Oasis Of The Living

Four years ago we were painting the city with our colours, he had his shawl masking his lower face, the black and white hatches contrasting his strong hazel eyes. I was hopping with the joy of a child who’s just exploring the world for the first time, to see our hearts, our words finally expressed on the walls of this city, changing the monotonous chill of cement into a reflection of the day’s spirit.

The Oasis of the living, watered by the rivers of freedom fighters both dead and alive. That graffiti on the wall was in memoriam of a brave young man who, among others, have given me the ability to deeply breathe with lungs full of air, perhaps for the first time in my short history.

In this city, we live inside a black cloud, you can barely see six feet ahead of your own step, we almost forgot what it was like to gaze upon a horizon that isn’t raging with beige and brown. The seasons all fell under the clasp of poisonous turmoils as well, the autumns and springs were a biohazardous yellow that you can feel your veins hardening from the toxicity as you inhale, the winter was a gloomy grey that creeps and settles inside your bones, leaching itself to your marrow, and by the time of summer everyone was isolated in one of the most crowded cities of the world. Courtesy of modern industrialism.

Yet on that day, four years ago, I took my first real breath, cleansing me of the grey with sprays of black and red.

We saw the soldiers heading towards us, Hussein wrapped his shawl tighter around his nose as I squealed in unease. One of them looked towards our work and nodded in approval, he seemed impressed, and if he could see beyond my eyes perhaps he would’ve seen the shadow of a smile. The other three however, wanted to assert dominance, one of them came yelling insults from afar. How do we become the vandals when we’re the ones at war with ugliness?

Hussein took my hands and looked into my eyes purposefully, I assured him I was ready with a slight nod and we ran together through the inner alleys of Mohamed Mahmoud St., I will never know if that was necessary or not, neither of us trusted the uniforms but we laughed the entire time and perhaps ran for a longer time than was necessary.

When we finally settled down near one of the street coffee places, we were merely two college rebels beaming with hope and my soul was overwhelmed with love for his sharp mischievous eyes. I took the Palestinian shawl loose around his neck and wrapped it around mine, and he never asked for it back.

I look back at those days with nostalgic fondness now, even though not much time has passed since then, but now we seem to be stranded along in the dog days. Slowness and lethargy descended on everything again. The rivers of blood never dried up but people stopped kneeling and paying tribute, they forgot how freedom once expanded in their lungs, a promise under persistent oppressive pollution.

Cynicism and depression are like the ball and chain being dragged behind everyone’s ankles. And we’re no longer college students.

I remember the last time I saw him, it was in our haven, a room in which you can not swing a cat, where we used to meet with our friends and our comrades. Theorizing, arguing about ideologies. Sometimes we were the dreamers, shouting poetry at the top of our lungs, smoking and losing our souls to music and some other times, we were the intellectuals devouring a book after another to bring new ideas of change to the table, to have them torn apart to pieces, criticized and then put back together before they emerge as a better collective version.

The weakening fluorescent light falling over the dirty white walls always gave the room a dim olive green hue that I disliked. The only empty wall was decorated by pictures of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Gandhi and Chomsky, opposite to it the worn out brown couch that I wouldn't exchange for millions and in the corner stood an inert ancient wooden TV, neglected for all purposes except pure irony.

There was but a small square-shaped window on one side of the room looking over a loud street, widely inhabited by workshops of woodmen and blacksmiths and many intermittent kiosks for snacks, and on the other side was a balcony collecting dust that we rarely cared to open in favor of our group’s discretion. On that particular day, none of our friends were there in our haven, Hussein sat on the edge of the couch and I laid my head on his lap, my thick curls covering his old jeans.

“Do you ever fear the blame anymore?” he said.

“Life is too short for that.” I said, “I imagine if they did, their ideas would have never survived this long.” I pointed at the face-decorated wall.

“All I want is to escape the farm,” he said, “I want to run free into the fields with you till the day I die.”

I looked up at him and smiled dreamily.

“We’re just foolish to assume that animals born in captivity have no desire to run away,” he said staring ahead, “we assume our artificial settings are all they know, our zoos, our labs, circuses and reserves, they know it will never be their home. It’s not natural, they will always yearn for the day they run free in the wild even if they had never spent a day in their life hunting for their own food before. The wilderness is inside them, it’s their destiny, and it’s ours too.”

