Meet me in the void
For the listeners, here's an audio version.
Hey
This is the first time I'm writing to you like this. There's so much I want to share with you. There's this meme of a guinea pig raging behind the wheel of a pink toy car, declaring that "the horrors persist, but so do I". It's become something of an inner voice.
The horrors do keep persisting, don't they? But how do we?
Maybe we can sit with the question together.
A pocket of life
It's almost four in the morning. I’m at my desk in a little pocket of a rapidly sprawling Dubai. I’ve been anchored here for what feels like forever, trying to make sense of things.
When I first sat down to write to you, it was to let you know that Notting Hill Rewatch Season had officially kicked off, and to tell you what the big deal about it is, in the first place.
But that same day, missile interceptions entered the chat, and any desire for discourse left the building. It's safe to say that life has been a bit of a blur since, but I'd like to let you in on it anyway. The blurry bit, that is.
(To be honest, I wrote this to let myself in on it, too.)
First, let me tell you a little about here.
In this corner of the Gulf, neighbourhoods within neighbourhoods are coming up at a dizzying speed, complete with parks, playgrounds, food trucks, and a curiously high number of gift shops. I didn’t know we needed so many flowers and chocolates. I’m into it.
Men on motorised little trolleys zip around delivering this-and-that to so-and-so. Men in uniform from more demanding services – like Noon, Careem, and Deliveroo – scoot and cycle a little more furiously from point-to-point.
Joggers, walkers, toddlers and dogs manoeuvre around construction that has no end in sight, while workers manoeuvre around the clock. Cats roam freely, unfazed by busyness as a matter of principle. To be a cat.
Revving and screeching and hooting are never far behind, alleviated only by the call to prayer throughout the day.
There’s a constant whirring of people and things, and there are simply too many accents to place. Life is being lived here in all its little ways.
To scream a little scream
As I write, at any given moment, there's a child yelling somewhere on my street. This isn't new; probably communicating with a cat, or chasing a shadow, I’d imagine. I can’t help but smile whenever I hear it, though.
How freeing it sounds: to scream a little scream in awe of the world.
This time, though, it lands a little differently, as does just about every other alarm, boom and rumble.
*
Did you hear that? Is that a car? A jet? Did something fall? Construction, or—? Did your building shake? Was that an interception? Do we even know what an interception is supposed to sound like?
I wonder who in the Gulf hasn’t asked some version of these questions; or who hasn't braced themselves, consciously or not, for the next missile alert to pierce through their phone.
I wonder who hasn’t been wrestling with hope and fear—spiralling one way or another—admittedly or not. Still.
*
By now you might be aware that we're sort of still in a war-zone – a heavily defended and presently cease-fired one from where I am – but a war-zone nonetheless.
This is a complex moment of ongoing colonial proportions, but for now, I'm referring to the events unfolding since February, when
...an assault by Israel and the US was launched on Iran, which set off an escalating chain of events that has impacted countries across the GCC and the wider region...
DAZED MENA
Saturday • 28 February 2026
In the face of an avalanche
I started writing to you two weeks into that escalating chain of events. We’re now over two months in, and reality itself has been fracturing in almost every way.
From this little pocket of the Gulf, I’ve been at a loss for words. This is not to suggest that there are no words. There’s an avalanche of them. (Please bear with me here.)
There are the words that have been headlined, expert-analysed, geo-poliTik’d, and forwarded multiple times as news snowballs into narrative, and narrative hurtles toward a vanishing point called History:
Epic Fury, Roaring Lion, Maven, When the world’s most precise missile chose a classroom, Double-tapping, Miscalculated, Eliminated, Escalated, Martyred, "Wiped off the face of the earth", Regime change, Black skies, White phosphorous gas, Acid rain, Environmental catastrophes, Critical infrastructure, Evacuations, Mission-creep, War crimes, Gaza Strategy, Boots on the ground, Forever wars, Holy wars, Oil wars, Force Majeures, Straight of Hormuz, A new map of the Middle East, A billion dollars a day, “President of Peace", Eternal Darkness
Then there are words I didn’t know I’d need to know as intimately as I do now:
Multi-layer defence network, Interception, Falling debris, Shelter in place, The fundamental differences in the Doppelgänger Effect between a passenger plane and a fighter jet stem from their opposing goals: efficiency vs. performance, How to Desalinate Water: A Survival Guide, You may resume normal activities
There are also the words that have emerged anxiously, gently, and all the other ways love tip-toes into a crisis. Little beacons of air and light:
Just checking in, Thinking of you, Praying for you, Stay safe, Come home, Here: a poem, Here: some good news in the world, Here: postcards from the places the news only shows you in rubble and ruin, Here: sweet vibes
And then there are words that may never fully form, suspended half-swallowed, somewhere between fight and flight and freeze:
What exactly is—? Everything is fine. What should I do? Everything is fine. What stays and what goes if we had to—? Is it safe to—? I don’t want to hear it. I think I need a nap. How do I explain that something has shifted inside me, again? I think a need a hug. I wanted to tell you—never-mind. Turn the news off. How do I untie this knot in my throat? Anyway, I’m fine. I’m lucky. I’m nervous. I’m devastated. I’m lucky. This is nowhere near as bad as—
Nothing sounds the same anymore. I think I’ll wash the dishes.
