Neebas 1.0

When the world loses well known names, it hurts. These were humans. Living, laughing, thinking, opining, and now they cease to be. When you lose star people you looked up to, found perfect, loved, followed, your heart is ripped apart and your life is impacted for a few days, months, if you're me. When you lose a person you know, you're stunned at first but then sorrow surrounds you, you mourn it for a while and nurse your wound. When you lose a loved one, you dive into a pool of sorrow and swim ashore over a longer period of time, heartbroken, hardly ever again if you're me, that sorrow becomes an integral part of your system like an organ emanating pain for the rest of your days, yet one you find no cure for.
When however, you lose a Sabeen, you want it to be a hoax. You tell yourself and others around you it's just a rumour and that somehow the leading news sources of the country stumbled. You pace the room, hug the wall, call a person or two and perpetually busy lines confirm what you dread to believe. You call the first person you can think of, speak gibberish and go and hideout as the world descends on you for confirmation, support, their own and yours, to be part of your denial, be part of the agony you keep fiercely pushing away every millisecond as it keeps returning to you like a boomerang high on something you wish was legal. You forget the time and embrace the discomfort of not changing out of work clothes or removing earrings that hurt when you hide your face in a pillow, unconsciously paying to some pool of pain in hope to buy your Sabeen back. You forget to switch off the lights or the TV and switch on the AC, see her name misspelled across social media and news channels, vehemently pushing away the realisation, it's true. You go through old photographs, last conversations, trying to claw on to what you have, laugh thinking of the good times and suddenly cry in a spurt of 15 seconds. You see the car she happily bought a few years ago, windows shattered and just some blood near the door. A little blood, does nothing for you but that chappal, with the steering wheel she must've been holding, the footwear characteristic of your Sabeen and your throat constricts, your pupils expand and your heart sinks to a depth it might not ever emerge from. Her laughter in your head weighs you down, you tire and retire.
I am not angry. Not yet at least. I just hate her name being misspelt, or the fact that they speak of the five/ four bullets and where all they hit her, or use the word postmortem for anything done to her instead of the dil phaink movement in London or the Paul Simon & Sting Concert in Paris. That's the kind of things that my Sabeen would get done to herself, not a postmortem.
The world around me is roaring in a mix of anger, denial and lashing back, mourning the absolute heroic life coming to an end, the loss to the country and what a disgrace it is to live in such unfair, ruthless times.
I curl into a ball, grieving the loss of mad, silly outbursts of ridonculous ideas followed by maddening laughter or enjoying the cheapest songs/ films, or someone I could just cry with, or my first confidante post my divorce, or the quiet fairy who would leave things outside my room with a heart shaped sticky note, or the only one who ever managed to make me sing for a public audience (all she had to do was ask), or the only one ever who would hug me out of a funk in a matter of seconds, or annoy me to the edge and then pull me in a hug, or yell out "Hareemast" whenever, wherever with me wanting to disappear that instant since it could very well be super public and she won't care! Ha!
Hareemast. That's what she called me. I loved it when she named me that, it's been on my Skype ever since. It's so Sabeen.
As much as i frantically scramble across all our communication ever, trying to hold on to a shred of her, I might soon go out in the real world, face my loved ones confirm what unknown faces have been rambling on overnight on insignificant TV channels, say my last goodbyes. My Sabeen corner of the heart dies with it today. I realise that shit gets real in a few hours perhaps, however as long as I can reminisce what it felt to be hugged by her presence in the room and what that squeal sounded like, I stand tall.
Allah mian, I give you our Sabeen. Please care for her.
Until we meet again, Sab Heart.