Fragmented Soul

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

Twinkle twinkle little star

Up above the world so far,

I found one lying in the grass

It was warm and it had mass

It was not a star at all

It was a fingernail that fell

From the hand I keep in jars

Twinkle twinkle little star

I asked my mother what you are

She said a diamond in the dark

I asked my father he said shush

The basement has a funny hush

I went downstairs to count the teeth

The ones I pulled from underneath

The floorboards where the bad men sleep

Twinkle twinkle little star

I wonder if you wonder too

What it feels like to be glued

To the ceiling of a room

Where no one comes to change the moon

Where the only light is small and red

From the clock beside the bed

Where the girl who looks like me lies still

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wonder what you are

A hole that lets the darkness through

An eye that blinked and never grew

A piece of sky that learned to fall

Into a well behind the mall

I keep your sisters in a row

They do not twinkle anymore

They just stare

Just stare

Just stare

Up above the world so bright

I drew a face on you last night

You blinked at me with ash and bone

And whispered you were not alone

That someone else was in the sky

A shape that matched the one I hide

Beneath my ribs behind my tongue

Twinkle twinkle little star

I think you are a silver scratch

A button from a dead man's patch

A shard of mirror from the crash

A tooth I lost and never found

It sank into the frozen ground

And now it lives up there with you

Rotting in a cradle too

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wonder what you are

If I could reach you from the yard

If I could pull you down and hard

Would you be soft? Would you be warm?

Would you fit inside my palm?

Would you hum a song I used to know

Before I learned that stars could grow

Inside the bellies of the ones

Who stare too long at the sun?

Twinkle twinkle little star

I have a ladder and a car

I have a rope and I have time

I have a reason and a rhyme

I will climb the tallest tree

I will carve your name in me

I will eat the light you give

I will learn the way to live

Inside the space where nothing is

Twinkle twinkle little star

I am not afraid of the dark

I am afraid of what leaves a mark

What twinkles is not always good

Sometimes it's blood on broken wood

Sometimes it's eyes behind the door

Counting freckles on the floor

Sometimes it's you

Sometimes it's me

Twinkle twinkle

Can't you see

Twinkle twinkle little star

How I wonder what you are

I wonder if you wonder too

What it feels like to be true

To be the thing that children sing

When they don't know about the string

That pulls the stars down from the sky

And strings them up to watch them die

Twinkle twinkle little star

I know exactly what you are

You are the light that never reaches

You are the lesson no one teaches

You are the word I cannot say

The game I play

The price I pay

The star that fell

The wish I ate

The door that opened much too late

Twinkle twinkle

Little scar

Twinkle twinkle

Little star...

Twinkle twinkle little scar

How I wonder what you are.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

What is your favourite colour?

I don't want to assume blue. I know you.

I know blue isn't just blue with you but if it were the colour you carried in your chest then I would tell you that no blue in the entire world shines as bright as the blue in your eyes

(I know your eyes aren't blue, I know)

I don't mean the blue of summer skies, the blue of cornflowers, the blue of a child's crayon drawing of the ocean. I mean the sadness blue that lives beneath the surface of things.

Blue is often called the colour of the sky but that is a lie we tell children. Blue is the saddest colour on this planet. Do you know why? Because it is cold. Because it is deep. Because the oceans are blue and they contain multitudes of drowned things, ships, cities, prayers, people who swam too far from shore and couldn't find their way back. The sky is blue too and the sky is the loneliest thing I have ever seen.

Have you ever really looked at the sky?

It is just blue stretching on and on searching for something to hold. The sky and the ocean are mirrors, Two vast lonely blues staring at each other across the horizon and never merging, only reflecting their own endless hunger back and forth for eternity. That is blue.

That is the colour I see in your brown eyes when u look at you.

That is the colour I would die in.

But then, maybe you don't like blue. Maybe your favourite colour is green.

Green like the fields we pass every day on the way to nowhere in particular, the ones that blur past the window and make me think of what it would be like to lie down in all that softness and never get up. Green like the mountains that hold up the sky, green like the forest where I got lost once looking for pink wildflowers to make you a crown, green like the exact shade of the world right before it rains. Emeralds are green too by the way.

Emeralds are the colour of a heart that has been buried too long underground and come out more valuable for all the pressure it endured.

I would sell my own heart and place it still beating on a scale and name my price and I would use that price to buy you the brightest emeralds on this earth. Emeralds for your heart which is priceless. I would try so hard that I would strip my ribs bare and hand them to a jeweler and say, "Make something that says what I cannot say."

