i was an absolute menace on apps, which is why i’ve been in app timeout this year. it’s genuinely shocking none of them have banned me, because i was mostly terrorising innocent strangers with a one-woman comedy routine.

i was incapable of using apps without running a bit. a friend also told me my main profile photo made me look like i was halfway through a bit, which i suppose wasn’t helping, either.

so i’m in my zoom therapy session, scrolling through my profile, and my therapist literally gasped. like, truly seemed stunned, and said:

“you can’t find a husband with a photo like that!!”

and i was like lol, apps aren’t real anyway, it doesn’t matter. it only got worse as i started reading out my prompts and bio, which i thought were hilarious, but she did not find any of it funny.

her final assessment was:

“what’s that species of spider that eats her husband after mating called again? …yeah, that’s the impression you’re creating.”

me, being the emotionally unavailable pest i was, took this as a compliment even though it wasn’t meant as one.

this essay was initially about style, grief, love, and determining if my therapist had a point when she basically informed me i was scaring away the hoes in a patent leather mini dress.

that was until i remembered how, later that night, i asked the group chat for their opinion. firstly, my friends told me that, at my age, i no longer have the luxury of rejecting everyone who wears skinny jeans (rude).

and secondly, basically the entire group chat collectively agreed that i was too old to still be acting this emotionally unavailable.

i’d already perfected the art of dating like a chaotic, emotionally unavailable menace when tahmid was still around. i stopped dating for a year after he died. then, i began ‘dating more intentionally’, which just means i was going on fewer dates but leaving even more men on read.

because every romantic possibility was now an extremely unsexy risk assessment. overnight, my partner criteria went from:

“is he over 6’2 and employed?”

to:

“can this man handle that the central guiding force in my life is and will always be a ghost — a man so pure that many allege he might’ve been a saint?”

as far as i’m aware, hinge is yet to add that category to its filter options.

i’ll admit to some audaciously high dating standards. they’re only considered audacious or high in australia, btw, because the bar is in hell. but i can’t drop it any lower, frankly. i’m far too divorced and hot and financially independent to do so.

however, there’s ‘standards’… and then there’s ‘avoidant tendencies inventing arbitrary self-imposed rules’. if someone asked me out for coffee or gelato, i’d immediately unmatch. how about treating an i-don’t-fuck-anybody-who-can’t-book-a-table rule like a legal requirement? yeah, sounds like princess avoidance is trying to find excuses while wearing a high-maintenance tiara.

but i wish grief was as simple as a “not jealous of my dead brother’s omnipresence” filter.

see, i’m not asking for someone who’s perfect or healed or whole. because nobody is. (and frankly, the healed and whole can be exceptionally boring in bed.)

i’m asking for someone to understand that, two years ago, the universe ripped my life and my heart and my soul open, and nothing feels real anymore.

i lost the one person who made my world make sense. i’ve never felt less safe. i’ve never felt less certain.

when someone can’t handle a calendar, i don’t know how to trust them to handle my heart. not these days. not anymore.

love stopped being simple when tahmid died. someone cute can still give me a flutter in my chest, but the moment they kick into actual possibility, it completely destabilises me.

grief loves to try and convince me that the best days of my life are in the past. because when my present is just hopelessness and mortality, it’s so fucking hard not to think that my future will be, too. because there’s no distinction between my grief and the future.

which is why the possibility of love is destabilising. because it’s not just about hope or love anymore, it’s about continuation. it’s about potentiality.

it’s the possibility that i might have a life beyond grief.

it’s the chance that i might not spend the next 50 or 60 years in one-sided conversations with a grave after all.

it’s the terrifying prospect that there still might be something bigger and greater yet to come. that, maybe, my life didn’t end when the world tahmid and i shared for 31 years did.

love isn’t chill anymore. i used to be like everyone else, finding comfort in the ‘we’ll see what happens’ of it all. now, the same uncertainty that once brought me peace has turned to pain.

love isn’t chill anymore. hope or possibility without clarity or certainty is destabilising. and if hope gets snatched away, it doesn’t feel like a ‘them’ issue like it once did. when possibility turns to dust, it doesn’t just hurt. it feels like someone brewed a custom recipe of cruelty, just for me.

