AREEBAH AHSAN

By twenty-four I could make my voice sound sunlight-warm over the phone.

No trembling.

No evidence.

I think women should receive medals for this sort of thing.

Not for beauty or childbirth or softness, but for sounding normal

while something acidic keeps eating through them from the inside.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“No problem at all.”

The office was refrigerated like a morgue.

Men glided through meetings carrying urgency in their mouths like lit cigarettes.

Their requests bred overnight in my inbox.

Excel sheets opened white and endless as hospital corridors.

Sometimes I would stare at the blue light of my laptop

until my reflection floated back at me from the screen.

A woman-shaped exhaustion.

Blue around the mouth.

Still typing.

Still, I thought:

Good. This means I am becoming useful.

As a child, I thought adulthood belonged to girls who had never imagined

their own death before puberty.

Girls who did not stand barefoot

on rooftops staring down at concrete

while their little sister played at being a child

whose mothers served rice for dinner

with tiny sighs of disdain

Money moved strangely in our house.

Loud, like another parent with bad temper Sometimes I think it raised me more than own father

I have heard vases shatter against wood over the cost of a mathematics tutor.

I have seen silence spread across dinner tables after someone asked for something small.

Shampoo.

New shoes.

Extra notebooks.

In our house every need arrived carrying shame on its back.

Even now I cannot buy cherries without briefly feeling fraudulent.

As though my father might appear in the doorway holding a receipt as long as a burial shroud

Years passed.

I began spending long hours at jobs that made me feel necessary.

I ate badly. Slept lightly.

But it still felt better than asking for things.

The money from my internship barely mattered in any real way.

Sometimes it paid for coffee, transport, stupid little things I could have survived without.

I earned just enough money to become dangerous to myself.

I started buying things without rehearsing explanations beforehand.

A coffee.

A lip tint.

Strawberries in winter.

Tiny reckless acts.

But I remember the strange privacy of it.

Nobody asking why.

Nobody sighing afterward.

Nobody pricing my body against the electricity bill.

I remember standing at counters

waiting for my card to check out

feeling something inside me unlatch slightly.

Like a window opening in a burning house.

Like an animal briefly forgetting it had once been cornered.

I remember thinking:

So this is what freedom tastes like.

Small.

Temporary.

A little like burnt coffee.

But fear is patient.

It survives migration.

Employment.

Monthly salaries.

Nicely furnished apartments.

Even now adulthood feels strangely similar to being fourteen.

The same panic.

Just better dressed.

Half of me answers emails

and pays bills and speaks professionally in meetings.

The other half still prepares for catastrophe before entering rooms,

still reaches automatically for the cheapest item on the shelf.

Still feels relief when nobody sounds angry.

Sometimes I think survival is not a wound.

More like mildew.

Something that blooms quietly in dark corners and learns the shape of the house before you do.

Sometimes at night I feel it turning softly inside me.

Wet.

Breathing.

Waiting for the walls to go dark again.

Areebah Ahsan struggles with the ordinary chaos of life the same way she struggles to write a bio. You can find them at @areebahwrites_.