Or do you like brown?

The brown of earth after rain. The brown of tree bark, of coffee, of the soft soil where things are planted and things are buried and sometimes those two things are the same.

The brown of your hair in certain light, the brown of your eyes. I have stared so long that I have forgotten. I have memorized the map of your face and still I cannot tell you the exact colour of your eyes because when I look at them I stop seeing colour. I stop seeing anything but the feeling and the feeling is too big for a name.

Red?

No, it can't be red.

Red is too violent. Red is the colour of the blood that pools in my palm when I hold the knife by the blade and squeeze until I remember I am real.

Red is the colour of the inside of things, the hidden part, the part we are not supposed to show.

Red is the colour of too much.

But if it were red, if your favourite colour were the colour of life bleeding out of a wound then I would offer you my blood. I would open my veins like a river and say, "Here, take it. It is the brightest red you will ever find." But I am afraid it would be too much.

I am afraid you would spill it because people cannot handle too much, their hands shake, they topple things over, they fall.

Like Atlantis fell.

The city that loved the ocean too much and was swallowed by it. The city where I am always drowning.

So tell me your favourite colour, blue, green, brown, red, something I haven't named, I will swim to every drowned city in every ocean on this burning planet and I will find you the colour with the only thing I have left that is dear to me.

My life, this pulse in my wrists that beats your name in morse code even when I am sleeping.

I will swim down. I will hold my breath and push into the dark water and I will not look back.

I will hope that the love in my chest is enough to fuel the blood in my body to keep moving forward.

I will push the water aside with my bare hands, make a path for my heart which is already swimming ahead of me and then somewhere in the green blue black of the ocean floor where the lost cities sleep and the silence is so loud it sounds like a scream, I will hear your name and without thinking, without hesitating I will open my mouth to reply.

I'm here.

I'm here. I came for you. I would come for you a thousand times. I would drown in every ocean on every planet in every universe just to hear you say my name once more.

But the water doesn't care about the love in my chest or the blood in my veins. The water pours in and fills my mouth. It fills my throat. It fills my lungs, my lungs which were supposed to be fueled by love, which were supposed to carry me through this, which were supposed to be enough. The water is cold and it is everywhere and it is inside me now, replacing the air, replacing the love, replacing everything I thought would save me.

I would cry.

I would cry the way I cried as a child when the world was too loud and no one came to hold me. I would cry the way I cried when you left the first time and the second time, and every time after that. I would cry the way the sky cries when it is too full of blue and has to break open just to survive but crying is useless when you are already in the water. When you are the water. When your body is ninety percent longing and ten percent salt and the ocean is ninety percent salt and ten percent longing and the two of you have merged into something that cannot be separated.

The ocean doesn't need my tears.

They don't even count. I can't even wipe them away. My whole body is slick with tears, my hands, my heart, still beating in my chest, pumping blood that is the brightest red you've ever seen trying to get to you even as everything else is failing.

Nobody can wipe my tears away. Nobody is coming to wipe my tears away. I am alone in the deep with the weight of my love pressing down on me like the entire sky and the entire ocean and the entire grief of every person who ever loved someone who couldn't love them back.

And then my chest caves in. My body trying to save itself even though my soul has already surrendered, lungs try to expel the water, try to throw it up, try to make room for air that is not there and this only pulls more water in.

I choke, and thrash.

I am drowning in an ocean of my own making and I don't even remember choosing to swim.

What's happening?

Wasn't the blood supposed to fuel my lungs? Wasn't the love supposed to keep me going? I have so much love in my chest I can barely eat. I have so much love in my chest I can barely think of anything but you, your face, your voice, the exact shade of your favourite colour, the way you once looked at me and I felt seen for the first time in my entire existence. I have so much love it spills out of me in everything I write, every scar I trace, every glass of water I drink hoping it will finally be enough to quench the thirst and still it wasn't enough.

See me.

I am down here. I am the one who asked about your favourite colour. I am the one who promised to bring you emeralds.

See me.

I am still here, my lungs are full of water and my chest is full of love and I cannot tell the difference between the two anymore.

My body is sinking.

My heart is still rising.

Pull me up.

Reach down and grab my hand. Pull me out of this,out of myself. Pull me into the warm,m air and let me cough the ocean out of my lungs and let me breathe and let me live and let me look at you and say your name with a mouth that is not full of water.