love isn’t chill anymore.

i liked someone, a while ago. it wasn’t long after tahmid died, so it was thrilling to know that all my grief and gloom could even pause for something as light as a flutter in my chest in the first place. like a tiny shard of sun appearing through clouds.

after a few months, there was an actual moment of possibility. in a normal situation, the opening bars of “friday i’m in love” might’ve started playing out of nowhere.

but my brother is dead, and nothing is normal anymore. except that he’s still, somehow, currently embarrassed that his sister just admitted to loving the cure in public.

possibility created stakes. stakes created fear. fear created a desperate need for clarity. a leap of faith without clarity felt incomprehensible. i sensed enough possibility to know my heart was already on the line, but not enough certainty to defeat the grieving risk calculus.

because the entire foundation of my world had changed. my heart was barely hanging on by a thread. risking my heart didn’t just feel dangerous, it felt lethal.

i want to be perceived like i might ruin a man’s day with one witty sentence while blasting “maneater” by nelly furtado. and, to be fair, i could.

yet — simultaneously — i am grieving so deeply, and feeling so fragile that if i have a crush on someone and they say something nice to me, i immediately need to flee home to cry and write in my journal for an hour. or four.

i started this piece with a weak thesis — something something vintage YSL makes me look invulnerable — but i slowly realised my therapist was, perhaps, onto something.

i’m armoured. and it’s got fuck-all to do with eyeliner or leather or leopard print. though, those things really do add to the whole ‘she-wolf concealing a knife in her knee-high stiletto boots’ thing.

see, if anything, my style might be the most honest part about me. perhaps i don’t even dress tough enough. because life forced me survive more bullshit by the time i was five than most woollahra grandmas have in entire lifetimes, but we’re somehow both wearing the same chanel jacket.

because i realised i am the woman who emotionally raised one of the toughest men any of us will ever know, and i did it on my own, when i was only a child myself.

tahmid was the only man i ever felt safe showing my soft underbelly to. he was the only man who truly knew the way my fierceness coexisted with tenderness, the way my strength was born from loyalty and devotion, and how my fire only exists because it comes from truly infinite love.

but tahmid is gone now, and the problem isn’t that i have nowhere to channel that part of myself. the problem is that tahmid was the only man to ever draw it out of me in the first place.

style is just the paint job. the real armour is how tirelessly i work to conceal my warmth.

he was the only man i ever felt safe being my whole self around, meaning i’ve always been a little prickly when it came to romance. because if you had tahmid as your lifelong standard of male courage, empathy, and emotional intelligence, how the fuck would some mediocre lawyer from hinge ever measure up?

(apologies to the many hinge lawyers i’ve dated, i hope none of you are reading this.)

ever since tahmid died, i think i became a puffer fish:

grief, effectively, activated my poisonous puffer fish barbs at any man who dared to approach me.

tahmid was the only man i’ve ever loved without limits, because i knew the only way he would ever leave me is if Allah took him back. i’m fucking terrified of loving anyone else that much. because, unlike tahmid, he’d have the power to wake up one morning and suddenly decide he doesn’t love me anymore.

did you know i used hinge for three years and i never — not once — sent a single ‘like’ to a man? hinge was safe because women just pick from a line-up, so i never had to proactively show interest in anyone.

shout-out to my desert graveyards of men left on read. i’ve never started a single chat on any app. well, except once. only to ask someone if he was standing next to tahmid in a photo. i already knew the answer, btw, because i’d sent tahmid a screenshot first.

but now all my arbitrary dating rules suddenly make sense. refusing to put out unless someone had booked a table. never sending the first text of the day. grief, obviously, led to new — still arbitrary, solely self-imposed — rules altogether.

you know when you try to scream in a dream but can’t? think that, except it’s wanting, very badly, to kiss a hot person and feeling paralysed. you’re basically trapped inside a fortress of restraint soundtracked by the smiths for years, which is a very cinematic way of saying it was meant to protect me from getting hurt.

joke’s on me. turns out sticking to arbitrary rules won’t protect you from shit, because it still hurts like fucking crazy.

