Journaling

Photo by Nasim Keshmiri on Unsplash

By Aamna Rehman

When your tongue can’t form the words, you let your fingers speak.

When something lodges itself in your throat, and builds up till you can't breathe, you let the scream out onto the page.

Journaling is screaming and raging into a void- you know nobody will hear it. But you needed to let it out anyway.

An introspection that leads nowhere; the relief of bloodying your knuckles on a wall when the flesh is out of reach. Sometimes it is picking apart yourself piece by piece- like trying to take out a shard of glass stuck in your skin- it hurts. But if somebody else does it, it’ll hurt more.

It is an undulation of the mind- a reckoning, untangling, a delusion and an indulgence.

It is a bloodletting- the anger trickles in red ink and furious speed, the poison that has festered. The cursive of buoyant happiness. A success comes in ALL CAPS, and eight asterisks for when you are called away for a chore and you have to stop.

Your mother read your diary once, without asking. You threw it out of the window- shame and dread disguised as anger. It was a gross invasion- a plundering of your privacy. The words stayed stifled inside for some time after that.

But it’s been too long. Your fingers miss the brush of the coarse fiber of paper, the pain of cramps from moving across it, relentless. The dam is close to breaking inside you. You need to open the floodgates before the walls crack. But still, what if…?

No, you are not so young anymore.

This time, you pick a screen and lock it twice.

A blank page opens. Your knuckles crack.

A sob tears itself across the page.