I saw him no more, after we graduated the sirens of false patriotism echoed over our heads, threatening him with jail if he tries to escape his mandatory military service. Servitude at gunpoint masked under illusions of nobility and honor. I often thought about how he must feel so out of place, trying to tame his tongue that refuses to tolerate oppression and so called “superiors” and how he must absolutely loathe the military hierarchy. For the first time I prayed for the revolution that runs in his veins to boil a little quieter beneath the surface, and I waited for his calls with a patience that comes not from a place of capability but of helplessness and so I detested it intensely.

I carry his words in the scent of his shawl now, I carry them everywhere I go, walking down the street, in the subway and after I arrive home from the office and leave my handbag beside the door, feeling unclean and promising myself that I will not do it for much longer. The human body was not built for office cubes, we were built to feed off nature and for nature to feed off us afterwards and yet where I live, whenever I see a tree on the street, it seems like the alien being amidst all the concrete.

I’m fated for bigger things, broader worlds, borderless and free.

So I sit down to my laptop and my voices, the insertion cursor blinking away as I try to summon every particle of energy that still runs through me, begging it not to betray me as I try my best to ignore the weights pulling me down by the ankles.

You’re the writer. So write.

Everything is too heavy. My heart is despondent and congested with my own hypocrisy. But I need to survive, I tell myself, and the voice in the back of my head nags me to be alive instead.

The only light seeping through the window was that of a purple-tinted blond sunset, suddenly all reminders of time became painful, so I drew the drapes and drenched everything in darkness. A hundred days and counting.

It is true what Physicists say, anything that is repetitive can be used as a clock. The uniform taps of my fingers, the oscillations of a quartz crystal, or even the movements of particles inside a single atom. Anything that tics and tocs, can measure the forward vector of time. And right here, right in this very moment, there’s a big clock hanging constantly above all our heads, clad in black, with a sickle in hand. I closed my eyes to receive my share of the blame.

One, Two, Three souls reaped, and then a thousand more.

They roll above me and under my feet, names on a cold list, green bones neatly stacked in fresh graves that newly open every single day. The ticking of the clock is replaced by the bangs of firearms, and as the bullets drop to the floor and the tanks stroll down the streets, maybe time will take me through another moment and another, till the long wait ends and I open my eyes to the egalitarian world we all deserve.

When he comes back, we will raise hell until our voices are heard, we will not fear the ravens in their black with their machine guns and their loud insulting cries, the masses that are now subdued will rise again and demand that the kleptocracy ends this very instant. When he comes back, he might be a changed man, and I might be a changed woman as well, and if I didn’t know better I would resent my own femininity for excusing me from sharing the burden of so-called service with him till we both emerge free to dance our way around the Square once more, but I do know better than to place blame where blame isn’t due. This is not his doing nor mine, he did not choose to be sent to Sinai, to protect a man-made border, and I did not choose the mortifying serpentine patience.

The sun had already set when my brother came back, in panic. He came in, wide eyed and panting with lips so pale they were almost blue, “George,” I fetched him a glass of water as he collapsed on the couch, “What happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“Worse,” he gasped between breaths, “Two ravens, I was being followed, but I think I lost them.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“Three of my friends are dead, Sara.” He said, “I can’t let that be in vain. Tell me you understand.”

I nodded as I knew he was right.

I looked into his eyes and saw his pain, I saw his own clock ticking above his head. He wouldn’t wait, fear was exerting its full power over me, but it wouldn’t even dare reach out to him.

“Do what you will,” I finally said, “But, just be careful, Georgie, tune it down for a while.”

That’s when it came, three knocks and then harsh bangs on our thick wooden door, the stomping of their feet, the loudness of their voice, it was all a terrorizing tornado of anger promising to swallow us whole. George begged me to hide, there’s no telling what they might do to me if they found me, he said, but I wouldn’t. And before we could even take control of our nerves they were barging in. Three of them paraded into the place, tearing it apart, confiscating anything of value they can find their way.

I was yelling words I can not remember now, the whole universe was a haze, as they dragged George outside the house. “He’s just a college boy.” I yelled and yelled, but one of them promised me I will never see him again, and when I tried to get in the way, I was pushed aside repeatedly till they were far ahead of me down the stairs.

I left the door open but grabbed Hussein’s shawl as I followed them down and by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, they were already taking him in their car and driving off. People gathered around on the street to watch, and as the car drove away their focus turned towards me, standing in my pajamas on the sidewalk. It was as if the entire city just fell silent, as if it became an empty shell of light and background noise. I looked around me and wondered why none of them did anything as they took away my brother, those armed gangs that ruin our lives in the name of our country, why was I the only one kicking and screaming?

Then, from the crowd emerged two of my friends and Hussein’s who lived nearby, I was utterly surprised to see them, “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We were just here to take you to Haven. We need to talk to you, Sara.” one of them said, “Come on, let’s take you up to change.”  said the other.

