a reason or two or one sixty-three

–

I feel really depressed.

Because I feel unloved.

I want to buy back my love.

So I will send you flowers, hoping every leaf buys me a day, or an hour.

I will write you letters, hoping every word, buys me a chance,

To be loved again by you.

Is it my fault?

That I am unworthy of your love?

Or do you love me, as you say you do, and I am flawed in my thinking?

How can I trust you, after you’ve broken me,

Many times, ago?

How can I trust myself,

When I’ve broken many strings, and loves, before?

How can I ever know, that I can love again, or be loved,

If I don’t love myself, anymore?

I feel weak,

A weakness like shattered glass, I see my reflection in.

I don’t know that I want to live again.

A weakness that makes me want to pull by a thread,

So hard, until it unclasps, from life.

I want to let go, but I am too weak.

I am too weak to take action, to be loved, to believe.

I embarrass myself, with my thoughts.

My head is not a friendly place right now.

I am afraid, to tell anyone, lest they stop loving me.

It’s embarrassing. It’s not nice. It’s not a lovable characteristic.

My victimhood is swallowing me,

Sabotaging my relationships,

Overtaking my life as though I stood on a mountain that’s split open and engulfed me.

I feel trapped in a cage, in the middle of the Gulf, below the water’s surface.

I try to speak, but my words fail me.

The world drowns me,

My voice unheard.

My only refuge is sleep.

But even then, I wake up thirsty, throat dry, nightmares regular.

I don’t wish to be a downer.

I want to be loved.  

As I prepare

–

as I prepare for my partner’s departure, my soul weeps,
I cry, behind every exaggerated smile – for help

agony holds my neck captive;
my knees beg for mercy,
my mind pleads forgiveness – though it was an accomplice,

I lose purpose once again:
is this all the world has to offer?
a plague of painted faces?

I am left, drenched in grief
I suffer in silence,
betrayed by speech

accompanied by death alone
my softest enemy,
my loudest friend

To my best friend

—

Despite the company of friends,

I feel loneliness the greatest of them all — my enemy,

My dearest, my lover — who

Through the tides, waves, and turns,

Stays by my side —

Loneliness: I have never reciprocated

My returned affection;

I have never declared undying feelings,

Or committed grand gestures

Dedicated to you

Though now,

After 22 years of accompanying me,

I may owe you one;

This: a letter,

After having written to none,

For years — I speak to you;

Loneliness,

Leave me —

Choose another victim;

Your love is suffocating;

Your cold embrace isolates me;

Your passion surpasses truth;

Your whispering drives me senseless;

Free me —

Your best friend,

رسالة إلى عشيقتي

---

الوحدة تعتبرني موطنها
عندما أقابل الخبر الطيب يحتضنني
وأبوح عن فرحتي لأصدقائي
ولكن عندما احتار مع خبر سيئ
لا أجد أحد ليحتويني إلا أنتِ
ولكنهم يريدوكِ بعيدة عنِّي
وأنتِ لم تقدمي لهم إلا حقيقتي

وهذه هي حقيقتي، أنا كتابتي
وإن كتبتُ بلباقة فاعلموا أنَّهُ انتحار قلبي
وإن لم أكتب على الاطلاق فاعلموا أنها ثورة عقلي
صديقتي الوحيدة هي
لم تَخذِلْني قط، بل نادتني في كل أوقات يومي
وكل ليل تناديني وأغفوا في نومي

إلا الآن، أتأسف لكِ يا كتابتي
لا أعرفكِ إلا في حزني
ولا أطرق الباب إلا وقت بكائي
عندما لا يسمع أحد صراخي
قد خذلتكِ يا حبيبتي
ولم أنصت إليكِ في أول رحلتي
فالحياة عديمة بدونك
ارجوا أن تغفري استهتاري
وإن قررتِ يوماً بتَركي
ِاقتليني قبل ذهابك
وارحميني قبل موتي

Head, Heart

I’ve been avoiding this for a while. It feels like decades up there. Writing about you, or intending to write about you feels like a crime – a crime I should not commit. It feels as though writing this will put me in trouble someday, as if it is not already putting me in trouble with her. I do not listen to her sometimes.

