I visited an old age home this August 14th, on Pakistan Independence Day. I went there expecting the average wise, old man with an aching heart at having been abandoned by his children. What I found, instead, were old people dressed in bright flag-green shirts, using crayons to colour in pages on which the Pakistani flag was printed next to a bunch of balloons, getting touchy about not being able to find the right shade of crayon and squabbling over who gets to sit where.
This experience of seeing the old and the supposedly mature behave like little children broke many of my previous mental constructions. This experience, and the thoughts it produced, is what I want to describe to the world through this blog. This experience, and innumerable others.
The experience of driving as an underage, shorter-than-average girl, on the streets of Karachi. The feeling of getting high on light mountain air. Witnessing five shooting stars in one night. Standing in the middle of a fast-rushing river. Living in a hated country. Coming home to an empty house. Falling in and out of love. Floating through a good book. Getting infuriated at the injustices around me. Crying at lives lost in violence. Thinking about people. Contemplating conditions. Learning a new subject. Taking a class. Growing up in silence. Finding myself out. Enjoying the feel of writing.
I am Hareem Salman and I will begin my posts where my thought process ends. My writing will open where my ideas close. And I will share everything that I believe worthy of sharing. So I will be stringing my thoughts together into sentences or ‘sentencing my thoughts’ (wordplay intended) to a lifetime of being imprisoned in the words of these posts.
I plan to write fictitious accounts, poetry, social analyses, travelogues, and book perusals. But really, they will just be my thoughts. Whether or not I am able to categorize each post into a genre, it will be one of my thoughts, one of my musings.
I hope you enjoy.
sentencingmythoughts 