The Dance

I have a dress the same color as angels flapping their feathery wings. One yesterday, I slid myself into it and watched as it became my skin. I was too white the sun shied away and never shone when I was there. But if you looked too closely, you would see the devil woven into my fabric.

I twirl in the sand. Eve and Lilith, like the ebb and tide, unravel my labyrinthine heart , then rise and fall into it. I am fading into a mirage. Have I ever been real?

The words frantically dance as they tear my brain apart. The shreds fall out of the window. I jump to collect them and I am all broken. I glue my body together and search for them. I press myself into a insanity and it pushes me into ecstasy and they both throw me, on the shores of nothingness. I remember. My brain. I lost it somewhere along the way. The shreds repulse and break my skull. Craziness is inevitable.

Become me again and I’ll pretend nothing ever happened.

55-The Cage

Fidgeting between

Discordant tones

Lashing me             

With expectations

To be something

And I envy the space

For its inexistence

And I push a thumb

Into my ear

I can’t hear

But that doesn’t make me deaf

I peel the pictures

Off my memory

Incinerated

Before me

Light light

Flying

Within the bars of the cage

Check Out G-Man 

Pendulum

Wise man sits on the top of a tower

Saying tears turn to pearls

Mine came crashing at my feet

And now I’m bleeding

Evil and good

Wrestled tonight on my threshold

I locked the door

Sank under the quilts and pretended

I was deaf

Politicians and Presidents

Movies and celebrities

Jewels and glitter

I just squeeze myself between the cracks

Hanging photos on dusty walls

A girl who wore pink dreams

Torn at the edges

Last seen

Two years ago

I tiptoe so I wouldn’t’ disturb

Extremes fighting within me

On my way to the candy shop

Just around the corner

Of yesterday

At the end

I am only a sack of

Twisted nerves  

The Way Back Home

At the age of eight, there were many things I had yet to learn: Earth is the third planet away from the Sun; salt consists of sodium and chlorine; wrong things  aren’t always wrong; happy endings are of stories that haven’t ended.

 Language was not one of them.

    A heavy cover of fog shrouded the place. When I was young, I had a childish notion that fogs are made when a giant sighs. So in my head, I saw a giant man resting his head against a tree and sighing. He was tired. Giants couldn’t be tired, a voice of thought interrupted. But that was something I couldn’t make sense of. Some way or another , everybody had to be tired. When dad came back home he was tired.  When he hit mom she was tired. And when they told me we would move to another country, I was tired.  

  In the fog,  I could see a faint trail of how every road began, but the ends were still something of an enigma to me. Everybody headed somewhere, that was the only thing I knew. I then looked at mom. Though she was only thirty-two by then, the skin around her eyes sagged. She cried a lot. I thought that tears drag your skin down with them; that’s why I never cried. It was years later, when my skin sagged just like hers, that I learnt, to cry, you don’t really have to shed tears.

   She waved goodbye and started to fade away in the fog. I felt a tingling feeling in my stomach that rose up to my chest adding to every breath a chill. I dragged my legs and entered the school.

   I was at a loss. It seemed to me that the fog was only in my eyes to blind me. I feared that I would stumble if I walked any further. After long minutes that felt like forever,  I summoned my power and asked about my class.

  When I entered, they had already begun. I had a petite figure, so when the teacher didn’t ask me about my name, I just thought she didn’t see me. I noticed how when she shouted, a nerve in her neck shook in a funny way. So I laughed. She then heard me.

 “What are you laughing at?” she said.

  Shivering, I answered, “Nothing.”

“Well then, I want you to write ‘People who laugh at nothing are stupid’ and bring it to my desk tomorrow”

  When the break came, I asked where the roof was and ran all the way up there. I felt mortified and didn’t want anyone to see me.

   I could see the ocean from there. Out of my pockets, I got out a small map and unfolded it. Back home, my friend told me we’d only have the Mediterranean  in our way. I asked how I would cross it. She smiled and said, “You just swim.”
  My eyes fell on the river. Back then when I used to stroll by its side, it'd looked so vast. But now, it ran down the map like a scar. 

 “Hey,” a voice came from beside me.

I didn’t answer.

“You know why Mrs. Peanut Head shouted at you?”

I then looked over my shoulder to find a boy my age. I understood who he was talking about and was interested to hear his explanation.