I shook myself away from their grasp, their presence raised my suspicions, I wasn’t ready to move a single muscle, it felt like any kind of movement, any wrong step or even just a flicker would shatter me into a million pieces. My congested heart was finally ready to paint the walls red.

“Say what you need to say right here.” I said, barely able to stand, “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Sara, there’s been an explosion, a terrorist attack, on the border.”

*************************************

I walked all night, holding the shawl in my fists near my racing heart, ready to detonate, my harsh exhales in the dark bluish December a countdown to salvation, towards a meeting point. Who would’ve known that waiting would become my life. I walked and walked, averting whichever eyes that fell upon me, a girl who’s finally lost her mind, crossing streets like a little lost girl in her silly pajamas looking for home, but home is empty, and home is dead. And home lies somewhere outside actuality, inside my blinding dreams.

I finally reached my little Oasis where we both live inside the lines of the graffiti, where I took my first breath and looked at the strokes of his paint and the splashes of spray that outlasted him, and his hazel eyes piercing through reality to puncture my lung so I couldn’t inhale anymore. I sat on the floor and let my tears drown me so completely.

Tonight I fear everything outside of this place. Tomorrow, I fight my way to the other side if I have to and if I ever fear the blame, then I die a shameful docile death. Tomorrow, I will do what I do best.

I’m a writer. So I’ll write.

The Girl In the Clouds

It seems that I have been born this way for I can not remember anything else, with hands bound behind my back, afloat in a land to which I see no beginning from end. It is the only one I have ever known, my home in the clouds.

Alone, in the blinding blue of the horizon, with my neck curled over my concave chest, knees hugged close to my body, hands restrained and wings unleashed so fully and yet so idle, a binding oath to a sky I never signed up to be a part of, that's where you can find me.

The cloud is an endless mist, whenever my eyes rise to meet it I feel like I am losing my sight ever so slowly, for whenever any color tries to fight its way through the dense particles, it dissipates, getting strung along the distance until it reaches my eyes a diluted weaker version of itself. I wonder what it’s like to experience those waves of magic in their full strength, but, I’m merely a creature of gray who’s in love with the hues.

Sometimes, I battle the mist with my nose, try to dive down as far as the cloud would allow me, to get a clearer vision of the desert beneath me. I long for nothing more than the dirt, to bathe in the brown of the mountains and the beige of the dunes, to sneeze out the earth from my nostrils and then delve into even deeper realms, in a crystal sea under a clear morning sky, I imagine it would not spare a current or a wave to caress every layer of my onion heart.

However, I still live in a cage of white, a curse so desirable by so many, I've heard them in their sleep, in their dreams of flight and freedom. All they can perceive is the vertical horizon, they do not know, that the horizon they wish for, while wide, is too wide to sustain the truth.

So I spin, around and around, curled in this fetal position without hope for deliverance, cycle after the next, hello, farewell, then hello again. I turn and fold over myself in the air until the movement makes me so dizzy that all my consciousness starts to beam out of me. Promises seeping one by one, and dream after another leaves my body as I try to hold on to the most basic of human needs, the need for a peaceful calm, a stillness that allows for a foundation to build from.

But in this land, I’m a drifter without direction. The wind decides all.

The sun rises, I can see a hint of purple coming from the darkness, it sets and I can see a faint string of orange that thins into perfect black, nothing passes through except the extraordinarily strong light, and even that dies under the feet of my cage, but not without seducing my mind with possibilities first. What will happen if I could control my own wings, I wonder.

I try to summon my knowledge, my faith and all my might, hoping that it would be powerful enough to redeem me, but the horizon is too spacious and cruel enough to scatter all what keeps me alive over the distance. 

Hope is a form of vanity that girls like me simply can not afford. It’s sinful to wish for the wind to alter its will for you, the wind always stirs forward and upward, it whirls once or twice commanded by its own whims and at its own time, so why would it change direction for me? Why would it suddenly dart downward with me leeching its back?

It can not be. This cloud will be my grave. There can be nothing akin to freedom when Will becomes a force barely strong enough to tease, but never to induce action. Without a plan to carry on, or a scheme grounded in intellect, my dreams are merely delusions. 

If there is indeed a higher power, then he is doing a great job at dancing on the sinews of my heart. For whenever I do my very best to descend an inch from the dreamless cave of smoke, with a flick of his masterful finger he sends another storm my way to send me twirling around anew, to trap me in another cloud for maybe a century or two. To what purpose does he keep me, I can not understand. 