See me.

See me.

Pull me up.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

*naiyak* kamusta ka?

to say that I'm fantastic would be a lie so I'll just say somewhere between feeling nothing and everything all at once (*hugs*)

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."

Then what is heaven?

Heaven is being able to love. Heaven is loving you.

I am a ridiculous person and I have always known it but I am your ridiculous person and that is the only dignity I need.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

Why do I get to breathe?

I am sitting in a room with four walls and a ceiling that does not fall and I am breathing.

Somewhere, a mother is counting her children's limbs. She started with ten fingers, ten toes, two arms, two legs, a head full of curls that smelled like sleep.

She is down to a number I cannot write because poetry fails where bodies begin.

"In the heart of the wound, a child is drawing a sun that looks like a tank."

And I? I am drawing nothing. I'm scrolling through reels with my thumb moving faster than my conscience can catch.

The child with the sun that looks like a tank has stopped drawing. His hands are under the rubble now, the sun is still on paper with a yellow crayon snapped in the middle and somewhere a crayon factory is still making yellow crayon and somewhere a child is using one to draw a sunflower and somewhere I am still breathing.

Why?

There is no anesthesia, only one doctor who has not slept in three days and a child who will not live to see four.

The doctor is crying, he has forgotten how to stop and he says, "I'm sorry. We have nothing to give you but this."

The child looks at the doctor with eyes that have already seen more than most adults and says, "It's okay, I'm not scared, mama said there are no bombs in heaven."

I am in my room with four walls and a ceiling that doesn't fall and I am crying but my tears don't bring back the kids. My tears are just water and water is a luxury in war.

Why do I get to live?

I have done nothing to earn this. I was not braver than the children of Gaza, I was not more deserving than the mothers who held their babies through the night and woke up to find them cold, I was not more righteous than the fathers who dug through concrete with their bare hands and pulled only pieces.

There are only children, only bombs, only parents digging graves with their bare hands and there is only me trying to make art out of the unmakeable and the children don't need my poems, they need the graves to stay empty, they need to learn addition instead of subtraction.

I cannot give them that.

I saw you and I did nothing and I am sorry, I am so sorry. I am the sorriest person alive and my sorrow doesn't rebuild you a home.

We remember you, we fail you.

We remember you, we fail you.

We fail you, we remember you.

Forgive me. Forgive us.

The field is full of bodies, and I am one of them. I am lying on my back and the sky is so blue.

"How dare you be beautiful," I whisper to the sky, "How dare you be beautiful while we are down here becoming earth."

A bird lands on my chest, it thinks I'm earth. I let it sit there because I want to be useless even dead.

"I'm not special." I tell the bird, it flies away after pecking at me. I don't fly after it.

"The war will end, the leaders will shake hands, the old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son."

I am not the son, I am not the mother, I am not the leader or the handshake or the war that ends.

I am the moment the body realizes it's no longer a body, blood drawn like new nations and a heart that keeps beating long after the treaty is signed because nobody told it the war was over.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

فَإِنَّ مَعَ الْعُسْرِ يُسْرًا

Indeed, with hardship comes ease.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I think I was born bored,

I think I was born blue,

I think I was born wanting more,

I think I was born already missing you.

I think I came into this world looking around at the walls and the windows and the people talking in the kitchen and I just knew with certainty, that none of it was right.

The colors were too dull and I was a child sitting in the middle of a crowded room playing with the edge of my sleeves staring at the floorboards waiting for a door to open that didn't even exist.

I looked at the things that made everyone else so happy and I felt nothing but a long yawn in the center of my chest.

I think I was made quiet,

I think I was made cold,

I think I was made with empty burning hands,

I think I was made just for you to hold.

I think my blood was cold from the very first breath running through my veins like an underground river that was mourning the loss of the sun. I walked around with this weight in my ribs, a wet sadness that ruined my appetite and made me stare at the ceiling for hours in the dark. I wondered why I felt like a house that had already been packed up in boxes. I thought I was just broken. I thought my slow heart was just a defective machine that didn't know how to keep time with the rest of the world.

I think I woke up tired,

I think I woke up sad,

I think I woke up reaching in the dark,

I think I woke up mourning what I never had.