He sighed and said, “Will you just look at your hair,” he then held it in his hands, “She’s jealous of it.”

I was truly puzzled and had to ask him, “Why would that happen? Her hair is quite good”

“Finally, you’ve talked!” he sighed, “When Mrs. Peanut Head was a young girl, she went to the zoo and stood beside the monkey cage. They all thought she was a huge peanut and wanted to eat her. By the time the security came, all her hair was chewed. What you see is a wig.”

I knew that was intended as a joke, still, to imagine the whole scene in my head, I couldn’t help laughing.

He stretched his hand and smiled. “Mark",  he said.

I stood up and shook hands with him. “Cecil,” I answered.

  Looking at his face, I learnt my first lesson in language; that language hardly spoken by the lips. Beyond every word, there’s always a thousand word that translate according to the listener. So there is not one language, there’s a million that may share the same words.  And those that are never spoken, are the most powerful.

  I wished I could tell mom before she packed her clothes telling me she was going home, and dad when he didn’t come from work and people told me that his soul went home, what I heard in Mark’s smile that day. It whispered to me, “Home is not that far away.”

10th DoM

Shreds

Shreds

Today, on my way to work, I came across an old friend in the street. They always feel awkward, those encounters, with people you cease to know anything about. In your head, their image is drawn the way you last saw them in but then, you discover that they’ve had their own share of  noise in their life. I’d lost all contact with her after leaving the country , so it was quite a good chance for us to catch up on what we’d missed. Our short conversation would have been perfectly normal for two people seeing each other for the first time in years, if not for the remark she made before leaving.

“You look so changed,” she said.

    When you wear eyeglasses that have a mud  stain on one of its lenses, there is not a thing you see that is not colored brown. That was how her words seemed to add shades of feelings to my day.  I wanted to ask her what she’d meant but something hindered me from it; perhaps I was afraid of what the answer might be. And perhaps, I just didn’t want to know.

    My first day in this country, everything was so shiny I had to cover my eyes so they wouldn’t be blinded. But it was never that sort of light the sun emits, it was more like the luster of cold metal. And as I came to know, nothing in here had a hint of life about it. Sometimes, I felt the coldness clambering my bones deep in summer and had to clutch the quilts tightly.

    It took me quite some time to learn their language. Before that, I made a hobby of guessing what people were saying. I made imaginary scenarios that made no sense giving myself a good laugh. But then, it constantly reminded me of how far away from home I was. I’d then throw my head against the wall and look at the moon. It sure was the only thing that still looked the same in my life. Now, I could talk their language but had I lost myself in the process?

   I had not asked  her about home. It slipped out of my mind, I kept on convincing myself. But how could such a thing be so easily forgotten? I rushed to my room rummaging the wardrobe for something, anything, from there. A small mirror fell on the ground and broke in what seemed a dozen pieces.

In all these shreds, I couldn’t see the girl I recognized as myself. 

Color Blind

I drew and you wrote.

   I loved the fluidity of charcoal as it stained the stark white pages with pieces of my mind. Sometimes,  lines would  hug and intertwine forming shapes; quite a lot, they were only shredded pieces of dispersed thoughts. I was more comfortable with the ambiguity  of grey mirroring the mess of me; we both too unruly to be tamed by names  You loved the definitive sense words gave you. In your world, everything had a meaning and whatever had meaning must be a word and what’s not a word is nothing. I was your only exception as you were mine.

   I argued that the first people used pictures and drawings to communicate as scientists found on the walls of caves. You laughed and said that it’s what got them in there in the first place; civilization  began when they started using their tongues in something more useful than making meaningless sounds like animals do. I just shrugged and said that it’s boring to have a word for everything.

Two people couldn’t be more different.

You listened to Debussy and Beethoven and I to KISS and Nirvana.

You wore Armani and I whatever I found not coffee-stained.

You ate at fancy restaurants with a large group of friends and I in the streets observing people from afar.

You planned everything ahead and I just did whatever my twisted brain would suggest.  

You were a day person and I a night person.

You were a communist and I an existentialist; which was, besides shapes and words, one of the things we’d always argue about. You thought that existentialism would mar any human progress because no person could make it as a single entity.  I thought that communism was just another way to cancel individuality using the façade of equality, which, of course applied to everyone but the governor who would suck all the money.  To you, communism was the promised utopia and to me, existentialism was how my life went on.