I bet, from the ground, that I would look like some kind of celestial being, a winged phoenix that appears on clearer days or an angel envied for how far away from the roots of the earth she is. Little do they know, that the roots of the earth is what I yearn for, for years and years without a bit of rest.

If only they knew how I wait so eagerly for a bird that could soar high enough to be within the reaches of my voice, or close enough so that I might gaze upon their complete and capable form and beg them to teach me how to control my wings, “I want to be an acrobat on the invisible ropes of sunshine, like you are.” I would say.

I would love nothing more that to dance and play on the specks of dust, like a bird on its landing, I would carry the seeds of the earth in my soles and between my lips then take off once more, so that it might dig new roots somewhere into the earth. 

Needless to say, the birds never do so much as to offer me a single glance.

The Ghost of the Prophet

They sat down by the creek. Jeremy did not know what she truly possesses or better said, what possesses her, nobody ever did.

The ghost was floating over the water in the form of a swan, she recognized the light under his wings and she knew that Jeremy did not recognize what they were in the presence of. She tried to tell the swan to go away, but it insisted on nothing less than the truth, she laughed at the concept so deeply inside her. Her way to reality had long been distorted like colors that fade away into the ugliness of the distance.

“Grace be to the Lord who made the creek flow after all this time.”

She stuck to her silence when she truly wanted to tell him how much she wishes it was the work of the lord. I made it flow, it’s my work, she wanted to come out and say it, but it would only ruin the joy of being reunited with him again.

“I've never treated you like I've treated all the others. I guess I've always known something about you was different. Is... different." he smiled, "You’re the only woman I've ever seen who never wants anything at all.”

He’s always been insightful especially when it comes to her, she wondered if he had known how he’s so right about her and yet so wrong.

“You don’t explode with fire like other women, Danielle, even when we were children you were the more contained of both of us.”

The sound of the shot echoed through her mind, the anger of that night has never left her alone. She was only a girl of fourteen when she was visited, she was only fourteen years and two days old when she could no longer stand another beating. 

Her father knelt and kissed her bruises, petrified and trembling under his skin, his eyes wide with terror, she never stopped wondering what might have went through his mind, or the minds of all those who’s fallen victim to her ways, she only wished it would be blank, an emptiness in which only her will echoes. Her mother stood above his head with the gun, and at Danielle’s signal the bullet dislodged and marked her little white dress with blood, her lips were smeared with the metallic taste of blood as well, and then, she stirred her index towards her mother, and the gun obediently followed the movement.

“Now you’ll never say anything, ever again.” that was the last thing she said to her crying mother, and she forever remained glad that such a pity of a woman never got to utter another word.

That anger so defining in the middle of the night was the cornerstone she placed in that hidden room deep inside her dungeons, she buried it in the darkness and locked the ghost and his gifts inside, on the surface she displays but the consequences of bearing the burden of her own soul, and that was what Jeremy saw as often contained and well-controlled.

“You’re a blind fool, Jeremy.” She finally told him.

Getting up to head back to her house, the ghost screamed so loudly that her ears were about to explode by the sirens, she stood up, and shook the dust off her jeans as he followed. She wanted to turn and yell at the ghost so that he’d shut up, or her brain might start exuding through her congested skull.

“Let me take my time” She muttered under her breath.

They entered the house and she threw away her phone and her coat on the old worn out couch, taking her seat beside the dimly lit fireplace she always adored. He has preserved the place quite beautifully. As soon as they came in, his cat came running through the rooms, a racing ball of white and hazel with yellow eyes, only slowing down at her feet. Danielle did not bother moving, the cat was content enough rubbing its body against her legs and relishing in the warmth. Jeremy stood in the kitchen, with a drink of water halfway to his lips, his eyes fixed in a gaze at his cat and the girl relaxing back in her reclining seat , the flickering of the orange fire seemed to disturb the serene effect the flowing creek has left inside him, it stirred up what he was so strongly struggling to suppress for years, he could not break the gaze as the play of light hypnotized him, soon enough, he felt himself disappearing further within a trance, all the universe gravitated towards this simple-looking woman who can’t be melted by the fire of a thousand suns, he on the other hand was weak and his melting point was well above zero when it came to her.

“And Daniel did not frown,

Daniel did not cry,

He kept looking at the sky.

And the Lord said to Gabriel.

Go chain the lions down-

Go chain the lions down-

Go chain the lions down.”

She sang to herself with her eyes closed.

