Written by Uswa Maryam

With Love, From Pakistan By Uswa Maryam

Taylor Swift teared up during The Eras Tour as she sang about heartbreak. I wanted to tell someone in my 8 a.m. class. I was watching YouTube shorts all night, filled with her singing. Each show seemed magical. It was only a dream for me to speak of heartbreak, see it in colors, and scream out, “Give me back my girlhood; it was mine first!”

Here, girlhood is a sticky little thing stuck on the edge of your shoe. Sometimes, when my father gives me too stern of a gaze, I wish I could shrivel up into the womb again. I want to apologize for nothing in particular. For just being, I guess. A liability on the land that never had the space for me to just be.

Where my heartbreak is a secret.

A secret you hold in cold sighs, muffled sobbing in the bathroom until someone calls you outside, the hope that no one notices your missing appetite. For what is worse than failing at love, than a sore heartbreak and its aftermath, is the fact that you loved at all.

It was a line you were never meant to cross, and you did.

As hundreds of people die to escape from the land you were born in, the one you once promised your lover you would elope from, you feel the heartbreak of a dream that could never be. A dream of freedom and hope. Now replaced by massacre and chaos. A dream you had for yourself. A dream many had for your homeland.

I pack my bag to go home as the country falls into another political disarray. There is no homeland that was ever really yours. Where you can laugh and love, cry and lament freely. A stage built for you where everyone celebrates as you recover from your ditzy Lover era and stumble into a self-aware Midnights one. A land where you can love, have a heartbreak, and sing about it. A land where girlhood had a glory and a story that was heard.