Two people could not be more different

Yet,  we had one thing in common.

We thought the only reason love made it as far as the twenty-first century is to make millionaires out of movie-makers. We both didn’t believe in love.  Each had a different view . You  couldn’t define it and I’d never seen it lasting. People get married, some get divorced and others stay together for the wrong reasons. Here’s the thing about love, it’s a feeling, and all feelings are like candles. Love being a violent one, the candle melts way  too fast. Soon, you are left with wax without a blaze, but it's enough to remind you that something used to be in there.  So you hold on, wishing for that spark to light you up again. But it rarely ever does.

    We weren’t what you’d call two people in love. To you, I was a special friend because I was different from the other people you knew. To me you were a special friend because I knew no one at all. But, curiously enough, I knew you.

   Many times you suggested to introduce me to the people you knew but I’d always refuse. I didn’t belong to people, or to anything really. I lived in many places, traveled to many countries, inhabited many houses, yet, I could call none home. I was too trapped within myself to ever see anything from the world but a blur of colors. You once joked with me calling me a misanthrope; it was when you saw that I didn’t smile that you realized it was something serious to me. I often thought of it, and came to the conclusion that I didn’t hate people; I just didn’t care for them.

   When I first showed you the stuff  I ‘d drawn, you said I must be color blind. I guess you’d thought I painted with a brush and used an easel. Your statement, though,  had some truth to it; I could see all colors only in shades of grey.

    I was curled up in bed, rather paralyzed in it. It was not tired legs that led me there, it was a heavy heart. I cried. I hadn’t done so in a while. It wasn’t relieving like they say; tears dragged tears and soon, my eyes were too blurred to see the light. I was twenty-five, empty, and alone. I didn’t want to die like this. And I didn’t want to live like this either. I only fitted into my skin, where my grey soul poured, happy for having a cover in the color of glistening masks and thickness of  a shield. It hurt, I won’t deny. Sometimes, the shield was too heavy  and sometimes, it made my lungs close in. Yet, it was the best solution; I was too fragile to last in a world where things didn’t flow the way charcoal  did on paper. I wanted to skip those minutes soaked with sadness to more benign times; and then, all I could see was you. I’d been considering it for quite a while now, calling you. I wanted someone to get me out of here and you happened to be the only someone I knew.

  Half an hour later, at 3:20, you were standing at my doorstep.  

   One of the things I loved about you was how you knew it wasn’t quite easy for me to talk about something painful. So, like what anyone would do, you didn’t just twist your face in pathos, ask about how I felt, and started the whole life-is-good crap. You commented on how my flat should enter the Guinness World’s Records for the most chaotic thing on Earth. I answered that chaos is complex order. You didn’t understand me so I had to explain: Chaos is a word created by us humans as to define things we couldn’t see the pattern of. Everything in life follows an order. Things ‘randomly’ thrown around in my flat were a result of my state of mind. Thus, it was actually mirroring the way I felt in its own complex pattern. When we ‘organize’ something, we are only creating simple patterns for us to be able to follow; and me being the farthest thing from simplicity, it wasn’t strange my flat being like that. You replied that it wasn’t okay for me to live in such a zoo then create a philosophical theory as an excuse for it. You then threw a bag  lying on the ground and said it wasn’t you doing it, just your state of mind. I’d been feeling more like a zombie for the past few hours, but you knew well how to provoke me; mocking my theories was unforgivable. Soon, we were hysterically laughing while throwing everything found on the ground at each other.

I tripped and fell on my head.

    I must’ve blacked out for few seconds. When I opened my eyes, everything was literally a blur. Soon, I could make things out. You were lying right beside me at such a proximity I could see every little detail in your face. We’d never been that close before. And there were your eyes, without the glasses for the first time, looking into mine. I could see you then, clearer than ever and I could tell you saw me too. Your breath brushed against my face speeding  my heartbeats. It was an awkward moment, we weren’t used to feeling like this. But that’s what made it beautiful. I knew that right then we had the same thought buzzing in our heads: we were not just friends. I was the one who spoke it out asking what exactly are we. You answered that it’s boring to have a name for everything.

No two people could be more different.

That was what we’d  thought.

