i think grief is a stray animal that keeps choosing my porch even when i leave bowls of milk for joy. happiness has terrible manners. it never knocks. it walks through me barefoot, leaves wet footprints on my ribs, drinks a glass of water from my body, forgets its sweater on the chair, and then remembers somewhere else exists. sadness folds my clothes before it sleeps in my bed. i know which one pays rent. i know which one keeps a toothbrush in the bathroom. i have begun to distrust sunlight. it enters every room like it owns the furniture and leaves before the dishes are done. sadness washes the plates. sadness knows where the spare keys are hidden. joy keeps saying it will be right back and then changes its phone number. maybe that is because sadness comes from me. it was born somewhere beneath my sternum and learned the shape of my lungs before i did. happiness is only migratory. it lands on me to rest its wings before flying somewhere warmer. it never unpacks. it never asks where to keep its shoes. sadness knows every crack in the ceiling. it knows which floorboard complains. i think that is why i mistake visitors for homes. i keep feeding birds as though they owe me winters. maybe that is why i write with the urgency of someone trying to memorize a face already walking away. every sentence is me pressing flowers between pages before the season remembers i borrowed them. i have never been interested in preserving happiness itself. only its outline after it has left, the dent in the pillow, the warm circle beneath a mug, the smell of oranges on fingertips that no longer exist in the room. absence has better handwriting than presence ever will. i panic and begin writing before happiness evaporates because i have seen steam disappear from tea quicker than people forget my laugh. i write as if language is cling film wrapped around fruit already beginning to bruise. i make a museum out of passing weather. i pin butterflies to paper while apologizing for the holes. sometimes i think my body is built backwards. happiness arrives and my bones immediately begin preparing for its funeral. i start collecting proof before the thing has even died. i become the archaeologist of my own afternoon, brushing dust off moments that are still breathing. maybe i am afraid of joy because it has the texture of soap. hold it too tightly and it escapes. sadness is easier. sadness is bread dough. it stays beneath your nails for hours. it asks nothing except warmth. i hate how familiar its voice has become. i hate that i could recognize it in a crowded train by the sound of its footsteps alone. my happiness has always behaved like perfume sprayed into an empty elevator. beautiful enough to make you stop breathing for a second, gone by the time the doors open. sadness is different. sadness is the metal railing your palm smells like hours later. it stains. it lingers. it teaches your skin a language water cannot wash away. i think my heart mistakes departures for harvests. every time someone leaves, it rushes into the empty field with baskets in its hands, gathering whatever is left behind. the smell of their shampoo trapped inside a scarf. the way they laughed with only one side of their mouth. the exact shade the sky became while they were speaking. i collect these things until my chest sounds like a drawer full of teaspoons. people say memories fade. mine ferment. they become louder. sweeter. more poisonous. every person i have loved becomes less of a person and more of a season my body keeps mispronouncing. i do not write about them. i write about the strange smell left behind after lightning kisses metal. i call it a muse because naming something is the closest thing to trapping it. i should be selfish when eating my own flesh. i have spent too long thanking other people for meals my own body prepared. i keep mistaking witnesses for authors. everything was always me in the end. every metaphor returns to the mouth that made it. every wound remembers whose skin it opened. i should be kinder to the hands that have carried all this weight. they deserved the credit long before anyone else did. i keep believing that if i stack enough sentences on top of each other they will become a cage with beautiful windows. they never do. words are bad at holding anything except echoes. maybe writing is just taxidermy for feelings. i keep stuffing yesterday until it almost resembles something alive. from far away it looks convincing. come close and you will notice the glass eyes. you will notice that nothing inside it is breathing anymore. i know this and i still continue. i still smooth down the feathers. i still whisper to it as though tenderness alone can reverse time. maybe every poem is just my mouth trying to convince blood that it once belonged to strawberries. maybe every happy thing i write eventually begins tasting like iron. still i write until my fingers smell like burnt sugar and rainwater, until the page becomes warm enough to mistake for skin, until even my sadness begins wearing happiness like someone else’s coat, sleeves too long, pockets full of stones that somehow sound exactly like birds. maybe i do not write because happiness stays. maybe i write because it doesn’t. because i know joy is a bad tenant and grief already knows where the light switches are. because somewhere inside me there is a museum whose exhibits keep trying to leave, and i spend my whole life standing at the exit with a notebook, asking each beautiful thing for one last sentence before it forgets my name.
Sakina Sajjad is a writer and International Relations student whose work explores grief, memory, intimacy, and the strange ways people make homes out of things that were never meant to stay.
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Picture Credits: Raahima S.
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