I know it has been a long time. I know you might be disappointed in me. But I still remember what you told me about the boy who went missing – or dead, or harassed – and the newspaper accounts of it. I remember how you wanted me to read it, even though we did not really know each other, back then.

I know it was an act of kindness that introduced us to each other, so I’m not sure when or why we stopped being kind to each other. I don’t know why the world does this sometimes. Why does she like to ruin everything? Actually, I usually ruin everything.

She is much smarter than I am. Everyone says it. Everyone says she knows the world better than I do, but I think I see the world through a special lens. I don’t think she could live without me – nor could I without her.

But would it be fair if I want to be with you? Would it be fair for both of us, to be together, when everything says we wouldn’t even be able to beat in the same rhythm?

I digress, because I’m afraid. My soul tells me it’s wrong to write this, but what if I really want to? What if this is a way to release how I feel? What if this is the way to let it out? But what if after another decade, I still remember the newspaper accounts you asked me to read?

Sometimes I want to kill her, but that’s only when I’m very sad. It boggles her; it makes her mad. But I know if I kill her, I’d be killing me too. But her insecurity makes me hurt – physically, really, hurt. And it feels like I run a marathon when she thinks she said something stupid. I get second-hand embarrassment, then she overthinks it until she finally decides to sleep – while I do all the work. When she’s in pain, she wants to kill me too.

We both can’t live without each other, but sometimes we can’t live together. This boggles us both. We both hurt, even when she thinks she’s alone; we both hurt.

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It has been a day or two or three hundred and sixty-five.

–

A year passed its mark. The tune cannot swim in the air’s waves.

The melody finds itself on a book: it’s dusty, cold, and alone. It dissolves in the letters and touches everyone that holds it. It feels itself under the spotlight when a highlighter marks its limbs – it feels itself travelling again when someone quotes its name.

The tune travelled from a history of muse. Across speech, overtime, it fell in writing, and made its book a nest for another three hundred and sixty-five days. Now the tune sits in these letters, and every day or two it takes a vacation in your speech.

It whispers to you. It begs you.

“Keep the tune in your conversations. Keep the melody sung for the generations to come. Keep the music in the air prevalent, louder than despair, louder than a child’s cry and a father’s cracking bones. Speak of these letters every day so they continue to travel space, to exist in the rubble of loud, deafening, noise –talk about the muse, I beg you.

Talk about me.”

Why do you work?

–

(For the privileged first-world members who wouldn’t be hungry without work)

This question popped up while I ate brunch at a café earlier today. I took my lunch break earlier than usual, at 12.20pm to have a croissant I’d been craving all morning.

And then it hit me. I don’t eat here every day, and I no longer spend my money here and there as I so often did during university.

When I was studying for my bachelor’s, I made up for the lack of sleep by indulging in the habit of ‘treating myself’ on the regular – it worked. The morale was, “I deserved this because I did that.”

But I knew that university was a passing time – a temporary, fleeting, period of my life.

I followed the plan as everyone did to be a sufficient member of society: a university graduate, a normal, educated, ‘adult’ who is now suitable for corporate jobs and marriage, and somehow, raising children.

But would I be doing this all my life, until retirement?

Will I live to work, or will my life be some work and more living?

Or is my life my job?

Does it necessarily have to be a negative thing if I see my co-workers more than my family, who I currently live with?

At once, while writing, at a café, as I so often did, it hit me: why do I work?

I do not work for money at the time being. More than half of my salary is spent on my commute to work, on the car I got to get to work, the course I study for my career, and on the food I eat while I’m at work.

At the end of the month, there is not much to save. Does that mean I live for work? How come I’m not unhappy as some of my peers, or my friends, who also work? Why is work a negative term?

I do not live for work. Essentially, I live to learn. Banality and tedious, bland, colourless conversations or books do not entice me. If there is nothing to learn, what is the point?