He managed to put the glass of water back on the counter, right on the edge. He walked slowly towards her, every step taken carefully as to not disturb the scene ahead, his breath ceased to flow but heavily. And as he reached the rug, only the cat was starting to be aware of his presence, while her eyes remained lightly shut. He knelt on the rug and gently he drove the cat away with his hands, that hideous object of his jealousy was the last thing to clear away from his way before he was completely lost.

“You’re the only woman worthy of worship.” He pressed his lips against her muddy white sneakers in long kisses, again and again unaware of anything in the world but her feet in his hands, the warmth on his back and  the roughness of the woolen maroon rug against his knees.

She was suddenly aware of those kisses she had long struggled to let go from memory, her body was unexpectedly swept away by the wave of pleasure starting from her toes to the center of her mind, she gasped, “Did I do this?”. It has been a lifetime since god had graced her with the gift of being surprised. He did not seem to hear her, as he removed one sneaker then the other, he did the same thing to her socks afterwards as he looked at her soft smiling face, revealing her clenched toes and holding them within his big callus fists, relaxing them open, relaxing all of her senses open. It was important to her that she stays within the boundaries of her own skin, but with his bare hands and their access to her, the wave starting small was surging into a tsunami. And so she had to ask again, “Did I do this to you, Jeremy?”

“What do you mean?” he replied, his voice was deep and as clear as ever. She closed her eyes tightly and prayed, “May the lord stop this blasphemy.” but Jeremy only caressed her soles with his tongue and whispered repeatedly how she's so perfectly possessed him, how he never wants any other Goddess. That's how she knew that she can let the surprise be pleasurable, that she can let her darkness roam a little bit closer to her skin.

Jeremy has always been immune to her will, with exception to the ghost, he was the only one on whom prayer did not work. For a lifetime she’s tried to pray that he returns to her, she tried to summon him, the yearning was unquenchable. It was pretty conspicuous as she sat in the yard of the mental-health institute, after she was falsely diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and admitted, surrounded by the scattered trees and ending only in high fences to keep her inside, satisfied with her bed next to the peculiarly and remarkably weak, who could not withstand the world as it is. 

She did not belong, she was more sane than the world could ever understand, she knew it very early on. It was time to make peace with her fate, it was time for acceptance to take its seat inside her heart and to let despair lead her to her destined homelessness. But her enemy was hope and her hope had a name, Jeremy. The boy who ran with her through the woods and jumped across the dry water stream with her, teasing the soil at play, she kept a prayer going on day and night for him, but he never came.

After the morning newspaper read “Murder/Suicide Couple With Daughter In The Splash Zone!”, she was treated so mechanically, the religion of her examining specialists was protocol and god forbid they would become sinners.

A woman in a suit came into her house on the day of the incident. She took her to a foster home and bathed her, discovering the family history in the bruises that covered her tiny pale thighs, so naively missing how they were so sweetly avenged by the girl, as Danielle very silently celebrated the decay of her parents. From there on, Danielle vowed silence, festering inside her the wishes that were never answered. 

She woke up when everyone else slept and stood at the window, where only the night lamps attracted life, and she looked out for the ghost of the prophet but she never found anything except silence and the wind that made her spine shiver. She thought that God must have been enraged by what she’s done, she thought his wrath had descended upon her soul and that she will never be able to reach in for her gift again. When Danielle thought that the ghost might have been gone forever, that Gabriel had forbidden him from visiting her window ever again, she felt afraid for the first time since her father’s last beating, she feared that she would be stuck in that prison away from her home, and that slowly she would be no better than the odd ones lying in the adjacent beds.

She was starting to neglect her own hopes, she listened to her nurse and stood in line like all the others, she took her medicine and she tried as hard as she can to talk to her nosy therapist, obsessively concerned about her emotions. It was ridiculous, even to her, how those “professionals” could make a science out of her condition, she found it very arrogant of them that they were trying to decipher her equation into separate terms of brain and mind. However, it wasn't too long until Danielle could no longer neglect that voice from deep within her, whispering impatience as the wish swelled and pressed against her nerves, she tapped her feet, she must see him, once again, she could no longer stand it. 

The nurse, who was handing out pills, walked calmly to the kitchen, retrieved a matchbox and started setting fire to the curtains of the ward, one by one, unhindered by the lunatics raving. She then walked straight towards Danielle, took her by the hand and led her through the beds and out the door, down the stairs and out the gates altogether, as smoke and screams started to form a cloud around the institute.

Danielle went back home, to the woods, and the nurse was executed. Everyone assumed the little girl had met her demise in that horrible place, not much worse than the tragedy of her dead parents. She was exceptionally pleased to know that she still possessed her gift, and that she was back in her house, and whenever anyone came looking for her, she would simply tell them to go away, and strip away their memories, that way only Jeremy found out about her return.