I was so furiously greedy for a light I couldn't even name. I would look at the ocean and think, is this it? Is this all the water there is? I would look at the night sky and feel cheated because the stars were just burning rocks and they didn't know how to reach down and touch my face. I was starving in the middle of a banquet refusing to eat the bread the world offered me because I knew that in some secret part of my bones, I was meant to be fed by someone else's hands.

I think I was born thirsty,

I think I was born dry,

I think I was born staring at a terrifying sky,

I think I was born hoping you would be my lullaby.

I spent my whole life lying on the grass looking up at a blackness that was too wide and too cold. I watched the dying stars. I was a little dove trembling under the weight of a universe that didn't care about me at all, scared that the sky was going to collapse and crush me before I ever found out what my own name sounded like in your mouth.

I think I will die hoping,

I think I will die true,

I think I will die with a very slow and heavy heart,

I think I will die still entirely in love with you.

I think that even when my brain stops working and my lungs forget how to pull in the air, the very last twitch of my muscles will just be the physical spelling of your name. I will not die of old age, or of sickness, or of a falling plane. I will simply reach the maximum capacity of how much love a human body can hold, and I will break open.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I dream of you every night.

You're there, I can touch you, I can hear your laugh, I can rest my head on your shoulder and feel the rise and fall of you breathing.

Then I wake up.

Every time, every single time, my eyes open and the world rushes in like water into a sinking ship and you're gone. You're always gone and the space beside me is cold, the light is grey and mean. The world kept spinning while I was dreaming, while I was with you, while I was home for a few stolen hours.

I have started to hate waking up.

I dream of you every night, hopefully I won't wake up this time.

I want to be trapped there, I want to be held there, I want to wake up inside the dream and find that waking was the lie all along.

In the dream, you laugh.

In the dream, you look at me and I don't have to explain.

In the dream, my hands are clean and my love is gentle and I don't ruin everything I touch.

The world without you is cold and grey and full of honey I spilled and glass I broke and a bed that's too big and a silence that's too loud.

The world with you is warm. The world with you makes sense. The world with you is the only place my skin fits right.

Hopefully I won't wake up this time.

Hopefully this time the dream holds.

Hopefully this time I slip so deep into the sleep of you that I forget there was ever anything else.

Hopefully this time I drown in you and call it breathing.

I should try again. Close my eyes and find you. It's still early. Perhaps if I lie down again, curl in exactly the same position, breathe the same way I was breathing when I had you.

But what if the dream becomes the waking?

What if there's nowhere left to go?

I dream of you every night. Hopefully I won't wake up this time.

What if the only place you exist is the space between sleeping and waking?

What if you're the thing I catch in the corner of my eye that vanishes when I turn to look?

What if you were never real and the dream is just my heart making up stories to survive the cold?

In the dream, I am good.

In the dream, I am not the sinner.

In the dream, I am just...someone.

Hopefully I won't wake up this time.

Hopefully the dream is stronger than the morning.

Hopefully you're stronger than the light.

I'm so tired of waking up without you. I'm so tired of being here when I could be there. I'm so tired.

I dream of you every night.

Tonight, I won't come back.

Tonight, I'll be where you are.

Tonight

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

You and me, we are not the same.

We could live a thousand years and die a thousand deaths and be reincarnated a thousand times and we would still not be the same.

You are good, I am rot.

You wake up in the morning and the first thing you think is probably something kind, something about the light or the birds or how to make someone's day better. You probably stretch and smile at the ceiling like it owes you nothing and you owe it nothing and that's fine.

I wake up and my first thought is, I am still here.

Shit. Still here, still breathing, still trying, still failing, still this.

By the time my feet hurt the floor, I've already convicted myself in a court that doesn't exist.

You are a saint, I am a sinner.

You pray and it's probably beautiful, your knees on the floor, your hands folded, your eyes closed like you believe in something. Your prayers probably smell like clean linen and hope. They probably work, things probably get better after you pray.

I pray and it's just...noise. The same three words over and over again.

Please please please.

Sorry sorry sorry.

Why why why.

My prayers taste like ashes.

You love and it's clean, it's the river you can drink from without getting sick. You love and people feel safe, seen. They feel like maybe the world isn't a terrible place because you're in it, because you looked at them and smiled.

I love and its a contagion. I love and it's a desperate thing. I love like a cat drenched in the rain for too long grateful for any crumb of affection and so pathetically visibly grateful that it makes people uncomfortable. I love too hard, too fast, too much and then I hate myself for it and then I push you away before you can leave first and then I am alone and I start my whole ugly cycle again.