Sorry for slacking off lately!

Nothing Makes Sense

We're heading for that one-way trip paved with our regrets.  Really, it just doesn’t matter….we are somewhere else now. Or does it? Tears carved the shape of your face.

Stranger, before you judge, do you know my name? To you, I am pretty clothes above skin below twisted thoughts imprisoned by cranium beneath a face.  Open your eyes to see, but not too wide; the truth will have you blinded.

Hear beyond the words, reach out a finger and trace the lines twisted into a brain molded into me who is talking to you what falls on ears  blocked by lies.

Curiosity killed the cat and to stop the harm we are now shielded by ignorance disguised in what makes sense but the truth is: Nothing really does. Lose your mind and be free.

The tunnel sinks in darkness and we can’t see through that  thing they call tomorrow . Let them decorate it with their fanciful thoughts that will be pulverized by the sun.

 And we are hanging on a pendulum swinging between hoping and hurting and not hoping at all. It’ll just hurt anyway.

New Skin

Click-Click-Click

Her beige shoes trod across the winding road. Faraway, there were pizzas and waiters. The place teemed with them walking swiftly not looking at anything in particular. They frowned in concentration with a Herculean effort not to drop the trays.

She walked starring at the tiles and listening to the Tick-Tick-Tick of her shoe.

Big tile. Small Tile. Big tile. Small Tile. Big Tile. Small Tile.

Tick-Tick-Tick

Tears hit the floor as her hands froze on the doorknob and her lips pressed into a thin line. She tried to imagine herself,  a figure standing in there with flushed cheeks and empty eyes, a huge lump rising in the throat.  But that looked like someone else. Her features lost their distinction as they drowned in the whirly sameness of days.

Wake up, survive, sleep.  Wake up, survive, sleep.  Wake up, survive, sleep.

Vrrr-Vrrr-Vrrr

    The voices in her head went dull, echoing the mechanical roars of the car motor. Her mind was an immaculate reflection of the world seen by those tarnished blue crystals, free of her vision, free of herself. The sun rays slanted across the black sky and spread until there were no traces of darkness. Yet, in her inner mirror she  saw where they resided, lurking right beneath the surface of the days. Days were masked nights. Nights were perpetual. The twiddling autumn leaves that flew in the far horizon were never free; the wind propelled them to the dead ground of her thoughts. And now, she was running away, peeling away that person’s skin she came to recognize as a self she no longer wanted.

Hush!

Listen to her tears fading away…

 Imperfect Prose Post 

Hold The Rain

As I sit waiting,  I close my eyes and let the whishing  sound of leaves paint thoughts within my head similar to those I have at the eerie minutes before sleeping when reality and dreams mingle and you can’t tell if you are awake. I feel the dust beneath me curdling. Seconds later, the train arrives and it starts pouring. I open my eyes to see you smiling, “It’s time to go,” you say. I carry my bag with one hand and with the other, try to hold the rain. It always slips away.

I press my head against the window. The moon is a crescent….it’s smiling  at me. My breath falls on the glass and my eyes dart towards the seat before me where you are sleeping. I can see the air coming out of your nose. I draw a smiley face. With the sleeve of my jacket, I erase it and draw something else.

I hear your keys opening the door and  scurry to it. Panting, you enter. I let my arms circle around you. Noticing  how much weight you have lost I smile and say, “Finally, a diet has worked!” I feel an abrupt shiver running through your body. I look at your face and  see a smile, too wide… too peculiar for it. “Yeah,” you reply and start  whining about the heat. I don’t remember this until later.

The silence of your breaths still my lungs

 I enter the train. Through the window, I see the moon, smiling from last year. I want to change it into a grimace but it won’t go upside down. I sit on the empty seat before me, and it’s still smiling. Tears escape my eyes. I was too stupid, life was never  laughing with me, it was laughing at me. 

Happiness is the seconds you hold  the rain.

                                                                                   

There Were Never Any Rats

Trapped behind a window

Strewn on the dirty floor

My heart seeks  blankets

Of the sky’s velvet black

Yearning as they are

Beyond my tiny fingers

Beating underneath

The words unsaid

Their pulse now causes me

A daunting sore throat

That forces me to hold my breath

Halt then talk

And I don’t know  what they are

Nor can I call them a name

Beyond description?

