The exhaustion comes from maintaining the frame of freedom. Maintaining that structure above your head, around your body, that gives you the freedom to move a bit. Move enough. It isn’t your full wingspan, it isn’t everything you could do. The exhaustion comes from knowing that it’s only a fraction of your potential but also knowing that, if you don’t maintain that fraction of space, there will be no room at all.

Liveability

This is a queer problem. It requires a queer solution.

People are being killed. All kinds of people in all kinds of places. Targeted. Planned. Angry mob murders. Serial murders. And there is no real sense that can be made, no coherent thread that can be pulled between everything so that we can say, yes, this is why, let’s just stop this one thing and…

So the problem of fear and the problem of the closet and the problem of being suddenly hurt or killed one day are all the same problem. How do you live your life in this country and feel like you’ll actually live? How do you act yourself?

Let me become specific.

As a bisexual cisgender woman from an upper-middle class background, I have a lot of privilege. I’m aware of this privilege and I’m aware that others do not have some or any of these privileges. Therefore I have thus far imagined that I’ll be fine. Finer than others. I will not go hungry, barring absolute catastrophe. I’ll be okay.

But it turns out, I’m not okay. Because wellbeing is not the sum of privileges and misery is not the division, subtracted, dispersion of them. We are not determined by what has power over us, or what attempts to exert power over us. We are affected by it – but we’re not determined by it.

I have been and am being determined largely by fear. For years now. I don’t really talk about who and how I am, I don’t like people to know. I hid and dissemble. This is healthy, to an extent, in a highly homophobic, highly misogynistic society. It is healthy to dissemble; and, in different circumstances, it is commanded – takiya in Shi’i thought.

And as I imagine my future, as Lovely and I plan the next 1, 5, 20 years together, as we imagine our child’s life and our work and our universe together, I become so afraid that it’s not a liveable life.

I wonder how many queer women of any kind of means have left the country.

I wonder how many queer women want to leave.

I don’t ever want to leave. I don’t know where I’d go. I’ve lived in the US and I can’t really stand it. I don’t know how the US feels free to people. It doesn’t feel free to me. Every moment in policed.

And then at home every moment is endangered. Is dangerous. Someone somewhere might say something.

But I have to live. We all have to live. So how do we live a life?

This is a queer problem. There’s no life if you’re hiding. Being smart, yes, strategic, yes, but hiding, no. Hiding no longer works. Or rather, pretending. Pretending that if I conform, behave, act like a proper citizen, a proper Pakistani woman, look enough like it, become a facsimile, it will be fine. They won’t notice. I’ll be able to slip by. I’ll survive.

This does not feel like survival. This feel like slow suffocation.

So no. We don’t do this anymore. I’m queer. I am a queer person. I do not fit. I will not fit.

And that is how I must live. Acknowledging that is what will make life liveable.

This.

I wish you loved people who really listen to you. Listen to your silences as well as the things you said. Waited for you to come to it – whatever it is. Had the time, really, for you to be you. We’re not all the same speed. Thank God.

Things to Do While the Cat’s Away

1. Realize that your partner is not actually a cat, nor are you any kind of mouse-type person.
2. Take no longer than 6 hours to realize also that, in fact, all that notion of partying while the cat/partner’s away is total bollocks because all you’re really going to do is more of what you already do while she’s at work, ie. sit around in your underpants eating mangoes and watching shows you’ve already seen.
3. Start working 9 to 5, to the bafflement of yourself, your family, your friends and, most of all, your co-workers, who only expect you to come in when your livelihood or your favourite thing ever (this week) is under threat.
4. Watch some more shows.
5. Imagine how you will rearrange the furniture while you wait for a new episode of Castle or Vampire Diaries to buffer.
6. Send your partner disgustingly googly email messages.
7. Try to contact your partner, fail to connect, miss her call, call her back, miss her again, go to bed frustrated and with your eyes twitching from too much Vampire Diaries.
8. Go to bed at midnight, that is. Not at 5a.m. like you used to when your partner was there sleeping consolingly next to you and you could get yelled at in the morning for fucking up your sleep cycle and managing to never spend more waking time than sleeping time together with her in any given day.
9. Write really long convoluted sentences.
10. Wake up at 8a.m. to drag your sorry, lonely, pointless ass to work so that you can feed your new and necessarily short-lived vanila-9-to-5-office-going fetish until you can’t stand your own pale tasteless waste of a life anymore.

Yes, I know she’ll be back in a week. Fuck off.

Love Dhakka

Penny Mathews

This is a crap culture to fall in love in. I kind of get why people will voluntarily go for arranged marriages. There’s no place anywhere to troll for potential mates. Gay men, you would think, have it easier, but actually, while gay men have a lot of places to find sex, there aren’t that many avenues for true love, or even true-enough love, in our culture. There is, however, a lot of fucking and running.

With straight people, there are more avenues – you can go out on dates and have relationships that are acceptable in culture. But even there, you have to fit a very narrow, tight definition of “girl” and “boy” to be successful, and that success tends to be outward more than inward. Macho guys and girlie girls. No variations allowed.

It’s luck and patience, finding a partner in love, and really hard work sticking together. And I think that’s true for gays, bis and straights – here anyway.