You and me, we are not the same.

You walk through the world like you belong to it, like you have the right to exist, to take up space, to exist without apologizing.

I walk through the world like I'm trespassing, like at any moment someone's going to tap me on the shoulder and say, excuse me you don't belong here.

And I would just...go.

I would not and apologize and walk into the sea.

You are made of light and silk and things that don't break.

I am made of glass and rust and things that were already broken when I got them.

You heal people just by being near them, I've been told I'm a lot, intense, too much and also not enough.

I exhaust people. I exhaust myself.

And still,

You looked at me once. You looked at me like I was worth looking at. You smiled at me like I was the kind of person who deserves smiles.

Why?

Why would a saint look at a sinner? Why would the light bend down to where the rot lives?

It's not fair but you looked-

I know, I know that if you ever fell, if you ever slipped, if you ever did something that wasn't saintly, I would still love you.

I would still love you.

I'll hold it for you. I'll be the one who deserves to bleed, I'll be the sinner so you can stay the saint.

One of us gets to be good.

The other gets to be...this.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

She had three teeth.

Three tiny white pearls that bit my finger when I teased her. She had one word.

Da.

It meant give.

It meant up.

It meant look at me.

I sit on the floor of her room and hold the rattle. It is a yellow sun with a face.

I shake it.

Ch-ch-ch.

It is a terrible sound of dry bones rattling in a box.

I am waiting for the Da.

I am waiting for the small noise that proves I am necessary but the silence is a blanket of lead.

Where are you my little silence?

Who is listening to your babble?

Do they know that Da means you are afraid of the dark? Do they know that you need the blanket with the satin edge?

I am shouting into my own chest.

Da! Da!

But my chest doesn't answer.

I put the rattle down and cover my face.

I am the child now.

I am the one who cannot speak.

I wake up and my hand is cupped, it is hovering in the air shaping itself around a head that is not there. I remember the spot right on the top of your skull. The place where the bone had not yet closed, where the pulse beat against the skin like a trapped moth.

Thump-thump.

The doctor told me, "Be careful, she is not finished yet"

I was so careful. I was made of trembling. I treated your head like it was made of spun sugar. I press my palm against the mattress. I press it against the wall, against my own rough face.

I am looking for the soft spot.

I am looking for the place where the life is beating so close to the surface that it terrifies me but everything here is hard. The world has closed up, there is no pulse in the dark anymore.

Only the clock and the clock does not have a heart.

The clock only has teeth.

I sit in the rocking chair.

Creak. Creak.

I find myself humming.

It is a reflex, like breathing and blinking.

I hum the old song, the one my mother sang to me, the one I sang to her small pink ear.

Do not lie on the edge of the bed,

or the grey wolf will come,

and grab you by the flank,

and drag you into the woods.

I stop and the song dies in my throat like a choked bird.

What a lie.

She was not on the edge of the bed, she was in the center. She was safe and the grey wolf came anyway.

He did not come from the woods but rather, he came from the air, from the silence.

He took her while the lamp was on.

I look at the window and the night is pressing its black face against the glass. "Come back, wolf," I whisper, "Bring her back and I will let you bite me instead."

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

Mom, am I still young?

Can I dream for a few months more?

"Mom, am I still young?"

I am kneeling at your feet, the kitchen floor is cold.

"Can I dream for a few more months?"

I know I am supposed to be waking up now.

I know the world is standing outside the door holding a helmet and a shovel waiting for me to get to work.

I know I am supposed to harden. I know I am supposed to turn into something solid and useful, something that can carry a heavy load without breaking its back.

But Ma, I am still so soft.

Look at me, I am still made of water and milk.

If you cut me, I just bleed fear.

I am asking for an extension.

Just a few more months.

Just until the winter is over.

I want to stay in the dark part of the morning where nothing has a name yet.

I want to pretend that I can be anything, an astronaut, a poet, a ghost before the sun comes up and forces me to choose a shape.

I want to lie in the bed of my childhood and watch the dust motes dance and believe that they are angels.

Don't open the curtains. Please.

Don't tell me I have to be a grown up today.

Don't tell me the war is starting or that my body is a machine that is already dying.

Let me be the kid for one more season.

Let me be the thing that needs to be held not the thing that does the holding.

"Am I still young?"

You don't answer.

You just brush the hair off my forehead and your silence is the loudest thing in the room.

It says, my sweetheart, you were never young. You were just waiting to be broken.