Ambivalent thoughts

And they keep my windows closed

Afraid of the rats’ scratching

Seething as they see me

Breaking their precious laws

I hold my  protests

And then unleash them

Small pebbles

Breaking their mighty glass walls

And I’ll see them screaming

Secretly smiling

Until they come

And close the door

The day is impending

Still not scripted in my plans

When I’ll break my shields of silence

Pulverize their lands

Scatter them on the moon

And sing

“There were never any rats”

Safeyya

A Story From Modern Egypt




In front of the mirror, Safeyya stood putting on the cheap mascara  she bought yesterday from an everything-for-two-and-a-half-pounds shop. Afterwards, she decided to wear her green lenses for she thought they would fit her screaming-yellow outfit she wore for work today. They did not at all match her color of skin, the lenses, and neither do they fit most of the other girls who wear them, but in Egypt, it’s not a common thing to find someone’s eyes having a color other than brown; and  the same  way it always happens in every place in the world, a country’s women yearn to look like another’s, and eventually,  they wind up making billionaires out of cosmetics’ companies. She tied her hair and wore the veil which formed a paradox with the tight clothes that made it easy to know what every part of her body looked like, but as a simple average girl, that was not a thing that had ever entered her mind. She hummed a song she’d heard yesterday on the radio while admiring herself in the mirror. Safeyya was not beautiful, and that was not unusual in her surroundings.

      After saying goodbye to her mother, Safeyya headed for the door and went down the stairs in a dancing movement now singing somewhat loudly the part she managed to memorize from yesterday’s song. She heard a sound of a door being slammed and was abruptly abashed and stopped her singing and dancing until the man who was there went away. She looked up and down checking if some other person was going down but, being put out of mood, she did not resume what she was doing.

   Standing in the street for fifteen minutes still not finding any empty place in a bus, she started to become somewhat worried. She considered getting on a taxi, but the thought of paying twenty pounds was appalling enough to make her totally throw that thought  out of her head; it was what she made in two days. But then, if her boss knew she was late, he would not give her the day’s salary and if she did not go at all without previously telling him so, that would be three days salary. Silently, trying to wind down, she prayed to God until she found a bus.

  Ascending the bus, which was a moving ball of human flesh adhered together, was quite a struggle. And what was harder, was clinging to the bars hung on the top of it without falling  and bearing the heat and the odor, not to mention the pain in her feet. Finally coming out of it to the air, she breathed a sigh of relief and thought to herself that it felt more like a stove than a bus. The ride on it twice everyday was inevitable which made her miss the winter days  in which she was not soaked in her own perspiration, but still, that did not save her from the other stuff. Taxis’ fare is twenty pounds; buses’ fare is one. That was enough reason for her and for millions of Egyptians to tolerate it.

   Safeyya was a salesgirl, and had been for the last three years of her life. She was only twenty and did not go to college having stopped her education as was her father’s wish to help in the expenses of their family, and she did not disagree with him; she had no interest in university and thought it was great she made it as far as high school.

  “Finally,”  Nahed, her colleague and friend  said at the sight of her. “ I was so scared he’d (their boss and the owner of the shop) come and ask why you were late." She was still making clothes for her second child; she was going to give birth in winter and did not have enough time in home to do that, so, she made them instead at work.

  “You mean he didn’t come,” Safeyya said quite relieved with the good news. “Thank God,” she said while slightly closing her eyes and sighing.

She placed her bag on a nearby table and took a seat beside Nahed.

“Aren’t you gonna tell me about yesterday’s suitor?” Nahed said.

  Safeyya sarcitaclly smiled and said, “the same..he sweated like hell, spitted while talking, had a mother who saved him the effort of talking, and who looked like the most unpleasant mother-in-law anyone could ever have.”

   “And how much did he make?”

 Safeyya raised two fingers.

  “Tell me that did not mean two thousand.”

  “You guessed right.”

  “And you refused him!” she now raised her eye browse, “what a fool you are!”

  “ I found it pretty hard to stay with him for half an hour and you want me to marry him?!”

  “Yes,” her friend said without one second of consideration.

   “He went away so whatever.”

   “Still, the shadow of a man is better than that of a wall” It was an Egyptian idiom .

    After one minute of silence, Nahed said, “ What are you thinking of?”

