to monetize your paper-rich education

is to preach disguised as teaching, 

because that is all turncoats can afford, 

you learn something else.

You learn to intimidate what intimidates you.

And so, I did.

And strangely, it works.

So I repeated it.

Like addicts repeat chemicals.

But dare you see through it, 

dare you look past the borrowed culture,

the plagiarized intellect,

the inflated certainty stitched together from survival, 

you become the abomination.

We are two sisters.

Two of the many.

Of a sisterhood.

A sisterhood that swears to erase every place it enters

of men —

because men do not make good sisters,

and anything that does not make a good sister

is not inclusive, and must be misogyny.

A sisterhood that swears to reduce men to ash,

because we descend from the witches your patriarchy couldn’t burn.

Our grandmothers’ suffering is our inheritance,

and your grandfathers’ sins, your lineage.

So what if a century has passed?

So what if you had no hand in it?

We will burn the whole herd of you down anyway, 

and from its ashes, we will build bricks.

Bricks for a sisterhood that sees nothing,

hears nothing,

says nothing, 

except what it believes to be true today.

And dare you call it a facade, this revolution of ours, 

we will rebirth you just so we can burn you again.

And when law enforcement finally arrives,

running awfully late, because old habits die hard, 

we will call it proof of oppression.

And ourselves, 

the martyrs of a forgotten history, 

the lesser witches who were dead in skin but kept breathing in soul.

Welcome to sisterhood, Adolf.

Heroes Need Wars & Wars Need Enemies

There's something beautiful about bullies.

They disguise narcissism as sacrifice.

Sell themselves as messiahs 

prepared to take a bullet for the greater good, 

then spend years 

convincing you there's a war to begin with.

A war so urgent, 

so existential, 

you must empty every last bullet 

before the enemy even reaches for a weapon.

Because proximity is dangerous.

The closer people stand to one another, 

the greater the chance they discover 

there were no bullets,

no guns,

no grenades.

More importantly, 

no enemies.

Bullies build enemies the way children build dollhouses:

with imagination.

Walls where none existed. 

Families that never lived there. 

Entire worlds assembled to justify ownership.

Their talent is not violence.

Violence is merely the ribbon on the package.

Their talent is architecture.

They construct a fiction large enough to rent out as reality.

And when someone points at the scaffolding and calls it a lie,

they are offended.

Not because truth hurts.

Because outrage has a far better return on investment.

A wounded ego can always masquerade as a wounded cause.

And before you notice,

your messiah becomes your martyr.

The martyr who took the bullet so you wouldn't have to.

Never mind that nobody fired.

Never mind that the battlefield was mostly carpentry.

Never mind that every corpse was produced by people trying to survive a war they had only heard about.

That is the genius of bullies.

They do not conquer reality.

They recruit enough witnesses to outnumber it.

And once a lie acquires a census, it begins applying for citizenship.

Soon, the fiction has borders.

Flags.

Anthems.

Heroes.

Traitors.

Heretics.

Infiltrators.

Every successful enemy eventually becomes public infrastructure.

And that is the problem.

Because a story built upon enemies requires enemies to survive.

The supply must never stop.

Sooner or later, all the strangers are gone.

Sooner or later, the circle tightens.

The traitor.

The heretic.

The infiltrator.

The unbeliever.

The insufficiently loyal.

Eventually, the only enemy left inside the story

is the author.

And so they are buried

in the very grave 

they dug for somebody else,

still insisting,

through the settling dirt,

that the revolution succeeded.

The Effigy That Wouldn't Burn

Stabbing a man with a knife

is surprisingly easy.

About as difficult

as scooping frozen ice cream

with a metal spoon.

A little pressure.

A little persistence.

A little willingness

to ignore the screaming.

Entire lives have ended

for less effort.

But there is something about a man

you can kill

much quicker than you can kill him.

His identity.

Kill that,

and what remains is mostly anatomy.

A collection of organs

fulfilling contractual obligations.

A heartbeat paying rent

to a corpse still awaiting paperwork.

Mine wasn't killed.