She embraced him tightly and the swift smell of her hair tainted his soul with passion, it was a love so easy as young love always is, with a girl who was not as young as she appeared to be. In time, the dungeons inside her were too convoluted, she sat for hours by the old dead creek and sailed deeper into the will of the divine, residing inside her like a volcano beneath the surface of the earth. She put her hands on the dry yellow lawn and swept it away to her sides and within her she prayed to the Lord that he might make it green again, and so it did, that’s when she realized that all earthly creations have a will, and where there’s a will, there’s a way to be controlled.

Her obsession with developing the breath of god in her lungs became her leading force, her will suddenly became the most lucid force in her life. And so, Danielle, was set on a path of discoveries that needed to start with her and only her, with full control over her own will, so as to control others. Therefore, it was time to pray that God removes Jeremy from her life. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not sway him if her life depended on it, he was closer and dearer than ever. And that smile he induced involuntarily on her, that blush on her cheeks she had no say in, were dangerous threats and so she was the one to get up and leave.

And so Danielle went on to have the stars in her pocket and the moon on a string. She enslaved the entire universe, with the will of god and the ghost of his elect, there was nothing to stand in her way. She drank the finest wines, enjoyed the company of kings and queens without being questioned, and had the most handsome boys and girls in her bedroom, waiting on her desire and decorating her room like ornaments with their submission. She stopped a volcano from erupting and burning an entire village, and shifted the path of a meteor mysteriously. She slowed time, she quickened time, and she had time to explore her place thoroughly, and when she was done, she was met with one simple truth. The concept of reality was only created to keep humans secure in their existence, and that truth was only a result of absolute power independent of all reflections. That is why, the divine does not reflect, but he leaves it to humans to reflect on him in the manifestations of his will, thus, becomes the truth.

What came next for Danielle was an emptiness, a hollowness often met after one finds the answer to one’s thirst. It was as if all those accumulated experiences, all those nights of happiness and misery were all a moorland of nothingness, and finally that long-sought despair was settling in, she had reached her deserved fate and had no way of finding home for the entire world seemed had become as alien and boring as it was years and years before. She did not wished to undo everything, for she knew that if it weren't for the ghost then she would have ended up as one of those feeble minds, never finding the darkness which became her All-Wise mirror on the wall. What she wished for was pain, that suffering humans endured on her hands everyday, how they writhed underneath their skins restlessly trying to reach whatever is higher above. All what she wanted was for Jeremy to come back and tear her skin apart without asking to let her soul free. For the will of everyone in the world was only a reflection of hers and so he must be the one, for anything else would only be suicide. She wanted him to know her, and to take his revenge from the thick blood spewing through her arteries.

And so she went back, sat down by the creek, it was unfair that it remains dry after all those years, and so she prayed for the water to flood it anew and rejuvenate the woods. Then she waited for him to came by and sit beside her. On his own time, he did.

When she was lying beside him in bed, sweeping away a drop of sweat rolling down his flushed forehead she said, “On the night of my fourteenth birthday, the Ghost of the Prophet Daniel visited my window and kissed me. In his breath was the will of God that he concealed inside me, I have been to the end of the world and back searching for my purpose ever since. I've never treated you like the others, my love, there was always something different about you, your will is beyond my reach. I've never asked you for anything before, for I've rarely desired anything that I could not obtain up until now, except pain. I no longer wish to be immune to the chaos of my humanity, I've caused the world to suffer and fell deeply in love with suffering. My darling man, don’t worship me, don't place your will unto me but rather free me from my will entirely. My darling man, would you please kill me?”

“This is the most strange of situations” Jeremy said, “I remember now, how one night as I walked through the woods a lion interjected my path, and with a stamp of his paw he blinded me with the dust of the earth. And then he told me, that when the day comes, I must find within me the courage to murder my beloved if I'm to save her soul, just like he was ready to devour Daniel whom he so dearly loved, if God had willed it.”

In Your Eyes

In your eyes,

An ocean wide and dark

Embraces all wisdom

My heart floats on one arc

Searching for my freedom


In your eyes,

I long for ascendance,

Into a depth of heights,

A rooted transcendence,

Though a chain of blight


Can a human take flight?

Can a soul burn the night?


In your eyes,

A black devoid of white,

A dragon with fire breath

That burns away from sight

And I'm caught in its death


In your eyes,

I'm destroyed and remade

In a Sufi-like trance

I'm safe and I'm afraid,

Of the wondrous light dance


Can a soul truly die?
When it has seen thine eye?