maybe worse, because possibility gets frozen in time. you never discover the annoying stuff that makes endings neat or bearable, like if one of you snores or leaves wet towels on the bed. i stuck to a rule and all it got me was a grief-addled, incomplete what-if chapter with morrissey playing on loop.

i often recite this well-rehearsed bit:

“no, it’s fine! i’ve accepted that i might die alone and i’m perfectly okay with that because duh, i can buy all the chanel i want.”

which is — surprise! — a big, fat, giant lie, and i can finally admit that.

because i already have the chanel and the unbearably chic apartment and the ‘au revoir, i’m off to paris for a month or two’ and the lavish oyster and martini afternoons with ocean views. i have a san pelly subscription, ffs. i am untethered enough that if i woke up tomorrow and decided to move to new york, i literally could.

i’m 36 and i haven’t worked for 12+ months. i’m flying to tokyo on sunday, just because my friends will be there, i had a bunch of points, and thought why the fuck not. i’ve manifested the exact life teenage nabila could’ve only dreamt of.

well, better actually. teenage nabila didn’t bank on adding:

“…well, since my divorce seven years ago…”

to casual conversation as frequently as possible, and it truly pays giant dividends from my ‘she’s an enigma with so much lore’ holdings. if my life sounds enviable, it’s because it is.

which is why i can finally admit that it can be really fucking nice, and it can still get pretty fucking lonely.

so, nah — i’m actually not-so-fine with the idea that this is all it might ever be for another 50 or 60 years. because life could still get a little nicer, but life could also get a lot lonelier. i’m tired of pretending i’m okay with that when i’m not, not really.

the only man who ever truly knew me was my brother, tahmid, and now he’s dead. since losing him, if you asked me what i want more than anything, it’s another moment of him alive.

then, if you asked me again, i’d say a vintage cartier tank watch. purely because i’m uncomfortable now and i’d prefer you to stop asking.

but, if you asked again, i might finally be ready to tell you the truth. because what i want more than anything is to be known again.

they certainly don’t expect a clip of her roaring into a mic at a metal show wearing a white sari and doc martens.

and, least of all, they do not want to hear that the lyrics she’s spitting give a voice to the voiceless that no one dares to name: the victims of sexual violence from the bangladeshi liberation war of 1971.

to add insult - this is a chat that floods with hundreds of updates about the seasonal mango harvest from everyone’s backyard gardens - and the song she’s screaming was written and recorded by her only brother. also known as tahmid, the now-deceased nephew and cousin everyone prefers to avoid mentioning, lest he raise discomfort and guilt about how little effort they made to know the man who lived a short but nothing short of miraculous life.

bangladesh became an independent, sovereign nation in 1971, in the wake of a brutal nine-month war. not all battles were fought through bloodshed or on a battlefield. during the war, the pakistani army, razakar paramilitaries, and their local collaborators raped ~400,000 bengali women (conservatively estimated).

the atrocities committed were the first recorded example of rape used as a weapon of war in modern memory. but history itself gets written by men, and often for men - so the liberation war’s dominant myth is about armed struggle and heroic resistance.

and when patriarchal, conservative societies tie a woman’s value to sexual purity, mass rape of women is inconvenient. so inconvenient, in fact, it doesn’t even make it into school books. to say there’s generational trauma around the atrocities committed by the pakistani army upon the women of bangladesh is an understatement.

growing up, i made a four-hour daily round trip to an all-girls academically selective high school. asian immigrant parents prioritising academic success is unsurprising, but i’d also been accepted to a co-ed selective school much closer to home.

the commute was justified when it was tied to a fact i’d absorbed as gospel at a very young age. by the age of 11, through murmurs and coded whispers, i’d understood that there exists a fate worse than death: rape.

metal can be entertaining, but it’s not entertainment. in Hail Mary’s first release, MOTHERLY MARTYRDOM, tahmid vivdly describes, in graphic detail, his fury for the horrors that our elders didn’t dare to name.

but choosing not to name the violence doesn’t make it go away. instead it bleeds into the way we raise our daughters. the fears we instill without ever explaining why.

but tahmid understood. not because he was taught, but because he was tahmid: a lifelong systems thinker who researched, observed, investigated, and connected the dots.

growing up, i was irritated by the way tahmid adopted every single interest i had. if i started listening to a band, he’d be wearing their t-shirt a week later. i turned thirteen, started swapping msn messenger details with boys at skate parks, and saved up pocket money for an og pair of macbeths from the PSC store at westpoint (checking to see if they were still in stock each week). within a month, tahmid decided he was a skater and i never saw those shoes again. lather, rinse, repeat.