But please Ma,

Lie to me.

Tell me I have time.

Tell me the alarm isn't ringing.

Just five more minutes.

Just five more minutes of the dream.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

"Did you get enough love, my little dove?"

Why do you cry, my little dove?

Did you get enough love, my little dove?

I ask you this because the sound you are making is a wet malfunction in the throat. You are folded into the corner of your room, knees to chest, and you look so terrifyingly aerodynamic as if you are preparing to fly away from the reality of being human.

Why do you cry, my little dove?

Is it because the world promised you a feast and gave you only crumbs?

I look at your shoulder blades, those wing like ridges trying to cut through the silk of your skin and I see the malnutrition of the heart.

You are starving my sweet silly dove.

You have been pecking at the concrete hoping for a seed or a worm, hoping for anything that tastes like tenderness.

Did they not feed you?

Did they look at your iridescent neck, your soft, gray innocence and decide you did not need sustenance?

You cry because you are full of a hollow wind.

You cry because you offered your plumage to the butcher thinking he was a collector.

You thought that if you were beautiful enough, if you cooed softly enough, the hands that reached for you would be gentle but hands are rarely gentle, my love.

Hands are cages. Hands are traps.

Come here, my little dove, come here.

Let me look at the damage.

Let me smooth the ruffled feathers of your ego. You are shedding the hope that kept you warm in winter and now you are naked against the frost.

"Did I get enough?" you whisper, the tears sliding down your beak, down your chin.

No. Of course not.

You were never meant to be full. You were only meant to be eaten.

So cry my love, my dove.

Weep into the pillow until the feathers rot.

I will sit here and watch.

I will write exactly how beautiful you look when you realize that no amount of singing will make the sun come back.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

​I. Peace in love (الأنس)

They say that to love someone is to be willing to die for them. I have read this in the great books, seen it in the statues of the martyrs but I think this is a lie we tell ourselves to make the emotion feel noble.

Dying is such an event isn't it? Dramatic. Period.

Funny how I am asking you for the most terrifying thing in the world, I am asking for the tuesday.

I am asking for the hour between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm when nothing is happening, when the sun is slanting through the dust motes, when there is no war to fight, no tragedy to weep over.

I just want to sit in a chair across from you and watch you drink coffee. I want the "how was your day" and the "pass the salt."

To die for you is easy for it happens once.

To live with you though, to watch your hair turn grey and your skin loosen and still find you beautiful?

Are you brave enough for the boredom?

11. ​Bewilderment (الوله)

Counter-saying: Silence is golden.

Correction: Silence is a poverty.

I am greedy for the sound of your voice. I don't want the vows written in blood. I want the scraps, the murmur, the sound you make when you are reading and you find a sentence you like.

When you speak to me, you are pushing air from your lungs into mine. If you stop talking, I suffocate. It is that simple.

Tell me about the weather. Tell me about the stain on the rug. Tell me anything as long as it requires you to open your mouth and let the life out.

111- Nostalgia (الحنين)

I went to the market to buy us some time.

The stall was full of heavy things like diamonds, gold, deeds to houses, plane tickets to Paris.

"I don't want those," I told the merchant, who had eyes like clocks. "I want the cheap stuff."

"What cheap stuff?" he asked me.

"I want ten minutes on a park bench," I said. "I want a rainy Sunday morning. I want the time it takes for a kettle to boil."

The merchant laughed and looked at me with pity.

"Oh, my friend," he said. "You cannot afford that. The big things, the diamonds, the trips, the sacrifices, those are cheap. Anyone can buy those with a little adrenaline but the small time? The quiet time? The time where you just sit and be?"

He shook his head.

"That is the most expensive thing in the shop and that costs a lifetime."

IV-The soul secret(النجوى)

Counter-saying: Action speaks louder than words.

Correction: Words are the only action that matters.

I want the intimacy of the mind. I want to cut open my skull and let you walk around in the grey matter. I want you to do the same.

When I say "I want conversation," I mean I want to be haunted by your history.

When I say "I want time," I mean I want to witness the decay.

Can we just sit?

Can we just watch the candle burn down to the wax?

Can we just exist in the same room without trying to consume each other?

Please.

Put down the sword.

Put down the shield.

Just pick up the teacup.

Talk to me until we are both dust.

Please?

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I am waiting for you in a future

that feels like a wet gray sheet.

but you should know the anatomy of the girl

you think you want to meet.