So why do I work?

To learn.

Perhaps, this is why I am not afraid; I am not sad; I am not disappointed. And I do not feel my time fleeting in nothingness.

I see my work. My portfolio is growing. I am learning.

I am making mistakes, experiencing life, and for now, this is good.

Perhaps society’s greatest fear and shared experience is to live for the weekend, which we’ve so often fallen into since our youth: to wait for the summer vacation, for the holidays, for the leave-days, for the weekend.

To live a double life: one at the office, and one with friends.

Many of us live for money and consumption. In essence, that is living to spend, and in many cases, it is to work a full month to live short spans of little pleasure.

And what’s the point of having money to consume? To live for the latest technology and the latest fashion, or to forget our misery by drinking and passing out?

To exist as a consumer, rather than take part of a larger experience?

To do mandatory work instead of meaningful work, even if it were a corporate job?

Your time is valuable.

Make your own choices.

Live, learn, and be weary of settling in exchange of your life.

The 1st of February

–

I can write despite cheer’s poverty

I can write when the wind pushes my plans away,

When my fears return,

I can no longer write,

For I have not held a pen in ages,

I have not written from my heart’s desire,

Have not cried

Have not kneeled to the power of the pen,

Have not surrendered my voice free to echo in the streets,

I have not written, and I am not writing now,

 

I am watching my soul perish

To the banality of existence,

To the reality of capitalism, to the next pay-check

To the expectations of my peers,

To my relentless criticism

Of this soulless self,

 

And all I ask for you

Is to spare me a sentence,

Let me live again, let me write again,

Let me breathe as I often did, as I was lost in commas and similes,

As I analysed every page till the letters became my family,

As it fed me with passion and bliss,

Give me, back.

2018

—

It is the New Year, evidently by the celebrations worldwide in clubs and on the internet, in the desert and on public streets. Perhaps it is fate that I write this now, quite appropriately on the 1^st of January than on any other day, and that these thoughts washed on my shore by the end of 2017, than on any other time throughout the year.

Unlike two years earlier, during this time, I am excited. I am excited and not in the fairy-tale sense of this year being a treasure chest to open holding seated opportunities. I have the excitement of a child and a student who has the parent or the teacher to guide and support them (luckily).

I almost suddenly yet gradually developed the will to have faith in myself and I truly believe that this is thanks to one main person in my life, along with many others. I do not think that when I secluded myself, as comforting as it was, that it was the best thing to do, or even the most productive way to go about life – to each their own, after all. Some work better alone, most work better with support – yet it is important to remember while mentioning this anecdote that we ought to remain dependent on ourselves.

This is not to say that you should never depend on your partner, or your best friend, or your family. There will come times when your knees will tremble and you will need someone to carry you – quite literally – and those important to you will be there, and you can depend on them and trust them fully to hold you. Despite this, we need to remain our own person, to continue thinking and sharing these thoughts, to work on our skills, to live and discover without creating the barriers we so often create for ourselves (and I am guilty).

I have missed out on many ‘good times’ because I simply stayed home.

I no longer want to remain tied this year by invisible walls I’ve created by myself (with some help from the society, etc). I want to be the person I imagine to be, I want to be proud of myself, and not only for some moments, and not only for a few bits of the past, but for the goals I have for the future, and the small cumulative efforts I put towards achieving these goals.

These goals are not necessarily capitalistic-driven. They can be as simple as spending 30 mins a day alone, thinking, in open air. They can be challenging yourself at work. They can be smiling at every passerby. They can be saying good morning to that one person at work you don’t really think replies to anyone’s good-mornings.

I did not intend to write this because it is the new year, nor do I support those who say the new year ‘feels’ are overrated (because, let’s face it, it’s much better seeing cringe-worthy and happy uplifting tweets than others).

This is a simple happy post of a hopeful and optimistic person. Maybe when I’m not feeling so well, I can come back and read this (and you too, reader) and somehow feel slightly better.