(seriously, look at the coolest man you think you know. now look again. i can almost guarantee he’s just a by-product of a tomboy older sister.)

a few - well, a lot - of years later, i finally realised that he wasn’t copying me so much as he was worshipping me, which could only be reframed as the most endearing and loving shit ever.

as we got older, tahmid picked up on confusing clues: i had a two-hour commute to an all-girls school while he went to a co-ed school fifteen minutes away. my parents would call the cops if i wasn’t on the first train home they’d marked on the timetable, while tahmid could spend non-dialysis afternoons doing whatever he wanted. he was the only one of us allowed to wear spray-on jeans, while i had to carefully plan a routine to hike up my school skirt as soon as i left the bus stop, so it didn’t trail beneath my knees.

i never realised how closely he’d paid attention to all the parental screaming matches he overheard and my tears he’d wiped, until my 2016 wedding. tahmid gave a speech, kinda. it was more that he silenced over 700 guests in a glittering ballroom to unleash sheer fury on the bengali community.

he declared that the generational trauma we refused to acknowledge instead formed a double-standard of how we raised our daughters compared to our sons. tahmid cursed every person who upheld the vicious cycle of impossible expectations placed upon the women of the bengali community.

tahmid raged with vengeance for over twenty minutes. devastatingly, there isn’t a recording of his speech. but any lucky witnesses will tell you this was the gist of it:

“i single-handedly became the man i am today because i watched the way you condemned my sister for simply becoming the woman she wanted to be. shame on you for enabling your own wounds to inflict irreparable damage upon the person i love the most. every one of you is complicit. and every one of our mothers, daughters, and sisters deserve better than this.”

he stood in that ballroom and made every uncle seethe and every woman cry, and i think it will always be the greatest act of love i’ll ever know.

the HAIL MARY EP is extraordinary. a team of legends worked tirelessly to bring the record to life, to honour tahmid and his legacy. if tahmid were here, i truly believe MOTHERLY MARTYRDOM could have achieved something remarkable: bringing awareness to the horrors endured by bengali women, a way to address the damaging impact of silence.

but tahmid isn’t here. and despite grief and loss colouring our landscape in the process, i like to hope he believes we’ve tried our damn best.

i hope so, because i know that:

• the language of bangla, and my right to speak it, was borne of protest

• the bengali national anthem, amar sonar bangla, is a song of maternal imagery. it is an ode to mother bengal, a personification of a beloved mother, whose suffering and joy are shared by her children

• tahmid wrote MOTHERLY MARTYRDOM as his ode to mothers, daughters, and sisters, and how there is no limit to the debt we owe for their sacrifice.

my messages in the family whatsapp group are still unacknowledged. no emojis, no mashallahs, not even a pity thumbs-up. it’s a familiar silence: silence is my family’s most fluent language, as it is for many bengali families in bangladesh and across the globe. over half a century of silence, but the impact still deafens.

tahmid took that silence and churned it into roars. and in his absence, i had the privilege of roaring for him as his proxy. i don’t need a pity thumbs-up reaction. not when i know in my bones i was loved, in the most unconditional way possible, by the greatest man i will ever know.

tahmid was a revolutionary, and his magnum opus gave silence a sound.

listen to HAIL MARY on spotify

MOTHERLY MARTYRDOM

Lyrics by: Tahmid Nurullah, 2024

VERSE 1

A Language,

One held with Pride

One we would defend

If the cost meant

That We would Die

CHORUS

At what value is identity?

When it comes at the cost of dignity

A pillaged country,

An abused Mother

Shame to her fertility

VERSE 2

The price I paid

For keeping

my mother’s tongue

Were the scars

Of mother’s sacrifice

To this day, go unsung

Matriarch,

Of this identity,

She bears the scars of violence

She wears it outside

And worse internally

To this day, her womb still bleeds

CHORUS

At what value is identity?

