russian roulette: juvenilia

It’s my substack and I’ll cry if I want to

Sorry for being a deadbeat of a poet :( I’ve been writing lab reports, tip sheets, and protest speeches.

Nostalgia is a curse I thought I’d purged. But I just graduated college!!! I’m a reluctant nostalgic for the past four years, even the PCL all-nighters. As the problematic British rock[?]star Matty Healy once said, “& I love you all too much”.

My goldfish brain holds little water. So I offload my memories in a two-thousand pages of diary, a sarcoma. Odds are, you’re cameoed if I’ve interacted with you for >10 minutes! I realize that little of my shared writing betrays the texture of my life— chunky, earthy, like unwhisked matcha. Perhaps because it doesn’t fit into the scope of the liTeRarY cAnnOn. After all, Kafkaesque Muslim femme shitposts are an embryonic genre.

The real reason: being vulnerable is hard. Taboos abound like landmines [X]. I’ll tread with a phenomenological approach:

~A Russian Roulette of Diary Entries~

Methods: Simple random sample. Flip to a random page. Edit minimally for grammar, length […], defamation, comprehension, etc. 1 entry/ each of my 8 diaries.

Part 1: freshman to junior winter

1/18/2022 Last day of winter break

… which is really surreal summer, 77 degrees, schoolwork an ancient memory, nostalgia abound in ICGA [masjid] marquee wedding // & parking garage rooftop rendezvous with Ayla and Alisha in the mythological Domain dank haze / like meadow’d morning dew / like fog beneath Cold Mountain when whizzing by on the bridge between Mopac and the Toll Road as if / it were Rainbow Road of Mario Kart Wii // all dating back to the 2000s anyhow // only toxic algae impeding me from leaping / into Brushy Creek, the only place to swim in Summer ’20, now amoeba-filled as any civilized body / of water

I write from the cushion / in the yellow’d grass of my backyard / of suburban white flight Round Rock, where there must’ve been a Native American burial ground // that’s the only valid explanation // under a cerulean cloud-speckled globe

—all on Allah’s thumb

AM I A GULLIBLE, NAÏVE TEEN GIRL, VULNERABLE TO CULT RECRUITMENT TACTICS?

Sorry mama and baba, I’m afraid so.

“THE ZEN EDEN OF POVERTY AND FREEDOM” —Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums

im not a furry this is my school mascot

11/9/2022 Sophomore slump

lol I’ve been in Round Rock for 3 days, feel like I’m in rehab. A star dying. Tousling nihilism like my ratty hair :) The suburbs make me play Stoned Again by King Krule on max volume and tear my heart out via butterknife.

There’s nothing worse than when lines stop blurring and words stop slurring. (Why do I have to be serious I’m a Gemini?!) I was sober this weekend and met a gay Satanist priest. We talked ab genetic engineering, music, drugs, cult childhoods, racism (erm… about that), scientific poetry, but something struck me, as some voice possessed him,

“yeah I tell ppl to kill themselves. It makes me feel powerful muahahhahaha”

“but what about forgiveness? :0”

“spirituality is dark. Some people are truly evil and they deserve to be punished. So I’ll take it upon myself to punish them.”

// The pine needle and nightshade are rotting in my childhood bedroom. I’m afraid of talking to customer service representatives on my phone, so ofc I’m afraid of talking to Shaytan. Who else can help me? [xxx] I spent that summer with fantasies of being a vigilante, just to wash them away with rain and Barton Springs water. I’m still not pure. \

Your angel wings sprouted from the same instinct as starving yourself. Seek Fan’a but don’t hate yourself: enough ppl are doing that already. How do u reconcile fan’a with the dehumanizing labour of capitalism? Enlighten me, make me laugh.

*2023 happened, as hurricanes tend to do*

1/12/2024 APA science fair + wheatpasting

My little brother [H] is growing up so fast!! Baby’s 1^st science fair!

---

We need more places

like masjids in America

places where you can take off

shoes, nap btwn dividers,

eat turkey sandwiches, play tag, read

holy books, hug your friends, glimpse at your crush

from behind in khakis, doze off

to khutbahs, watch The Human Centipede,

perform rukiah skits, exchange teenage

secrets, lose the spelling bee, graduate from

4^th grade, discuss doomed Umrah plans

for 2020, cross-dress as Benjamin Franklin,

have Qiyam nights which are the only sleepovers you’re allowed,

debate whether r**e is the victim’s fault, project headshots

of the 1^st female Muslim US house reps and hear “that could be you”,

make TikToks flipping water bottles at Quran study,

gupshup, organize [X], repeat others’ dua’as.

---

11:30am

The last I saw of [H] was him running to hug me in the masjid <3 As we’re putting on shoes, his friend asked me, “Are you his mom?? Do u know my cousin at UT?”. The TA interceded, “dw he says that to every tall adult.”

…The kids showed us: wind turbines powered by mom’s hair dryer / heliotropic solar panels like lego sunflowers / an elevator w a little lego man / a pentagram of candles, spinning a foil carousel / plastic cling wrap insulating better than a blanket, despite its cold symbolism.

We conferred srsly over the fate of 4^th graders, then chose the winners. Caught up with old schoolmates, then looked for my mom’s new classroom. The high school girls’ lockers glistened with the red FREE PALESTINE bumper stickers  I found Mama downstairs…

We had 2 hrs to kill. “Why don’t we go to Austin Creative Reuse? It’s like a thrift store for artists,” I suggested … $6 for 3 skeins of yarn and a sketchbook!!!

2:30pm

Back at me & Hafsa’s apartment! We talk ab our Hinge matches & the revolution.

radicalgraffiti

A post shared by @radicalgraffiti

5:30pm

Drove down to [R] Books for my 1^st [S] event: wheatpasting for Gaza. It reminded me of the week I lived in the [O] Warehouse. I was greeted w a shelf of rare, 1^st edition Beat literature and 4 comrades <3 “Nice keffiyeh!”

“Thx! It’s from Saudi Arabia.” (Do you know how awkward it is explaining Umrah to yt leftists?!)

… Scouting for ~legal~ wheatpaste spots, we walked through my favorite place in Austin, Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge, and I navigated if nothing else. The city transformed into planar geometry. We scoured for flat surfaces, then sprayed glue while another comrade held down the poster and looked out. “Just don’t look suspicious!” Plz I’m brown; I can’t help it!!

We went under bridges, bike paths, streetlights, power banks, construction sites, poles. Finished the night envying the stealth and dexterity of street artists who climb the cargo train bridge over Lake Austin.

There are so many empty surfaces in this boomtown, meant for defecation or street art. This is where we can publish the unpublishable. Maybe on Halloween I should’ve accepted the number of that man with a headlamp, who gave [X] ketamine in the storm tunnel, who offered to bring me there in the day to practice graffiti.