   “Huissen,” she said a dreamy look covering her face.

    “And who is that?”

    “ A guy I used to go out with four years ago.”

    “ You used to go out with a guy, if I did so, my dad would have buried me alive and Abbass wouldn’t have agreed to marry me.”

   “Like it was not the same for me, I just managed to keep it under covers.”

    “And what brought him to your mind now?”

    “ He was sooooo cute!”

     “Why did not you get married then?”

    “Are you kidding, he barely made five hundred pounds.”

    “You could’ve married the one who made four times as much as that and you refused because you just didn’t like him.”

   “ Listen, I absolutely know that love doesn’t pay the rent, but, that guy was unbearable so enough talking about him and tell me, did Abbass buy you anything for valentine’s day?”

   “Meat.”

  “Huh?”

  “ You heard that right.”

  “Okay now, I cannot remember the last time I ate meat. What did you want then, a teddy bear?”

  “Flowers would be great you know.”

  “You could go to any garden and smell as much flowers as you want. But now, one kilo of meat costs 50 pounds, so, if you eat it once every week, that would cost you 200 pounds which is two thirds our salary.”

  “ I still wanted the flowers.”

  “And you call me a fool?”

    At the abrupt sound of the door opening, they both stood up.  it was the first customer of their long working day,  which lasted from 9 am till 8 pm. But in fact, their days seemed to last longer than 24 hours, more like a lifetime.

My Name ــــ Story

You saw me standing alone and asked if you could stay with me for a while. You never were considerate and the word “gentle” was an antonym to your name. It surprised me. We talked like there was never a thing between us and on parting, you didn’t remember my name.  It has been years, many of them and you conquered the rules of time in my mind to be always in the present so no second passes  without you sealing it. But you don’t remember my name. How come when you were the one who taught me how to talk? After years of silence, you granted me the words and I started writing, everything imaginable and maybe unimaginable and like a baby who has just learnt how to speak, your name was in every page, every line, every word, every dot even when it was not present, it was there, your shadow was there and when I had not the least intention to write you, your ghosts haunted my pen.

   You don’t remember my name…but you remember my face. Your eyes devoured it… you stole it and rendered me prisoner to yours. You held a rope at one end, and at the other, you  tied a knot around my finger. And you started walking around me, the way wolves do before attacking their preys, you were too stupid to see I had already surrendered..like a thief who saw no use in running, and gave up because it was easier. I wasn’t the thief..you were. Every time you moved, the rope circled around my hands, my arms, my legs, my body, me , all of me….remember me?

    You once admired a red dress I had. you don’t remember it, do you? I do. Red became my favorite color because of you, and it was your favorite color because it seeped out of the hearts you ruthlessly murdered and did not bother to know a name for.  They were all your victims, we were all your victims.

    Once, I dreamt of you..you were weak, vulnerable; everything you were not in real life and then, you started crying in my arms. I told you this dream and you laughed saying I must be feeling very sorry for you now. I smiled and said I did, but I was lying. I didn’t want to wake up from this dream where you happened to need someone, an imperfection you hated, and I was that someone you needed. I loved the feeling of your head spreading all over my chest and me holding you asking you to cry more, let it all out, but in truth, I feared that when you’d be strong enough, you’d leave.

  I bet my story  is too clichéd for you, you’ve heard it before and became weary of it …your ears created a shield blocking it away from entering your mind and being interpreted as a voice of someone who held a memory in your subconscious….that’s why you can’t remember, because unlike everyone else you knew a name of, you did love me.

    

Within Me

I once heard that when you are writing, you are getting into deep with yourself, that self you know, or think you do; then start talking in symbols, unfathomable to everyone but you. So I’ll try, I’ll try to break that boundary, try to decrypt my words for you to understand, making some room for you to enter me, be...within me.

