What really did it, was that

My feet squelched the entire way back up the mountain.

It was almost amusing, the steady squish, squish, squish, squish against the rain sodden surface. The steep path uphill (or downhill, depending on whichever way you’re facing, I suppose) is painted in tyre stripes of mud tracked up by the owners of the little houses lining the paths. Roads, they’re to be called formally, because they have graduated being traversed by feet to being coursed by cars. A field could arguably lay claim to that by the same qualification, but well, roads they are. I’ll admit to having more than a little animosity towards them. At an incline of about 45°, they’re not the stuff of a casual stroll, regardless of where you’re headed. But the inevitable aches of separate groups of muscles in your legs is still the more pleasant alternative to taking the slower, winding path down the mountain, lined by houses that have homed generations, with their gardens littered with gnomes, and faces pointed with equal parts of inquisitiveness and guardedness, even some scattered hostility, towards obvious strangers passing through. Come to think of it, it’s an easy choice to make.

I dwell upon these minutiae. I could even say, I think it’s impossible not to. Whether it’s the odd tranquility inspired by a gargantuan golden candle hoisted up on the sides of buildings, framing in electric light the four corners of the city, or the peaceful steadiness with which the behemoths of trees drown out this human attempt of marking man-made boundaries here with the ease of their breadths, there is an unspeakable wonder in both. Depending upon which street you take, your shadow will be cast in the streetlight, or the moonlight, but never both. Depending on which way you’re looking, the mist will condense whisper soft on your face, or lose its fragile claim to existence on your shoulders, but never both. Heading into the woods, I would have still called it fog- visible, almost palpable, but not yet tangible. I moved through it like a brush through paint, like an eye through the ocean, watching swirls bloom and die under the sparse reach of streetlamps. Everywhere else, it was left to those most primitive of senses to still perceive. It feels like drowning in air with uncertain boundaries, melting unexpectedly, seamlessly, with a ground that springs into solidness out of the nothingness, with each step. And yet, the moment I left the city and ventured out to retrace my steps home, then it was rain. The only difference between mist and rain is, after all, how it falls. The deniable and the undeniable, the almost there, and there. Wetness, on my face, in my hair, under my feet. Not flowing yet, but enough to add a layer of movement imperceptibly yet definitely there. I wondered, on my way between two candles, if the frog I saw at the side of a path knew where he was going. Or, for that matter, where he’d come from at all. There were no ponds or streams here anywhere, spare the river, at least two candles away. For a fleeting moment I wondered if I should take him home, but then the impulse passed, and I let him be. You can’t save everything. Most days, you can’t even save yourself.

On the cracked glass globes that cover the streetlights, barnacles grow. Exactly like the ossifications that encrust the skeletons of ships, or the undersides of piers. I remember most clearly ones that grew on a fence half-sunk into a rock pool I used to walk past, a lifetime ago. They looked just the same. Just as sharp, just as desolate. I wondered if they sleep when the snow comes. I wonder when the last time was that the ocean had covered this mountain. I wonder, when the next time will be. I wonder if I will calcify too, before then, if it too would be tangible, and wet. If the frantic lady who discovered at the cash counter that she’d left her credit card in her car, and left a line of people tapping, shifting, and sighing in those unmistakable nonverbals of repressed exasperation behind her, will be there for it. If that man I perceived walking behind me with the slightest, most visceral and peripheral of instincts, will be there for it. If the frog will be there for it. I wonder if it’ll still feel like drowning in air, when it’s salt water instead.

18.12.2021

Floodgates

I want to open my mouth

and have only rainbows pour out

with that same breathless quality

with which nightmares tear the ground

Flowing from my ears at night

Wild-maned terrors, champing to bite,

Iron shod hooves tossing restlessly

while my own twisted feet make no sound

except their untangling, in bedsheets strangling

slowly, insidiously, ‘round my neck snaking

Fingers cold as death on my own shaking

straining for the nearest light, to put down

the shutters, the shudders of whatever horrors

metallic-tasting dreams and bruised lip murmurs

rustling threateningly, behind creaking floodgates

Cracked fingernails leaking ink, insistently loud

But because I will,

I open my mouth

and have only rainbows pour out

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Floodgates | Yusra

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What are you not telling anyone? .

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I feel as though I am frequently guilty of this. Of simply rolling over and falling asleep, and ignoring some nagging unwellness that has been pestering me. But it scratches at you, making you increasingly restless, till it starts spilling over into the part of your life that you only ‘portray’. When the person you are is unwell, it’s only a matter or time before it starts leaking into the person you’re supposed to be.

For the sake of metaphor and stunted humor, let me say: we’re nothing more than giant bathtubs. If you don’t deal with how much is swirling in there, pretty soon it’ll be sweeping out from under the door and reaching the guests in the living room.

But it’s not about the guests at all. People who visit you don’t live with you- you live with you. We none of us take the time to recognize our existence as a little, self-contained biome that needs a little tending to flourish- and a little pruning. If the diseased parts and chipping fingernails don’t get trimmed regularly, you’re not going to be growing.

