I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of Hell:
Exquisite ghost, it is night.
The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves ...
I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You won't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not been possible in the world?
Exquisite ghost, it is night.
The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves ...
I'm everything you lost. You won't forgive me.
My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.
There is nothing to forgive. You won't forgive me.
I hid my pain even from myself; I revealed my pain only to myself.
There is everything to forgive. You won't forgive me.
If only somehow you could have been mine,
what would not been possible in the world?
- AGHA SHAHID ALI
The Country Without a Post Office.
The Country Without a Post Office.
What came off as my mask was handpainted on sheets of paper, and hardbound into a thick brown diary only to be slipped away to a corner of your cupboard, and you still haven't mustered up enough courage to read scraps of my self-pity, have you?
I think we pretended to live in a dead city, like the one I'm living in right now, where the postal service didn't exist or letters sent were never received. Dead letters. Dissolved letters. Words spread out in black and blue ink. I remember singing mundane songs and speaking those words out loud to you; yet, you never cared to sift through the pages of the brown diary. You were a coward, still are perhaps, to some extent. You had no courage to see what you did to my songs and my words. Never have I sung or read poetry aloud to anyone since then. You live inside me like a void, a scar memory. And though I've gifted a part of me to you in pages, in whispers, in words and silence, I feel that part in me living and, dying sometimes.
I drifted away from that world. Thankfully so. The shift of worlds was planned and prepared. My last plan that worked. We don't share an umbilical chord-ish relationship anymore. Your world is but a chimera. Only a bubble illusion. Believe you me, I never want to run back to your world that waned at the weight of our dreams. You appear way better as fiction, as a part of the torn pages of a happilyeverafter fairytale. You look better as the crumbled tin soldier wrapped in a blanket of lies, someone who never made it to my world.
What matters in the end is that I have forgiven you and me for all the mistakes we made. I have edited my story and moved forward.
Note: I read the aforementioned quotation ages later and it triggered this train of thought.
I think we pretended to live in a dead city, like the one I'm living in right now, where the postal service didn't exist or letters sent were never received. Dead letters. Dissolved letters. Words spread out in black and blue ink. I remember singing mundane songs and speaking those words out loud to you; yet, you never cared to sift through the pages of the brown diary. You were a coward, still are perhaps, to some extent. You had no courage to see what you did to my songs and my words. Never have I sung or read poetry aloud to anyone since then. You live inside me like a void, a scar memory. And though I've gifted a part of me to you in pages, in whispers, in words and silence, I feel that part in me living and, dying sometimes.
I drifted away from that world. Thankfully so. The shift of worlds was planned and prepared. My last plan that worked. We don't share an umbilical chord-ish relationship anymore. Your world is but a chimera. Only a bubble illusion. Believe you me, I never want to run back to your world that waned at the weight of our dreams. You appear way better as fiction, as a part of the torn pages of a happilyeverafter fairytale. You look better as the crumbled tin soldier wrapped in a blanket of lies, someone who never made it to my world.
What matters in the end is that I have forgiven you and me for all the mistakes we made. I have edited my story and moved forward.
Note: I read the aforementioned quotation ages later and it triggered this train of thought.
1 comment:
beautifully written...i love how you weave your words.
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