Mine suffered

a failed assassination attempt.

Repeatedly.

Knives buried so deep

they snapped inside the wounds.

Twisted.

Abandoned.

Left to rust beneath the skin

until the blood itself

began tasting metallic.

It wasn't murder.

Murder is honest.

Murder admits intent.

These people wanted something far more sophisticated.

They wanted revisions,

until only mutation remained.

They wanted

to turn a man into a rumour, 

a reputation into graffiti, 

a voice into background noise, 

a name into an apology, 

to assassinate a person

without ever having to explain

where the body went.

And they almost succeeded.

Almost.

Funny thing about identity.

It heals incorrectly.

Scar tissue develops opinions.

And opinions, 

unlike wounds, 

do not close neatly.

They linger. 

They compare notes. 

They remember dates 

other people misplace intentionally.

Today,

I stand here

with affidavits where the weapons should be.

Chronologies.

Statements.

Evidence.

Witnesses.

And suddenly,

everyone discovers morality.

Cute, isn't it?

Now you speak of restraint.

Now you speak of forgiveness.

Now you speak of healing.

Now you speak of collateral damage.

Now you speak of consequences.

As though consequences

were a natural disaster

and not a receipt of owed dues.

As though stitches were an acceptable substitute for skin.

Funny how morality always arrives after the forensic reports.

Where were these sermons

when the knives were still entering flesh?

Where was all this moral architecture 

when demolition was being conducted without permits?

Where were your righteous amygdalas

when character assassination

was being conducted

like a community development project?

At what exact point

does spectatorship become participation?

How many witnesses

does a lynching require

before it qualifies as a constitutional joke?

You watched.

That is the part

you keep trying to misplace.

You watched.

Crowds are fascinating that way.

Nobody wants blood on their hands.

So they outsource the stabbing

and volunteer for the audience.

Everybody wants innocence.

Nobody wants responsibility.

Everybody wants innocence. 

Nobody wants fingerprints.

Everybody wants the story.

Nobody wants authorship.

Everybody wants the execution. 

Nobody wants handwriting on the warrant.

You stood there

while they picked at me

like crows discovering roadkill.

Piece by piece.

Excuse by excuse.

Joke by joke.

Lie by lie.

Until even my shadow

looked exhausted.

And now,

when consequences finally learn their names,

you wish to discuss ethics.

No.

Save your morality.

Save your wisdom.

Save your motivational posters

and your discount spirituality.

I have lost appetite for all of it.

Because there are only two categories here.

Those who twisted the knife.

And those who took measurements.

One committed the act.

The other filed it under acceptable losses..

The only difference between them and me

is they believed

power could bury accountability.

They believed institutions

were decoration.

Laws were suggestions.

Consequences were mythology.

And justice was merely a bedtime story

poor people told themselves

to make sleep arrive faster.

The only difference between them and me

is they mistook silence for absence.

Mistook patience for escape.

Mistook filing cabinets for graveyards.

They looked at paperwork the way arsonists look at smoke — certain the evidence was leaving with the wind.

They believed archives forgot. That dates decayed. That signatures expired. That memory was merely a witness with poor attendance.

And so they behaved with the confidence of people who mistake an unopened door for a missing room.

I disagreed.

I still do.

Because the amusing thing about law

is that it does not require rage.

It does not require forgiveness.

It does not require closure.

It does not require healing.

It does not even require satisfaction.

It merely requires evidence.

And evidence,

unlike guilt,

does not suddenly develop a conscience

when the invoice arrives.

So no.

This is not revenge.

Revenge is emotional.

Revenge seeks catharsis.

Revenge wants blood.

I want records.

Dates.

Statements.

Evidence.

Witnesses.

A trail so long

it stops resembling paperwork

and starts resembling a procession.

The same constitution

they believed themselves above

is now the sound

they mistake for thunder.

Not because I became a monster.

But because they spent so long

trying to manufacture one

they forgot something crucial.

Monsters require belief.

Evidence does not.

Monsters are anecdotal.

Evidence is matter of fact.