My chest is not a bed of moss,

it is a factory of salt and wire.

I have turned my grief into a hobby,

I have set my own house on fire.

There are flowers in my heart yes,

but they have forgotten how to be kind.

They are black veined and heavy,

with the sort of thorns that blind.

They scrape against my collarbone,

they bite into the red wet beat.

I am walking through my own life

with glass shards beneath my feet.

You will want to kiss my mouth,

but my mouth is a bowl of rain.

You will want to hold my hand,

but my hand is a map of pain.

I am crying as I write this,

the tears are fat and slow like wax.

They land on the floor like dead insects,

they are the only things I cannot tax.

I am so alone in this body,

It is a room with no windows or doors.

I am scrubbing the walls of my mind,

but the shadows stay on the floors.

The thorns are moving upward now,

they want to taste the air in my throat.

I am a sinking ship in a bathtub,

trying very hard to stay afloat.

When you find me, if you find me,

don't expect a girl made of silk.

I am made of sharp edges and spills,

I am the smell of sour milk.

I am the elegy of the unloved,

I am a bell that only knows how to toll.

The flowers are winning the war tonight,

and they are eating the rest of my soul.

The tears are making the ink run,

turning "love" into a dark blue stain.

I am practicing how to be a ghost

so I don't have to feel the rain.

You are not here yet,

but I am already apologizing for the mess.

I am a house where the wallpaper is peeling,

revealing the names of every old distress.

​I am so alone in the middle of the day.

I am so alone when the moon is high.

I watch the colors of the world turn gray,

and I don't even have to wonder why.

It is because the heart is a heavy fruit,

overripe and bursting at the seams.

The thorns have taken hold of the root,

and they are strangling all of my dreams.

Do not come to me expecting a song.

I am a throat full of dry, dead leaves.

The nights are quiet and the nights are long,

and I am a woman who constantly grieves.

I am mourning the person I used to be,

the one who didn't flinch at a touch.

Now there is so much sharp inside of me,

and I am feeling way too much.

The tears are falling on my shaking hands,

the ink is blurring into a dark wet sea.

I am a traveler in forgotten lands,

and no one is coming to look for me.

The flowers are wrapping around my spine,

pulling me down to the cold hard floor.

I am becoming the thorn and the vine,

I am not a human being anymore.

​I am a monument to the things that sting,

I am a bird that forgot how to fly,

I am a winter that never found spring,

a slow, whispered goodbye.

So wait for me if you have the heart,

but know that the heart is a dangerous thing.

I am falling slowly deeply apart,

under the weight of the hurt I bring.

​My eyes are red and the room is dark,

and the silence is a heavy, red velvet shroud.

I am looking for a distant spark,

but the thorns are singing way too loud.

I am drowning in a gallon of tears,

I am a ghost in a dress made of lead.

I have been lonely for a thousand years,

and the flowers are well and truly fed.

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

I am the patient,the surgeon,the cold steel table.

I stand in front of the mirror and the light is harsh. I am washing my hands, scrubbing under the fingernails until the skin is raw and pink because sanitation is important when you are about to open yourself up.

People think they know how to hurt me.

They try.

They throw stones,use words, then they leave, ghost, break promises.

"Are we doing this again?" the reflection asks.

Her eyes are black holes, her mouth doesn't move but I hear the voice in the base of my skull.

"We have to check," I reply, picking up the scalpel. "We have to see if it still bleeds."

"It's healed," she lies. "Leave the scar alone."

"It's not healed," I say. "It's festering, I can feel the rot."

I know exactly where to cut. I don't need a heavy hand.

I insert the blade and twist.

Do you remember the way he looked at her?

Do you remember the exact tone of voice when he said he didn't love you?

Do you remember being twelve and lonely?

I slice through the fascia, I separate the muscle.

I bypass the ribs and go straight for the soft, pulsing organ.

External enemies strike the surface and bruise the skin.

"Please stop," the reflection whispers.

She is crying now. "Anesthesia, please. Give me the anesthesia."

"No," I say, calmly terrifying. "Pain is data."

I take the tweezers, I start pulling out the insecurities one by one.

They look like worms.

You are not enough.

Snip

You are too much.

Snip

You are a burden.

Snip

I don't throw them away but feed them back to myself.

The world thinks it can break me?

The world is a joke.

I am the one who knows how to induce septic shock with a single thought. I am the one who knows how to stop the heart for a full minute just by replaying a conversation from three years ago.

