Bedridden Bedlam

and for now I have snoozed my conscience and migrated my soul elsewhere because in this enslaved body, wind is a serial killer cosplaying as breath

The axe forgets what the tree remembers. 

- African Proverb

Selam,

A hopeless wind abandoned in an even more hopeless world has perhaps finally confided in the arms of my city and so its air is stained by an unexplainable winterly commotion. October is a month that was invented in the memory of parted lovers who communicate in the language of gravity; leaves surrendering to their urge to not caress the ground, moths giving into flames as if it was always their destiny, lilies bowing their heads down as if paying homage to the sun in deathbed, days longing for nights and the mavericks of the wild skies finally seeking a shelter on mourning earth. I often think how we begin every new year with frost bites and warm coffee mugs, and well it is also how we end it.

If you are wondering about my whereabouts- well I was congealed in time, sometimes stirred sometimes stuck to the walls of this bottomless cauldron called life. Choking on all the poems wanting to not be fenced by my reticence and unwritten letters coarsened like a ceramic vessel forgotten in the summerly furnace. I was busy shooting exiled rocks at the sky, hoping maybe a few pigeon will escape to the ground and so I will tie my soul tantalized in the ink to their ankles, for you to hear from me once again in this lifetime.

I write once again, assuming you too would have mistaken someone else's shadow as mine and ran with an anticipation to ask if the paper has betrayed me or language slithers between my fingers reeking a venom that induces prolonged silence. Now that we meet again, in our letters, in our unspoken yearnings, in our quelled mania; I am impatient to hear all your curtailing "fine" to my "how have you truly been?" The calender keeps changing its skins and flourishes in an uncanny mathematics of irrevocable return, but still you and me remain rooted in a billowing nothingness that has discarded all its organs in lieu of a thousand windows that will let its subdued squeals and screams find an exit. For you are my loudest yet unheard “one day, three autumns”

For they often write passages about how love, pain, rage, sadness enters our withering existences but I wish they wrote more about the death of all of it. The mothers have been conditioned to believe they were born with an entrance to life between their thighs, unknown and unquestionably ignorant to how a womb has also always been an exit. An exit from being caught in a limbo in a safe haven. Perhaps the last time you and me rested in peace without denying life to discard our bodies. As I write and ponder how perhaps every timeline syncs and nods its head for me to gather my will to articulate and remind you something you haven't yet mustered up all the courage needed to let your faculties register it.

I truly believe in a theory that talks about how even before our souls zipped up the costumes of our mortal bodies, even before earth had anticipated the possibility of our existences to ever exist- we signed a soul contract with all those who'll meet us in both the worlds. None of us knows what that contract entails for who has ever had time to read the terms and conditions printed in a negligible font size like a footnote without any context. And so every cell in my body tells me that you and me have signed the soul contract to meet in this and all the next lifetimes only to kiss each other's ramparts with words that can both kill and heal. For a perpetually sad poetess like me, you bring joy with even a mere nod, agreeing to read my unending nonsense with an unflinched zeal.

This is you and me- beyond our aching bodies, muddled up minds and sore hearts Almost

everyday I ask myself, "I am alive but am I a living thing?" I desperately seek my answers in books written by those who had themselves pulled the decaying life out of them the way a syringe feeds on blood. I am caught talking to myself in thin air, forlorn in my room and all I reek is this embarrassment of never making sense to anybody. Either I have never devoured the true meanings of what it means to be above the ground from the eyes of those beneath it or I was never meant to be here. I have never witnessed death, even once in the entire span of my existence but yet I feel i am just a few inches apart from it, something I'll never be to life. And no I don't say all of this because I wish to inflict a miserable hopelessness over you, I am just a curious soul often dreading to understand how life passes through us like a thread drilling into a needle, and so how do we define death? Is it when you let the other end of the thread transcend exhausting the entire spool or is the needle's incapability to take it anymore?

I talk like a nomad who has been buried every night and somehow still let sun caress her knees the next morning, don't I? But aren't we all nomads here, tired of falling for mirages in the search of oasis. Maybe suffering is tethered to our wish to be quenched, an asylum seeker who doesn't dare to wish for home because even a roof is a privilege. Isn't it very humanly of us to envy all those who have everything we would happily slice our throats to possess. They taught us to desire with the complimentary shame for doing so. It is shameful to long for a love that'll soothe a soul with blistered feet but it is courageous to be kind and bestow the same love upon those who yearn like you and me. For the fire that ravages itself to keep others warm, for once too wishes to be held tight to taste the same fervour it exudes. It is as necessary as hard it is to unlearn how yearning and wanting is equally applausable as giving away.

You think so confidently that your heart is an orange and the moment someone asks you to lend it to them, you tremble in an unchewable fury wondering if they'll sit silently to dip their finger in its skull, strip it naked softly and carefully peel off even the thinnest, tiniest threads of scarred hopes. You seek the kind of patience it takes to peel an orange but what if nobody told you that your heart was always a pomegranate and it'll demand way more than just knowing the skin, it takes one to unravel every cell in your body to decipher some meaning in all your meaningless almosts. Don't tell me that the world wouldn't exist if Eve didn't bite an apple but had to dismantle a pomegranate. For when we yearn, we yearn for as long as our souls grow hands themselves to compensate for all that a human hand could never do. And because you have dared to seek antiseptics in the market where they sold salt at every corner, you don't have to take pride in calling yourself the moon with all these craters of wounds.

"I see this vivid dream almost every night,

Where you sit beside me and tell me how

all the owls in our city are willingly taking their lives. Perhaps as a final act to display their fatigue of letting go their beloved night every morning.

I don't utter a word but rather smile back foolishly,

like a clown with cracking face paint unable to find a mirror.

How do I tell you, the owls are privileged to lament in the agony of bidding goodbyes,

For if they met me they would belittle their misery-

Because I am an owl and you are the sun,

I would even celebrate letting you go,

But in this life my fate was maybe to never hold tight,

onto even your mere shadow. "

And so this is my time to leave, leave with the taste of all my thoughts in your mouth. I shall return once again, I don't know the season because all I know is that everytime we meet - it is spring in my heart. This, our paradise remains intact even amidst the storm. I'll keep reminding you how I'll willingly hold the fire within you without burning my own hands- my iridescent lamp. You'll find a poem attached below, may it put your soul at rest. Sending you love songs, magic, sombre smell of crackling leaves and honey eyed dreams.

Yours Truly,

Postwoman next door.