On Silence, Emptiness and Acceptance
If I don't tell you, you won't know that I have been quiet for a while now. So quiet that I only hear the voices of my mind and soul. Everything else is the kind of music I carefully avoid. A nomad once, I have now settled in the abyss of nothingness. I am nothing. Nothing is me. This void is neither apocalyptic nor enlightening. It's just there, like a guest who visits without a notice and you are too kind to ask if they are leaving anytime soon. You let them stay for as long as they want and try to do your best to host them well. It's been three months now. Three months of quietness, silent suffering, harsh confrontation with bitter truths and cruel acceptance. Three months of standing at the centre of a nameless hurricane, letting the play of pressure weather me to the last limit. I wonder what I am curious about. My patience or the person I become if I manage to come out alive of this embraced torture.
From grief to fears, from fears to numbness, from numbness to detachment, from detachment to loneliness, from loneliness to falling for death, from the face of death to the gate of life: a circle I have covered way too many times. And in the process I have left the world behind me, the desire to dream, the urge to give value to my name and the eagerness to house love in me. All I am now is an empty space where there used to thrive a tropical forest once. Nothing seems to grow here anymore. Nothing can. It's a long wait, I can tell, before this destroyed soil chooses a seed again for flourishing.
"So this is what it is like to taste death before dying," I tell myself every day. An anthophile, I love daisies. Daisies tell me that resurrection is real. Who knows what I will be in my next life. Hopefully, the being is equally kind and equally in sync with art. I won't be me without words, painting, songs and silence.
-Sabina Yesmin
