I Am Cooking Sadness

I am cooking sadness.

The evening is here again, and I do not know what else to call this ritual: the small flame, the tired room, the hunger that is not only of the body.

What should be another moment to feel nostalgic about?

Home, perhaps.

Parents.

Grandparents.

An all-boys house where noise had its own innocence, where evenings arrived with footsteps, utensils, old voices, and the strange authority of family breathing through every wall.

Here, I am running only to find reflections of an eternal beauty inflaming itself in the nooks and corners of being.

And somehow it reminds me of those streets I used to stroll.

There too, I was helpless.

Have I not learned it now?

It is stitched deep inside me.

I was cooking something when my mother and father did not call their youngest on a long weekend. I was listening to Nusrat, building emotional affiliations with computer games, and letting Majaz, Firaq, and Ghalib sit beside me like men who knew the architecture of longing better than any therapist could.

I chose this course myself.

I know that.

I chose the road where I am supposed to cram textbooks, memorize the body, reduce the living miracle into diagrams and exams.

But like always, I am walking in the open skies of my hostel room.

Music is my escape.

It has always been my escape.

The kind of escape I kept seeking, from homes to hostels, from monasteries of thought to barren auditoriums, from textbooks to poetry, from anatomy to AI, from duty to the fragile intoxication of meaning.

Perhaps I did not earn it.

Perhaps escape also requires moral permission.

Perhaps I am still the same helpless boy who once imagined teaching as salvation — to teach, to earn wages for it, to buy tea and poetry books, more Dostoevsky, more pages, more fever, more ways to make loneliness appear noble.

They would say I need hard fixing.

At the hands of a cold world.

But perhaps I am not broken in the way they think.

Perhaps I am only struggling with my own agony, with the same old wound returning under new names.

Where shall this take me?

Khalil Gibran will not hum tales of love when the wings are broken.

The lark, once fallen, must see the fox tear its flesh.

And yet I keep looking for a solution.

One solution.

The same one that has chased me for years through every form of escapism — through music, through books, through prayer, through computers, through empty rooms, through crowded auditoriums where even applause sounds barren.

I must seek it as badly as my mother seeks forgiveness for my sins.

Maybe more.

Because the darkness is not outside only.

It has learned my name.

I keep stirring the pot.

The food is ordinary.

The sadness is not.

It rises with the steam.

It enters the room, sits on my bed, opens my books, looks at my unfinished notes, and asks me why I keep confusing survival with poetry.

I do not answer.

I lower the flame.

Outside, the hostel evening continues like nothing sacred has happened.

Inside, I am still cooking sadness.