"You're killing us," the reflection says.

She is leaning against the glass, sliding down.

"I'm refining us," I correct her.

I look at the mess I've made.

I am safe from everyone else because no one can aim as true as I can. No one has the steady hand that I have. No one hates me with the precision that I hate myself.

I rinse the blade.

I stitch the wound back up with black thread, tight, leaving a mark that will itch in the rain.

"See you tomorrow?" the reflection asks, defeated.

"Same time," I say. "Same procedure."

I turn off the light.

I survive.

(Unfortunately)

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

We'll die anyway~

"I reach for me but I'm not there, it's so lonely but who cares?"

[fragmentsof-mysoul]

So how does it matter?

I’ll die anyway.

Everything else, the kindness, the cruelty, the love that feels like a heart attack, the hate that tastes like metal, it’s all just noise.

I’ll die anyway.

So why not scream?

Why not take this love and press it against someone until we both bruise?

Why not crack the world open to see if the yolk inside is gold or just more goo?

I’ll die anyway so what’s the point?

The point is there isn’t one and that’s the freedom. It means my devotion isn’t noble. It’s just another form of hunger. It means my rage isn’t tragic, it's just a chemical fire.

I’ll die anyway so I could spend my last day planting a tree for you, watering it with my own hands or I could spend it striking the match that burns the whole forest down just to feel the heat on my face, just to see the light.

The outcome is the same.

I'll die anyway.

This love has no future to protect. It might as well be beautiful. It might as well be total.

I would orbit you like a doomed satellite. I would memorize the cadence of your breathing. I would wear your name like a shroud and if you turned from me? If you made my devotion a joke?

I’ll die anyway

So what’s one less laugh in the universe?

What’s one less set of footsteps walking away?

But if nothing matters, then everything is permitted and I am capable of everything.

The tender kiss and the twist of the knife are made of the same desperate material.

I’ll die anyway so maybe kindness is the only rebellion. To be soft, even as you’re crumbling. To hold a hand, even as your own bones are turning to dust.

I’ll die anyway.

So let me love you to ruins or let me ruin you with love.

It’s all the same song.

The true death isn’t the stopping. It’s realizing the song never meant anything in the first place.

I’ll die anyway.

So how does it matter?

It doesn’t.

Let me paint the wall behind my eyes.

Let me paint an overripe pomegranate splitting on the sidewalk, let me paint the radiator of my room. Let me paint the glistening trail of a slug with no where left to go in the snow.

I'll die anyway so let me.

Let me paint the trail that's my love, irrational and shimmering and doomed by the first light of dawn.

What's a little more ruin?

I could trace the lines on your palm with a reverence so complete that it becomes a theft, I could steal the future from your skin or I could press my palm to the hot eye of the stove just to hear the sizzle of my own blood. The blister would be more honest.

I see it all in pictures. The greasy rainbow in a puddle, the mold on a loaf of bread.

Ugly, beautiful, dying, alive.

Like me.

I should kiss the mould. I should drink from the puddle.

I want to press my ear to the chest of the world and hear the rhythm. I want to put my love in a shoebox and bury it under the brightest flowers so that it feels like something pretty. I want to take my rage and scream it into a river.

I'll die anyway.

Let the last image be good one. Let it be the milk spill over the black stone, the crow picking a jewel of glass from the gutter, let it be your eyelash on my cheekbone and me letting it stay or let me be the crimson bead blooming from my finger I pressed to the thorn.

Let me be your heaven, let me be your hell, the destination is the same and I'm just the road that ends in a cliff. I'm so tired of walking and I'm so ready to fall.

My morality is a suit and I wear it for an event already cancelled. I can take it off and I can roll it in the mud and I can set it on fire just to watch the threads blacken and curl. I will crush you with the weight of my need and call it intimacy because I'll die anyway. I would build a palace for you from my own ribs, I would polish the bones with my nerves until they shine and you'd say it's a cage.

And I'm afraid that if you do, I would collapse it and let the whole structure fall and I would lie there in the rubble of myself laughing, because the joke is on me.

I built a home from the very thing that holds my heart prisoner and bold of me to assume you could live there. No one ever can, not even me

Let's be done with pretense.

Let's be done with fakeness

Let's choose love

Let's choose kindness.

Let's choose reality.

Let's be done with cruelty.

I'll die anyway.

We'll all die anyway.