And so it goes.
Punching around for air
The surest way to survive an avalanche is to side-step out of its path as quickly as one can. That’s what National Geographic tells me.
“If this is not possible, reach for a tree. As a last resort, try to ‘swim’ up out of the snow…If buried in an avalanche, try to clear some space [to breathe]…then punch a hand skyward.”
Is it any wonder that we’ve been swerving all over the place: reaching for things that feel like safety, dodging war-slop and misinformation, deflecting ugly fictions and uglier truths, negotiating how to say, or do, anything at all?
Us in our millions—each with our own infinite complexities—punching around for air, all trying to outwit-outplay-outlast yet another avalanche.
I have one eye on Vic Mensa peeling oranges progressively, reminding us that many things can be true at once, and another on an Angela Davis lecture I’ve had on repeat, calling it what it is:
It’s some depressing shit, isn’t it? But it won’t always be this way.
No, it can’t be.
Reaching for the void
Then there’s the thing the avalanche of depressing shit opens up: voids of I-don't-know-what.
It emerged in the quiet between missile alerts, and it lingers in the air as something flies by. It grows between what is broadcast as breaking news, and what is experienced as daily life; between what’s happening around us and what's happening inside us.
It morphs between ideas of “us” and “them”, and it stretches across timezones between ‘community’, ’home’ and ‘home home’. It’s not new, either. It’s only getting a lot harder to ignore.
Silence can be menacing here. Joy can feel criminal; grief: illegitimate; dreaming: reckless. And bringing a pen to a gun-fight can feel utterly useless.
It would be too easy to ignore the discomfort here, but that might involve missing the potential for something more transformative. (That's what I'm inclined to believe, at least.)
Here in the void, there's room to refuse to run with the news cycle, and to cry-laugh-shake it out like no one’s watching. There’s midnight karaoke to yell into the night alongside Mariah Carey that, yes—obviously—“We Belong Together”.
There’s long walks where we take turns holding each other’s worries. There's oceans to melt into and stars to sleep under.
And there’s sitting together, no words needed, holding onto the fact that this is what matters: choosing to live while alive.
Before the clock strikes normal
This could be the part where I give you a plain description of what I’m referring to, but, since there were fighter jets tearing through the sky not too long ago – and since there are continued horrors unfolding not too far away – I'll lean on Dr Gabor Mate's insights from his book, When The Body Says No:
There is a deeper sense of something that’s happening…but the mind can only experience it in terms of thoughts and images.
I’ve been leaning into the void–not to be here forever–but for a gentle internal readjustment between the shell-shock of what has been, and the future-shock of what any ‘return to “normality”’ will surely be.
To detach from the noise; to pay close attention to our own feelings, instincts, and desires; and to examine our hard-wired beliefs about what we can and cannot do in a world of man-made crises: that's what I'm here for.
Who, for example, sets the timer on ‘moving on’? Where are we moving? And why do we respond the way do? Who's in charge of the order of operations around here? And–with apologies to Bad Bunny–if "love is the only force more powerful than hate", why do we find ourselves here again and again?
These are the some of the questions bouncing around the void I'm in, along with the questions Samuel A. Adeyemi asks of us in the haunting poem, Beyond the Body:
“What am I truly capable of?
We talk about our lives often in theory and metaphor.
But the real world outstands us,
breaks us bitterly. The mockery of the hopeless
perplexes me. It takes something
beyond the body to wish
for a joyous life in a world
that ruins us.
What logic is there in optimism?…”
I, a civilian
At this point, I can’t say I know much about logic. I brought a pen to a gun-fight, remember.
But I know I want to understand what forces are shaping our imaginations of what we are truly capable of. I want to be able to recognise the ideas that distance us from our own capacity to think, to contribute, and to create the world we live in.
I, a civilian, want to meet the Thought Police inside our heads. We need to have it out.
I see this as less of an exercise in futility, and more of an exercise in devotion to the things that make us human; the things that make it worth screaming a little scream in absolute awe of the world.
This is who is writing to you from the void.
Perhaps we can meet there every now and then.
<3
P.S. Some tunes to spiral gently to
xx
About this letter
You're reading the first instalment of something I'm calling Emotional Attachments. This is where I'll be sharing the research and reflections that go into my work exploring the intersections of love and power. Perhaps you'll find some of it useful.
It may not always be in the form of a letter, or an essay, but it will always be some kind of Note To Self. This is to say that I'm very much in the chaos of it all, too.
If you're into it, please consider subscribing below. If you know someone who might enjoy this, please pass it on.
Thank you so much for taking the time, bby.
AI Disclaimer
No AI was expressly used in the making of this essay. Any use of this publication – including, but not limited to, all existing and future work by the author – to train, develop, or be inputted into to generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited.
The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.