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

Headaches (and other assorted regrets)

It‘s been a while, hasn’t it.

I suppose I needed to vent my spleen, and this old haunt of chronic splenomegaly was the first that sprung to mind. Old habits, and all that jazz.

I’m currently beating myself up over having missed an extremely important class today. It had been scheduled over two months ago, I‘d paid through the nose for the sheer chance to have attended it, and there‘s no denying the fact that it would have provided me with a LOT of instruction that I invariably would have needed for the coming months.

And yet, I woke up this morning with the remnants of last night‘s headache, and a complete unwillingness to subject myself to the slightest exertion that would have been needed, in order to drag ny backside throughout the day. I contacted the person in charge, found that there was some way to back out of it, and that reinforced my already fluttering inclination to spend the morning in bed and sleep the headache off. I could have gone. I could have made it through the day. I know for fact that I could have managed it, and would have been much the richer for it.

Instead, I slept for three hours , woke up fresh and rested, and filled with horrid guilt for having giving up an opportunity of this magnitude for a little more snooze time. At the point where I sit typing this, I could have been done already. And I’m acutely aware of the death of my ambition, that somehow went unnoticed gentle into that night.

How on earth did I come to this? How on earth have I grown comfortable enough in the span of a few short months, enough to ignore such massive gateways and crossroads, simply because the path I‘m on will do fine for now? Whatever happened to my steely resolve of years, that constant rage and race for self improvement? Between hours of unvarying workdays and long periods of ample rest, I have disconnected from that constant, incessant burning desire for self betterment that drove all my conscious thoughts. Comfort apparently truly is the death of all ambition. I find myself staring at the clock today with an oddly focused, concentrated sense of horror and dim detachment: there was a time earlier today, where I had to take a decision. But this decision was taken by the ‚new‘ me, the one who is lazy, well rested, well fed- and not the stranger I thought she would be. The one who would have shucked all physical discomfort at the possibility of a seriously good opportunity is long buried- and apparently, I haven’t missed her for a while now.

It‘s with this unnerving knowledge that I‘m confronted with my own newly blossomed deficiencies. Indeed, they seem to be less ‚new‘ and more long in the root already. I find myself sorely in need of tilling the soil this late into the winter, when the frost has already set, with no one else except myself to blame for the tardiness. With no one else except myself to blame. Not for the harvest that I have already missed. With no one else except myself to blame, for when the results of my poor hard work grow again, weak and malnourished and poorly fed. And I will have no one else except myself to hold responsible for them. A ‚myself‘ that I have to now reassess, reorganize, indeed, to recognize. It‘s a late wake up call; one that I chose today to wake up to, turn off, and go back to sleep on. And I can’t help but be halfway between disgust and reproach, and an urgency to repair this to previously known heights again. But it’s always morning work. Here‘s hoping that I don‘t let the mornings after this one go to waste.

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 3: Leviathans dans le ciel

Monsters, even in the skies. That white whale defeats me yet. .

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Day 3 of NaPoWriMo. Oh, we’re doing this! ☀️

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Your Cookie has been traveling. Spring greetings from Bonn, Germany. Who’s in the neighborhood? 🙃