The Funeral

Scarlet chairs, perfect rows
Women in black, in love
With lives not theirs, deceased,
Their souls are not above.

This is the day when life
And death switched up their cloaks
He's no longer, he's alive,
He slept for good, he awoke.

The smell of fresh coffee,
On their lips, the venom
Can harm no dead, her dress,
Her heels, vile as a phantom

She chatters with her friends,
Lamentations to thrive,
We're here to stone the death
That took him, we're alive.

Clad in the abrasive trances
Unaware of their lies
Begging their souls for tears
May their fibs hide in their eyes.

The words of God an echo
In their hollow vessels
Searching for truth inside,
For any revenge to wrestle.

Scarlet chairs, blackened souls,
A Martyr more alive
In his grave, than us all-
Dead for our wish to survive.

About Death and Humdrum Fucking; Part II

He carried me over his broad shoulders and I had no reason to fight him off. I knew very well when my voice had left me finally that I was facing a near crucifixion.
I looked in the eyes of the crowd upside down as I hung down his back like fur of a fox, dead and skinned, their eyes seemed to ease up, they cheered and inside me I cheered too, they were relieved that the mad one was being carried away with her poisonous mind and her delusional dreams that threatens their stability and their sanity in such a fundamental manner, that doesn't recognize their common sense or any other absolute standard that they've worshiped for generations and passed on to their sons, I was relieved for an escape from their world.
He carried me all the way to nowhere, where I did not see a thing, but I could only hear tides collapsing together on the shore, and I could only feel the breeze. He took me to a cave on the beach, were I was concealed even from the light of the moon, but somehow the strength of his beauty did not waver, it did not disappear, his beauty was imprinted inside my eyelids and it became a part of my dying world.
His arms were crossed as he said ''Do not fear me. I'm only here to kill you."
And I knew that he spoke my language.
"Do you claim to be above us, savages?" he held me against a rocky wall.
"I'm cursed with a door in the cloud, a lonely cloud trapped over this village" I answered, "I'm just a savage afflicted with a sickness."
His clasp tightened around me so much that I felt it squeezing the air out of my lungs, what a great pleasure it is to be in the tight clasp of a monster like Samson, The Beast.
"I have only taken you away from the villagers, O daughter of Eve, to kill you in the way you deserve to die, the way I choose for you" he said "Lo! What sets you apart from the other daughters?"
"My fellow sisters are ashamed of surrendering to a beauty such as you. I am not." I said "My dearest captor, I'm here willfully because I'm tired of this world and I see in your eyes that you understand the magnitude of that disaster."
And he looked away trying to hide his truth, but his truth was as audible as the waves loud on the shore.
"Discard your will, and I will avenge your miserable life for you."
"How?" I asked. And he told me that questions were no longer an option because choice was no longer one.
Cuts, bruises, razors, leather, screams, steel in the dark, rape after rape, I could taste my blood, I had no idea where the next hit will be coming from, my breath hitches, my joints lock together and an intense pleasure entrances me as I could feel the control seeping away from my body to his.
Such beautiful destruction. It was like he held a hammer and started cracking every wall I've ever formed, and with every crack I felt a light gushing out of me, invisible to the world but only inside of me did it shine and rid me of my noble savageness, it took me under and under, but in the wreckage I was above everything that ever existed in this universe.
He took me further from god, but somehow he made me understand him better.
In the submergence within this sin my flesh was quickly getting rotten and my soul was leaving me through the cracks, I was dying slowly, painfully in his beastly land away from the humdrum fucking of the commoners, and I enjoyed every thrust of it, every scream, every whispering word and sound. And I was determent to reach salvation in the arms of this new prophet of death, the one crazy enough to kill me enjoyably and to preach life to me through such a complicated death.
My flesh started to smell as every beauty started to fade, my spectacles fell and broke under his feet, but his beauty remained the same for a while before it started to go too, everything was collapsing into a black bottomless hole as my eyes started to close, as I started to see the ghosts of dead children and creatures from other lands calling for me to finally join them. Somewhere to belong to. I smiled for salvation.
My right arm fell first, then my right leg, then my ears and nose. After that my skin collapsed and my stomach fell off, my uterus, my brain and my vessels opened as my blood flowed on the sand of the beach. And then my heart fell last.
I heard the noises nearing, the savages has found the cave with my necrotic organs. He invited them in for a feast.
A little savage child bit off a finger and gave the rest of my hand to his mother, the father and the daughter shared my liver as another skinny savage scrimmaged with his brother over my full meaty thighs.
Bite after bite their teeth dug into me as I smiled from death, he avenged me truly, the savages started to fall like flies.The betrayer of his people, the mad murderer of us all, The kindest of Beasts.
"Food poisoning" he said, as he watched them eating the last one of my bones, and then he held my heart in his hand and took a big bite. He died too, as he chewed my heart in his strong jaws.
I could only imagine, that nations and nations of humans will feed on their rotting bodies and die too.
This is the story of my deliverance.

