Something You Can Hold

Notes from the launch of Sugar Pill

The day arrived the way important things do — quietly at first, then all at once.

I had carried these poems so long in the dark of my chest that I had forgotten they were also meant to be held by other hands. *Sugar Pill*  was now a real thing on a real table, in a room full of people who had come because they wanted to.

I arrived in my traditional Pashtun dress — fabric that carries its own memory, color that does not apologize — my hijab wrapped, adornments catching whatever light the room offered. I had wanted to wear it for such a long time. I had decided that surviving was not something to dress down for.

Close friends. Chosen family. Peers who had walked their own versions of the madness I had named. Strangers who would not be strangers by the time the evening was done.

But nothing prepared me for my parents.

They spoke. For the first time, they spoke — about what it had been like on the other side of my illness. The not-knowing. The watching. The feeling of being submerged without a name for the water, without a map of where I had gone or how deep. All those years they had held their silence the way you hold something fragile you are afraid to examine — and then a book arrived, and the silence opened.

I do not have the right words for what it is to hear your parents say *we were drowning too.*

I watched someone cry. Not the loud kind — the quiet kind, the kind that escapes before you can catch it. And I understood then that honesty travels. That a word can reach across a table, across years, across the particular distance between a child and the people who made her, and say: *now we can speak. Now we have language for it.*

People said *this line — I thought I was the only one.* People laughed in recognition. People could not finish their sentences. All of it honest. All of it warm. Café Central held us the way a good room does — not too tightly, not too brightly.

I signed copies with a hand that did not shake as much as I expected.

And for a moment I saw myself the way the room must have seen me — adorned, present, rooted — standing in front of everything I had survived and saying: *this is what it looked like from the inside. I made it into a book. I made it into something you can hold.*

At some point I stopped trying to remember everything and just let myself be inside it — the noise, the tears, the strange particular grace of having told the truth and been met, finally, with more truth in return.

Even from the people who had been there from the beginning.

*Especially* from them.

If you wish to support my work, here’s where you can get a copy on Amazon

https://a.co/d/0eDsFNKV

With all my love,

Mymy