Esmat Zeerak

Still here and breathing.

What does it mean to respire?

There is something to be said about the act of breathing in air, and breathing out something transformed.

Our being operates on this premise: to make something out of something.

Still here and writing every day.

I can’t help but write compulsively every day.

Nothing short of astounding to myself; it is a condition, I say to myself, when I am trying to ease my sense of helplessness.

Though, these words have a different home, one that cannot be addressed as of now.

My life is currently an equation undergoing some sort of transformation, and I can not wait to see the horrors on the other side of this nightmarish show.

The variables are changing, but the crux remains the same. This vessel is undergoing a cleaning ritual. Enough said there.

Mr. Bob Dylan has always been somewhat of a father figure in terms of cultivating my musical taste. I mean, of course, I have never met the man in the flesh, but I have met the man a bunch of times by listening to his music, so to speak. It should go without saying that his oeuvre has an encyclopedic range to it, and I find it all quite edifying, again, in terms of learning a whole bunch about what makes his songs so good.

So how do you get high on life when you have committed yourself to a completely sober life — no alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, or even bad memes?

Personally, I have chosen the path of making avocado toasts, drinking copious amounts of tea (my new addiction), putting on my earphones, and listening to entire albums of Mr. Dylan while running or doing ellipticals. This evening I happened to listen to the entirety of his Dante-esque (“Italian poet from the thirteenth century”) album, Blood on The Tracks.

And let me tell you, it works. You get the same high without dealing with the onset of cognitive impairment months later as is usually the case when certain substances are abused.

I used to care, but things have changed.

That’s Mr. Dylan echoing some of my feelings as of the past few months.

I have been walking 40 miles of bad road.

Yes, I have been threading through a nightmare for more than 40 days and nights. And yes, some of it was in the desert waiting to be tempted by the devil.

People are crazy, and times are strange.

Enough said.

You can hurt someone and not even know it.

May those who hurt us never find out how much they have hurt us.

I am locked in tight and out of range.

As I have said, I used to care, but not anymore. Maybe this too shall pass, but one can never be too sure. Somethings are too hot to touch!

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

The trouble is that you don’t know that you are being tempted by the devil when are you being tempted.

I know I have said: “I read and then I write.” There can be so many ways of thinking about this thought. One way of thinking about this is to say, that by writing, one is reading the world essentially.

Writing, be it through typing words on a word processor, or carving shapes on a stone, is making one’s mark in the world through a deep interaction and engagement with the grounds. Is this not reading? Is running one’s hands over the texture of the grounds not reading? Looking for something means to read for something. It is a natural instinct.