And that’s already too many house- and body part analogies, but I’m going to leave you (and myself) with one last one: this body and mind house each other. And in levels of intensity, each one of them needs your care.

Open those floodgates now and then, okay? I promise you, there will be a rainbow over all that you’ve bottled in, flowing out. ♥️

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Day Nine: Rebellion of Many Forms

Some lines need to be said more than one time. For day Nine.

🍪

Day 4: Empty Gleis

From ship to shore. Day four. 🌿

Directions

Do you ever feel exhausted at the idea of having to explain yourself to yet another stranger, all over again? I know I do. I feel as though…. my capacity for sharing myself from the beginning, has long been overrun.

I’m content to sit gathered and contained, roiling within myself, not at all inclined to open windows showing what’s inside to people passing me by. There have been enough people who’ve lived in me, at this point. I have made a home out of this body and heart. I’ve come to appreciate the silence in the rooms, without the empty chatter of strangers who need to explained the novelty of it all. It feels as though I’ve come years from needing to be understood, the fierce impulse to lay myself open for roughly probing fingers and minds to turn over and see.

I’m done, trying to sell myself to vaguely fascinated drifters in the day, taking a bite out of me and tossing me back into the tray. I’m nobody’s sample, nobody’s trial period- nobody gets to walk their calculating gaze through me. Now I’m a puzzle I’m working over inside my own head. And should there be someone interested enough, truly intrigued enough, I’m not impossible to find- Should they be sincerely invested enough to come find me. 🌙 .

Honeysuckle

Colored

 

 

I overheard something amusing earlier today. A patient’s attender had apparently asked for me, but she didn’t know my name. She asked the nurse on duty where that ‘fair, brown haired’ doctor was. The nurses conveyed the message across in the exact same terms, and it amused me to no end, because I’ve never been referred to as ‘fair’. What made me chuckle louder internally was that if my father ever heard anyone calling me ‘fair’ within earshot, he’d probably have a coronary.

I’m a mix of colors. I suppose I was a standard fat white baby when I was born, but a lifetime of playing too much in the sun, horse riding, a fair smattering of assorted sports and swimming, and the ever present tropical sun, have ensured that I never went back to the baby’s pink bottom thing I was back in the toothless days. Which has always been a particular thorn in my father’s side, him of the bone white complexion. He always had issues enough that my mother wasn’t as white as him. Add to that the shame of a daughter who was clearly headed to the other end of the skin spectrum, and it was one blow too many for his fragile ego. My entire childhood was peppered with a steady upkeep of comments about how dark I was, and naturally in succession, how ugly. There was this one particular incident, an Eid party when I was twelve, where he called me out to say hello to his friends. They all asked the standard ‘how is school’ questions, and my father answered for me, saying, ”Oh, she’s just an average student. Everything about her is average. At least if she’d inherited my looks or color, she’d have something good about her.” The comment was met with laughter from some of his friends, and awkward smiles from the others. And I stood there, in all my twelve year old offended pride, and announced, ”What’s wrong with my color? I like my color!” This time, all of them laughed. My father pulled me out to stand in the middle of the room, and said something from his usual repertoire of back-in-his-modelling-days, if-only-you-had-my-color-you’d-be-worth-something- spiel. Followed up with his standard ”See, what you look like right now, nobody likes that. Nobody’s ever going to want that.” But I was properly worked up at this point, and I informed him that I happened to be a very nice color. There were tons of white people who went to the beach trying to get to my precise color. And I still remember the faces of each and every one of his friends chortling at that statement. Including my uncle, who’d had enough of my embarrassment, and goodnaturedly told my father to shut up and leave me alone.

I guess it’s more than a little strange that I’ve made a full, full circle from that point, and come back to where I was then. I was only allowed clothes in certain shades of beige, brown, and gray, because I couldn’t ‘pull other colors off’. I think I was sixteen, when my aunt, exasperated with the contents of my suitcase, tossed half my clothes in the Salvation Army bin and replaced every one with popping reds and pinks and purples. ”You dress her like a medieval widow!”, she told my parents, to which my father replied calmly, ”it’s what she can wear, with her coloring.” And then confiscated the brightly colored clothes, when we flew back home.

I remember coveting red, and blue. I wanted blues so much. The first time I bought my own clothes, I bought four dresses in the same shade of blue, because I loved that cerulean so much. Overkill, I know, but it made sense. And unsurprisingly enough, the same shades still peekaboo in my closet now. Only more normally interspersed with other, more taboo colors. Maroons and emeralds and royal purples, lots and lots of glossy black, some pink (even though I loathe it), and even the occasional bumblebee-butt yellow.

