Tomorrow will answer today's questions — Poems by Khatija Khan

I stumbled upon my old doll today.
Wiping the dust off her
glossy buttoned eyes and caressing
the cotton oozing out
of her torn hand, I said,
"You've changed a lot".
She might have wanted to say it back.
She might have wanted to ask me
if I still guard my oversensitive
heart from my own self,
if my mother's trauma and
my father's anger still sit
on my face perfectly,
if guilt is a crumpled organ
inside my belly,
if inheritance is the
ugliest thing to ever exist,
if worry beats like a second heart
in my chest,
if I miss the girl I have once been.

Pity bubbled my eyes.
I cleaned her up and stitched
her skin well. I combed her
woollen hair and recalled
the days I cried my heart out
on her shoulders and
sang her lullabies to sleep.
I revisited the days of milk moustaches
on her upper lips when I
made her drink from my glass.

Now she sits at
the corner of my couch.
Tomorrow she will have all her answers
when my daughter returns
from her school trip
-hopping like a kangaroo,
filling the room with innocent giggles,
carrying her mother's smile and
her father's gentleness,
when inheritance turns out
to be the prettiest thing to
ever exist,
when there is love and only love
in every spine and bone,
when I kiss my old photographs
without feeling guilty.

Guilt is a crumpled organ
inside my mother.
Inside my father,
it beats like a second heart.
I knitted my hope under my
mother's feet,
and now I am dissolving.
She says, "Humans are nothing but
convenience stores of guilt.
We share it and it multiplies."
Like a parasite, I always cling to her
waiting to engross myself into
poetry and optimism instead of
pressure cookers and Chinese saucers.
She has taught me that I should not be
a woman like her
because I want to tell my daughter
that- humans are nothing but
patties of kindness sandwiched
in buns of warmth. We share it
and it multiplies.
My father asks us to smile for pictures
even if we shed rivulets of regret in reality.
Our dinner table conversations end
up in massacres of hope.
There has never been blood but
we're covered in disguise from head to toe.
We break ourselves to save the cups.
We cry enough but never miss
onions for salad.
His childhood is a foggy memory for him.
He might have felt guilty for being
the person he is, as a child.
But who will tell him how I feel guilty
for being the person I am, as an adult?
How do I change the narrative
when all I am is silence?

My grandmother's poetry
percolates through the knuckles
of loneliness
and teaches me to break free
and migrate
to places no train can reach.
Days when the sunlight doesn't
knit its forehead into the windows
of those dying out of darkness,
there are cotton swabs sitting
unnoticed, ready to wipe
teary eyes and paint a language
which has no word for grief
but pools of happiness ready to soak
everything in them.
"I have known people
who live as softly as
a bud opens to bloom into a flower,
who love as gently as the fireflies
decorate the night sky,
who move as kindly as the wind does,
carrying pollen particles away
with itself,
who quiver the way a caterpillar
does within its cocoon and comes
out as a tiny butterfly.
I have decided to be one of them.
My love language is to pour
forgiveness over everyone who
couldn't love me the way I deserved.
I do not want to hate life
more than I love myself.
I will not wait for peace.
I will become its synonym.
The sky must surrender
now that I have finally grown wings."
- the last entry from her
treasured journal reads.
Dear Grandma, the only branch
that connects two trees of
generational gap is that of pain.
You have turned it into poetry.
Now your words are preserved
deep into the soil of my soul
and whenever I will write,
our lives will sprout side by side
and you will be immortalized.