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Maimoona Abidi Books

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“It doesn’t knock. Doesn’t bloom like it used to. Just shows up in the way someone remembers how you take your tea. In a song that doesn’t ache anymore. It slips between the cracks of the day in the quiet of forgotten habits, in hands that don’t flinch when reaching for yours. Love returns slowly. In mismatched mugs, and the softness of being asked if you’ve slept. In laughter that feels like rinsed linen clean, familiar, light. It’s a slow thing, like the light that finds its way through closed blinds.”

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“Some days, the light falls strangely across the floor, and I almost believe it's trying to speak telling me about the versions of myself I left behind. The girl who thought love was a folded paper note; the boy I once called home but forgot how to find; the promises we buried in the mouths of wilted flowers. I walk slower now.”

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“You learn to tuck it into your coat pocket. Like lint. Like keys. It follows you to grocery stores and funerals and lazy sunday afternoons. Some days it’s light, like a paper cut. Some days it eats your breath. But no one notices. You laugh anyway. You pour coffee. You say “I’m fine” because explaining it feels like bleeding for no reason. Grief, when invisible, grows teeth.”

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“There is a version of me on a bench that doesn’t exist, beside someone who never arrived, hands folded like questions without answers. We do not speak. Still, the silence grows roots between us. The kind that twist around ankles, that make it hard to stand and leave. I do not know their name, only that I’ve mourned them like I mourn cities I’ve never seen with a longing that makes no sense and still doesn’t stop. Somewhere in the unlived life, we are laughing. Here, I just keep glancing sideways at the absence that fits too well into the shape of a stranger.”

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“I miss her the girl who wore too much hope and not enough armour. Who danced barefoot on sharp things because she believed pain was proof of living. I see her in old photos, smiling like she didn’t know what was coming. 'Sometimes I wish I could go back. Sometimes I’m glad I can’t.' Some versions of you have to die so you can breathe.”

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“There’s still sand in my shoes from august. the kind that clings, stubborn and golden like you did. Love was loud then. It dripped down our backs like sweat, sweet and impossible to hold. We kissed like we were trying to memorize the shape of goodbye before it even arrived. And still I’d follow the hum of locusts, the scent of sun-warmed citrus, every blistered street and blooming ache if it meant one more evening where your name didn’t taste like leaving.”

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“Grief, when it comes like this, arrives without a knock. It wraps around the wrist when I hear a song I don’t skip fast enough. It sits in the passenger seat when I pass a street I swore I’d never return to. Some feelings never got spoken. Some wounds were too polite to bleed. I let them rot quietly like fruit forgotten in a fridge corner, sweetness gone sour, but still too familiar to throw away.”

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“Do you still feel it in some happy elsewhere, a quieter version of us sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor, arguing over groceries, your hand reaching for mine between apples and oat-milk. Sometimes, I imagine running into you as a stranger. Your eyes flicker with almost-recognition, like they remember the weight of my name in the dark. We smile, polite. You walk away. I fall in. I don’t know if the abyss was always meant to feel like home. But I keep its door half open just in case you ever want to return as someone new. Or worse as someone real.”

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“The garden stretches out before us, every leaf a promise, every flower a quiet rebellion. I remember when we planted the first seed, its smallness fragile like hope. Now, the tomatoes hang heavy, bright with the fullness of summer, and I wonder if we’re not so different from them. How many seasons of patience did we need. How many days did we water the soil with regret until love finally bloomed.”

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“Cemeteries stutter like broken radios static and memory, all at once. Not quiet. Never quiet. Just my father’s voice trapped between stations, trying to reach me across years he never learned how to carry. The way he would clear his throat before telling me things I wasn’t ready to hear. My mother didn’t cry at burials. She folded her grief into the corners of her saree, tucked them between recipe books, let the scent of cardamom mourn in her place. Grief is not an echo. It’s the bruise on a peach. It’s turmeric beneath the nails. It’s calling out names in a cemetery and flinching when no one turns. Some days I mistake sidewalks for gravestones. Some days I pour tea for the silence at the table. Some days I mistake dust for the breath of memory. Some days I say “I miss you” to the crack in the wall near the kitchen sink, to the kind of quiet that doesn’t leave. But grief never finishes its tea it just stains the cup and walks away barefoot.”

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“This skin, stitched with the silence of each woman before me, tightens each time I try to move differently. My hands carry her habits folding towels with precision, biting the inside of her cheek instead of speaking. I learned early that a woman’s grief should look like grace. When I say I’m tired, I mean: my spine bends in the same places hers did. when I cry, It’s always near the stove, as if inherited sorrow prefers the scent of something burning. I try to unlearn her footsteps, walk backward through time, but even my sorrow wears her name.”

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“There’s a bobby pin, two receipts, and my mother’s voice trapped in a voicemail I haven’t had the courage to delete. my lipstick sits there too the one I wore the day I didn’t cry. No one asks why I keep a drawer full of matchboxes and apology notes. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I trace the ring mark left by an old mug and imagine it’s a constellation. I tell myself the bedside table is not clutter it’s just the only place I keep remembering to live. Some days, I organize it. Most days, it organizes me.”

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“I used to think I was different. But I trace her storms in the way I love always bracing for ruin, always sleeping with the lights off, as if that’s how you keep the house from burning. I started having dreams in her accent. Started pausing before I spoke, like her. Started carrying umbrellas even when the sky looked clear. I mistook her quiet for peace. It was survival. A hush that had teeth. Now, when I cry, it rains in my daughter’s room. The wallpaper peels in the same corner it did in mine.”

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“She doesn’t ask what broke me. She just shows up A mug of coffee in one hand, a wilted orchid in the other. The purple matches the bruise of the sky, sun bleeding out behind the hills. We sit with silence between us. She lets mine grow wild. Pours warmth into it without stirring. When I finally say “it still hurts,” she doesn’t say it’ll stop. She just shifts closer, like grief is a door she knows how to hold open without letting anything spill. The orchid rests between us on the table. One petal falls. She catches it. Says, “even the softest things learn how to let go.” And I believe her.”

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