When it comes at the cost of dignity

A pillaged country,

An abused Mother

Shame to her fertility

VERSE 3

The birth of a nation,

Of Our liberation

Came Through her molestation

Our emancipation

Her degradation

BRIDGE

Violation

of a nation

Horror, Birthed through despair

Violation

Of A nation

Horror

lives through the womb.

VERSE 4

On my deathbed

The reaper, she visits me

Cloaked in a blood-stained Sari

To remind me

The guilt of this identity

tahmid had principled views on fashion which transcended all manner of reason and logic (to everyone else, anyway). his opinions weren’t just preferences. to stray from his opinions would be an affront to his integrity. he was drawn only to classics, the OG, the ‘source material’ as we called it, so the idea of a twist on an original was downright offensive.

which i mostly understood, this was (largely) the same weirdo autistic trait we clearly shared. tahmid was the only person who respected the way i can only buy or wear sneakers that were originally designed before i was born, which is a rule that’s so silly i’m afraid to admit it to anyone else.

but back to these loafers. i purchased weejuns in a 90s lug sole version.

… and it feels like the biggest betrayal to the memory of my brother that i’ve committed to date. yet i would’ve had zero remorse buying betrayal footwear if he were still here.

that’s the thing about grief, i’m finding. see, i have almost 32 years of tahmid archives in my brain, which means if anyone mind is all set to decode WWTND (what would tahmid nurullah do) via machine learning - it’s me (the machine version). but without him here to give me permission, or validation, or justification, i feel lost as fuck.

if tahmid were here, and i said i wanted the 90s lug sole version of g.h. bass weejuns, mostly because i didn’t want to wait for imported full-price ones and just wanted domestically shipped shoes on sale - he’d be fine with it. the irony. he’d give me shit, i’d still get them, and we’d move on. then he would’ve seen me style them and give me a tip or some inspiration and a link to what i should place on the wishlist next.

but he’s gone and it feels like i have to make every decision behind his back now. it’s a strange feeling that i didn’t anticipate. i feel it all the time now, with a variety of things big and small.

i know it’s a testament to our sibling relationship in all its beautifully intimate, intertwined, inseparable glory. but right now, and i think for the rest of forever, this sucks. i never made a decision or a purchase without his perspective weighing in on it. he knew every half-baked thought on my mind; every minuscule notion or conception that popped into my head.

existence feels foreign now. it’s like both my legs were amputated and replaced with prosthetics. i have to learn how to walk again but to the rest of the world i’m standing upright and look exactly the same as i used to and no one can tell that absolutely nothing is the same.  everything is hard and hopeless and grey.

most days i just don’t want to but i know i have to because he never let anything be an excuse so i sure as hell don’t get the option to either. even when i’m tired all the fucking time and my new loafers hurt because they turned out to be a half-size too small (maybe that was his way of showing disapproval after all).

to us, fashion wasn’t just an expression of identity. clothes were an embodiment of our values; shoes were a representation of our histories; accessories were a manifestation of our collective pasts and idealised futures. everything we donned concretised our cultures, interests, hopes, dreams, desires, fears, and beliefs.

and the thing is, only a sibling understands those things. and only a sibling who overthinks their style as much as you do - in addition to sharing the same damn genes with an identically trauma-bonded approach to life - would even care to listen as you rant, rave, ramble, and debate it all.

both of us approached style in the same way because we suffered from identical afflictions of being self-conscious to a fault, AND narcissistic about our own esoteric bullshit. we knew each other better than anyone, so it was like our inner monologue was a different gender who always texted back.

i don’t have that anymore, and that fucking blows. so i’m taking it to substack.

because while i have a million and one beautifully reliable shoulders to cry on, countless outlets for my grief, and a kick-ass therapist - i no longer have tahmid. he, who understands why it’s completely valid that i now weep in public at the sight of wingtip bluchers, is no longer here and it’s making me weep in public at the sight of wingtip bluchers.

while i’m secretly hoping no one ever reads this and i get to have a liberating corner of the internet to ramble into, someone might and if you do then hi.

i’m nabs. right now i’m very sad and i think i always will be, but i also still really like to look fly in a niche dumb way that makes sense to only me and the best man i’ll ever know, who is gone. i’ll write about both.