  The fading strings of night circle around my heart, it never tries to escape them, they are its cords to play with the beating that keeps me alive; so that the night never really departs…today is tonight, and tonight is my ephemeral form of eternity where my imagination fires up and bits and pieces of my soul clamber for you to see. And when I imagine, nothing can be more real, or at least that’s what I dupe myself into believing. So many faces are mine but no eye gets to see them but that  of my mind. Remember that girl with shrill voice who uses her hand a lot while talking and has an awkward pronunciation of the  “r”? I hate her, and hate that she’s all they get to see of me. Me…..I always make you in my fancies the only one who knows her. We’d meet up and talk for hours about me, but you never reply. You know why? Because within me, you are not you, you are my reflection who can’t split into half and have a voice of its own to speak. And till  now, I still wonder if I loved you or merely  another version of myself. But you never got to see me, that’s why we talk a lot about her. Sometimes, I'd see you in my room, checking up the stacks of books on my shelves, and sometimes, you'd be reading my journals. I never managed to get over the fact that when you left, I was a person that makes me embarrassed when some fleeting memories stream in my head.

   Last time I saw you in real life, all I’d wished to do was saying goodbye, even though nobody knew it would be the last, not even you, and not me, just my heart. But you know, it wasn’t really worth it, it came up too awkwardly. Years later, I learnt that ends are overrated, the final chapter in a novel is not the best; it’s the one that comes  before it. When I learnt that I’d never see you again, I cried,  I pushed myself into it, it was inadequate not to cry. I knew You never left, you were there. Always there. Hidden between those strings of night, breathing within the folds of my brain.

  I never knew how diluted is the effect my memory holds on the sight of you. But today I knew that;  I saw you again. The chance represented itself to me to finally have a mutual conversation with you. But we didn’t talk because you never knew I was there. I was stoned in my place. I couldn’t move, not a step and couldn’t breathe. But when I did move, it was the other way….I feared you wouldn’t be like the you I’d created. 

Metallic Paints

Hours giving way to timelessness

Dreadful present  swallows me

Tomorrow and yesterday

A shadow and reflection

Never to be felt again

With darkness suffused

And now they fade        

You threw a stone

Broke the window

Almost stealing my heartbeat

Towing me to underlying existence

Beneath their metallic paints

Those dreams our dreams

They hide and breathe

Offsprings of their prohibited

Our never to be real screams

Let’s seek alternative shelter

Beyond what they can reach

Listen! Their sirens

Have come here too

Where else to go Where else to go?

Those dreams our dreams

Are but forged fancies

To soothe ourselves by lies

They caught us long ago

Behind their metallic-painted bars

Lucidity

“Marcus”

“Yes dear”

“I think I started hearing the violins in my head again”

   I am in my old living room, I realize as I glance around the place. For some reason, everything is in black in white. My vision is hazy and I remember that when it happened, I had just woken up from sleep. Mom is standing, all dressed, and holding the door knob. I say something I cannot now recollect, then she closes the door behind her saying she is going to the market. She never came back.

  Me and Marcus are on the airplane. Everything is going down in ruins. Our hands are clasped tightly until I get this numbness in it that makes me think it broke into his. Amidst the screams, I recognize my grandpa’s voice singing to me “Come Josephine in My Flying Machine” with his usual enthusiasm. A wide smile is all I can see out of his face. Years later, I come to the conclusion that me and Marcus survived, just like that. I remember the crash and I look at us, we are here, which means we are not dead.

  I keep on searching for that shoes under the bed. There are stacks of shoes there but not the one I want. I am in hurry, Tim Perrson asked me out; only I can’t remember where that pair of shoes is. He is standing outside with his olive-green jacket. I can’t find it. I can’t find it. Beads of perspiration cover my forehead and fall on my eyes. They are blinding me and I can’t see through them. Tim left and went away.

   On the deck of that ship, I stand before a creased version of me. It’s stormy and everyone is panicking, but I’m not. I search for me and she’s too frightened. When I approach, I find out she’s my mother. I want to talk but then I step on something and I realize it’s the pair of shoes.

   I hear the violins again. My head rests against a brick wall. Beside me, is someone. I can’t see his face but the comfort he radiates is enough for me to stay. I am in love with that person, only I don’t know who he might be. I am drowning in the stormy sea. He is with me.

  Years ago, when I was five and mom left, I said in a voice low as a whisper for I had just woken up, “ How can you tell when you are not dreaming.”

She stood for a second and looked my way. “You can’t,” she said

  

55-Reruns

Tick Tock
My present is passing

As I stand here alone

Watching from a distance

Reruns of the past

Tears

Break my shields

And you slip through the holes

Making me sink in you

Drowning my soul

The scars are fading

Only me and you remain

The pains are  aching

Only me and you remain.

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