Kiss It Better

I overthink.
I overlove.
I overfeel.

My preferred way to arrive is completely. Like the sea.

I ask for a love that arrives without conditions and a freedom vast enough to let every part of me breathe. Perhaps that is why I have always been called too much. But this morning, wrapped in sunlight and poetry,    too much    feels suspiciously close to holy.

It is just after seven. The morning shine is slipping through the curtains in long, soft ribbons. I am on my sofa, scrolling through poems on Pinterest. Every few lines, a sentence catches me by the wrist. A quote from a poetry book. A fragment of someone else’s heart. Something that makes me stop and smile into the misty gold pouring through the windows.

I am so happy to exist.

Not because I have figured anything out. Not because I have become anyone remarkable. Simply because I am here to witness this morning.

There was a time when I lived as though my greatest project was myself. I was forever reaching for a better version of me, sculpting and reshaping my own becoming. But something has shifted.

My capacity to meet life has stretched wider than I knew possible. My intimacy with existence has changed completely.

Now I want less from life and more of it.

I want to feel each moment before it disappears. I want to notice the ordinary before it becomes memory.

These days I sit in nothingness not to discover hidden truths or receive profound messages from my consciousness. I sit in it simply because it is there.

Nothingness as nothingness.

A quiet room. An empty sky. A pause that asks for nothing from me.

40 minutes ago, Idris was curled completely inside my arms. I held his whole little body against mine and imagined him tucked inside me again, safe and suspended. I curled myself around him as tightly as I could, imagining the shape I once occupied inside my own mama’s womb.

The difference was that I had no walls holding me together anymore.

He did.

Held entirely by me. 
And I felt so happy for him.

Happy that he can still know this kind of closeness before the day arrives when he no longer fits inside my arms alone. A morning cuddle healing something in both of us.

As I write this, he has just walked over and said, “Mama, can you come on the sofa with me? Because it won’t be warm.” As if warmth is something we make for each other.

Saeed was already jealous because Idris had occupied my arms for too long those 40 minutes ago. These boys love being held by me. And I love that for all three of us. I love holding them. They love being held. There is a tenderness between us that feels older than language.    I am adorned with them.    Truly, I cannot imagine a jewel of greater worth entrusted to me by Allah.

I could spend pages writing about the small interactions we’ve shared these 2 hours spent together this morning, but I feel another piece of writing calling me. A love letter to my sons. They deserve one.

So I will save those stories for them.

For now, it is 9:40am on Wednesday, 17 June 2026.

I am telling myself the story of my life. Openly, perhaps for the first time. In voice notes recorded while running errands. In conversations. In paintings. In pages like this.

I am allowing myself to be seen in all my contradictions. Openly accountable. Openly tender. Openly unreasonable. Openly becoming.

And because of that, I feel freer than I have ever felt before. Not freedom as escape.    Freedom as coming home to myself. The kind that feels inherited. Like something carried across generations in song, in stories, in the quiet certainty of knowing who you are.

This is simply my understanding of life as an 27 year old woman on this particular morning. This exact day. This exact hour. This exact patch of sunlight. One of my favourite things to know is that this understanding will change.

I am excited to meet the woman who sits in nothingness at 28, inshallah. At fifty, inshallah. At eighty, inshallah. I wonder what she will know. I wonder what she will have forgotten.

I have spent so much of my life trying to fix, improve, unravel, heal, understand.    Perhaps not everything needs that much from me. This morning asks for none of that.

Just sunlight. Poetry. My boys. A sofa. And for someone who exists in the way I do, sometimes kissing it better is enough.