Somewhere within that one hour I must have started shivering, uncontrollably. And I knew I must have felt some semblance of tears rising in my throat. And I didn’t feel like living, I didn’t feel like going on in a world that allows these things to continue. I hate myself, my religion, the society I live in. verses in the Quran make me shudder, because I cant believe that anyone they’d call God would advocate something like that. Shudder to think of the lashes those protestors felt, shudder to think of the power the law of this godforsaken land wields. I am not afraid, I am sick. I am angry… and anger seems to have drained the energy from my hands and body. As if at every step, at every single turn I learn how cruel life is, how fundamentally wrong and unfair and unjust to just about anybody, and that nothing can be done to untangle this mad, horrible choking mess that this sadistic, totalitarian religion of ours has wreaked upon us… I have no faith. Not in mankind, not in man, not in any of his Gods. No God of man could ever assure him the right to burn and rape and victimize and torture and stone to death someone who has as much right to freedom, life, love, sexuality, infidelity, faith as he does. And if God does, if God does do all these things, if mankind itself was one masochistic act of divine chootiyapan, I want to quit. Now. I don’t want to belong to a religion that says all men are equal, but women… have special laws. I don’t want to belong to a society that deliberately misinterprets and advocates these laws, like a misshapen, deformed child whose idea of power is to cut of each of his imperfect limbs, one by one so that the right hand may have supreme dominance. I don’t want to live a life that lets me forget these things, slowly and gently easing my mind, soothing it, singing it its peaceful little lullabies like the tinkling of gold coins…. Everything I touch; the clothes I wear, the books from which I read, the places of learning and worship seem to have been made by millions of tiny hands, millions of starving little children screaming bug eyed, toothless, lice-bitten, bawling in their flea-ridden beds. It’s hard to believe in anything. I’m not asking for sympathy. If you think I couldn’t handle it, that I couldn’t really deal with the little trickles of truth as they hit me, you were right. I can’t. I cried when the first sword fell, I gave up the minute they killed the first innocent person. I felt, very honestly, that if someone who has done nothing wrong can be annihilated without anything moving except the dust that they fall in, then I definitely have no business to go on living.

if you could lend your ears to even the softest of voices around you.
if you could overcome your fear of the tiny winged insects that crash fitfully into your window at night
if you could learn to ignore the mad buzzing of voices judging what they dont understand
understanding what they cant judge
forgetting all that they cant be bothered to learn....
if you could learn
to respect things you cant relate to
to let go of the dreams that you hold on to with neurotic tenacity
to give up, back down, move on
stop thinking....