But more than anything, I’ve settled into a peaceful coexistence with my own color. My father, I think, never will. He went off  last month and bought me a ‘designer’ dress worth a comfortable $300, in the same drab beige as the curtains in my house, the same tired color I wore almost as a uniform at home.  But at some point, we stop being the broken children of broken parents, and start repairing ourselves, because we cannot repair them. His logic is still the same. His daughter’s too dark for actual colors to look anywhere good on her. By someone else’s reckoning, I am, amusingly enough, ‘that fair doctor’. And somewhere in the middle, I am my own spotty, tan-armed and pale-legged, dark circled and healthily scarred color.

Just that I like my version of it. Because I’m more than my color. And I happen to like that.

 

Until next rant,

Your ever lovin’ Cookie ❤

Downwind

I’m still here.

Only this time, downwind.

❤️

The Adventures of Two Mice Being Experimented Upon in a Glass Box

 

 

I’ve never been afflicted by Writer’s Block. I never woke up and had a day that I couldn’t write a little more. A day where nothing happened that could provoke me to write. But all the same, my writing habits became disjointed and slowly, crippled to the point where I didn’t even want to think about writing. I’d mentally shove the idea or the inspiration along. Tomorrow, I’ll chronicle this tomorrow. And Tomorrow never comes. Because there’s no today that has ever stopped itself in time for the day before it.

The problem, I think, is Deja vu. And I don’t mean a flash of disconcerting recognition, that I’ve been in this very combination of place and time, that glitch in the matrix, so to speak. I think that the same things have been happening to me over and over again, with very little variation. And that’s slowly ingrained this indifference. Why should I write about this now? What purpose will it serve? It’s only going to happen again. It does, it always does. I go back home to the same house. I’m serving my sentence out bonded to the same slaver. The names and covers of books and authors change, but six hours a day, I sit at the same table I’ve been sitting at since I was eight. I wear the same clothes in nondescript succession, tie my hair the same way, mechanical movements and systematized behavior.

This is the pit. The pit of all things lost and forgotten, never to be rescued. I walk in circles. The same words are thrown in my direction, and I respond to them, because when I don’t, something worse will follow. I sit on the dining table, and eat – eat – subserviently. That means that you eat in intervals. You are not on that table to eat, but to serve food, serve water, run errands to and from the dining room, listen to an hour and half’s worth of sermonizing, and god help you if  you don’t acquiesce to whatever is being discussed and whoever is being maligned. You listen to a steady stream of minutely honed observations, a calculation of all your short comings, all your perceived and apparent flaws and defects. You collect a list of things-to-do for till the next meal, where you’ll invariably be held accountable for them. You take all the abuse and all the anger and all the narcissism-tipped barbs thrown your way- and the food, that you have to be grateful for- and you swallow.

Three times a day, every day. When he’s not home, he calls home to make sure you don’t miss a dose. Venom needs to be administered just as carefully as medicine. You swallow it all.

And  you become sick. The days and the nights become repetitive milestones on a road going nowhere. Some hours you have the patience to analyse what you’re seeing. Other times, you barely have the energy to keep your head out of the mire you’re sinking in. Occasionally you get enough time to indulge in a little philosophising, about the state of life, the meaning of it, the whys and hows of the tangible and perceived world that exists outside your cage/bubble. You experience it as though through a semi-permeable membrane. But you can’t swim through. Or even look in that direction too long. You’re not allowed to.

At a certain point, a life like that is little more than a lab record. The Adventures of Two Mice Being Experimented Upon in a Glass Box. Running on a fixed wheel, eventually the most stalwart of your dreams begin to gasp for air. You slow down, reserve your energy for the barest of essential tasks that you must do. You account for every iota of mental and emotional energy, and bury the rest deep inside, for when you can afford to feel, without consequence.

You stop hoping for things to change. You stop dreaming.

You stop writing.

That’s why  I stopped writing. It began to feel like a lie I was telling myself. Lies of love and lies of better days to come, even though good things were happening to me, they washed off the minute I set foot back into my pit. It has a gravity of its own and I fight it, but the words escape it with more difficulty these days. Just as I do.

I hope to get out with the rest of my sanity. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve given up on all possibilities of justice here, for karma or the law or the fucking Flying Spaghetti Monster to teach the keepers of the pit a lesson. I don’t care, I just want to get out with what’s left of me, and what I can still write.

And even if I don’t make it, I’m going to keep pushing my words out with my back to the last wall. Or I’ll try, anyway.

 

Here’s hoping, for some form of escape.

 

 

Love,

Cookie ❤

Day Twenty : New?

Strip away every known.

Every tendency

every fallacy

Clean off the bone

Past the skin but

leave the poetry

wash the words away

Dull the clarity

Take the lessons

-spare the sins

They have no meaning.

Dissect understanding.

Amputate

that knife edge balance

of what I have and

what it takes

Snip, snip, all the habits

Every face

Remove the wings

Bind the fingers

Stitch the lips into closing,

eyes frozen

I take every bit of I from me

and I

still remain

But who am I then?

New?

©️Yusra

19.04.2018