The clock just hit 7:52 AM. The morning is moving forward, completely indifferent to how heavy the world feels right now.
I’m still staring at the numbers, trying to make the math make sense. 8.31 billion people. That’s what the live trackers say. They tick upward every single second, completely unbothered by the fact that the earth is breaking apart in real-time.
How can a machine count a birth when entire mountain villages in Nepal have just been washed away? How can it track growth when over 6,500 people are gone in Venezuela, and hundreds more are missing in Colombia and India? The charts say humanity is expanding, but my chest feels tight, like the world is actually shrinking. It feels like we are losing the people who matter while a cold, calculated digital counter just keeps running.And then I look at my own family’s timeline. It’s so precise it hurts.
Shakir is on day 10,179 today.
He made it past Mia Zapata's lifespan, and now he has exactly 6 days until he reaches Jacob Miller’s 10,185 days.
Laiba is sitting at 10 days short of her milestone.
Hamza is at 264 days. And me? I am 9,011 days old today. 24 years, 8 months, and 2 days. I have exactly 76 days left until November 14, when I hit Tammi Terrell’s lifespan.
It feels almost selfish to count our days so carefully when so many people had theirs cut short without warning.
I am clutching onto these numbers, celebrating the fact that we are still here, while families in Chocó or Assam are digging through mud just looking for a single trace of the people they love.Why do we get this morning? Why do I get to sit here in Karachi at 7:52 AM, watching the sun come up, while thousands of other stories just stopped?It makes the math feel completely irrelevant.
The world isn't growing; it’s fracturing. All we can do is hold onto each other as tightly as we can, and hope we make the days we are given actually mean something before our own clock runs out.