About Death and Humdrum Fucking: Part I

This is a pretty pointless piece about the way I died...
There's no hidden meaning, no lesson learned and no purpose for anyone to go through with reading this but the curious humanly desire of reading a story of another pointless death, another anecdote to throw around at dinner since it seems that death has become the number one topic of conversation around most.
I lived in a land where I was called crazy and where I called everyone crazy.
Once upon a time I was bespectacled, and everyone thought I looked so very old in my spectacles and that they were always, dirty.
Well my dirty spectacles served for one purpose, and their secret lied in that purpose that all the crazy fools in my village did not see. It could see from a further place, like I was in a deep pit looking at the from there or like I was peeping through a cloud in the sky and seeing people as small as ants compared to the vast universe above me. The people in my village said my spectacles made me mentally inapt for living but when I took them off and replaced my vision with one like theirs, it was my turn to call them so.
They had a superpower that made everything boring. They saw everything exactly in its abstract color and at its exact calculated distance, that when they reached, looked or heard, their senses became nothing but computers operating on facts, automatic responses to their surroundings and in that automaticity they found safety in a common sense that everyone agreed to follow but me.
When I used to reach for anything in my village, I had to look at it first, however unreal my image seemed at first I tried and tried so hard to view it from every angle that in the end I might realize the truth in it, so that I would not over reach or have my hands falling short and idle into the air. The exploration was my fun, the reflection of an outside object into introspection. My dirty spectacles made the world beautiful to me, like I was looking through a translucent lake, the haziness of which made my mind twirl and twirl in an ineffable mixture of color, word and sound.
I am into the art of constructing sentences that no one comprehends, and people often looked at me with gabbing jaws and walked way.
I tried so hard to take off those spectacles and their visions condemned for their lunacy, I tried to see with the clarity of my own programmed human robotic eye. Sometimes I'd succeed to put on a show and to see reality as shallow as they do and some other times, I failed.
When I did succeed, I met friends.
When I did fail, I met myself.
And I lost the friends.
But a danger I did not calculate or perceive neither with my naked or my bespectacled eye was in the stars for me, a sickness that formed inside me like a single cancer cell, starting with one, spreading to another and finally possessing me whole. It crept undetected, even though their were signs.
The first sign was a cut which one of the lunatics did to my arm, it was very painful and it made me scream a lot but my incomprehensible sentences made it impossible for anyone to understand a word. When I was tired of screaming I slept, and with sleeping comes dreaming and so I dreamed. When I woke up happily jumping off my bed to the world, telling them that I've found the dream, it came to me, it visited me when I wasn't looking at all, they mistook it for a joke and it seems like it was a funny one indeed, but I was the only one not laughing, it only created another cut. Alas! I did not know how to undream a dream.
And so I tried to take off the spectacles again and found that my dream looked like a mirage without them, that this dream was the only thing that was clearer with my spectacles and so I knew they had to laugh, because to them, I am following an illusion.
There I was developing it, the sickness of listening and comparison.
In its core it was only a conflict that comes from the realism of an illusion, or the illusive nature of reality, or so it sounded to me and so I did believe. I realized that succeeding of ridding myself from the spectacles would mean that I would live my life faking happiness amidst their mad boredom, while failing and the stubbornness of holding on to them would mean that I will be called crazy all my life, that this censure, ridicule and conflict would last a lifetime.
I believed in a whole lot of different lives than they had lived, I believed in touching my cuts other than strapping a bandit on them because the pain felt more human than any of their meaningless chatter, I believed they were savages because of their scientific approach to themselves and the way they felt completely alright only devouring each other and consuming little ones until they turned them to savages as well. I believed their connection to colors was different than mine, and that they can not hear a sound and see pain like I do, I believed that the art of constructing sentences in their world was judged by facts and metric measurements of entertainment and not truth, and I believed that insanity to them was a disease and to me it was an identity I had to accept. I had to not only live with the pain of alienation, but love it.
One day, when I was walking in the streets that consumed me everyday, enjoying the decay, the wreckage I was becoming in every second that passes, taking everything in and turning it into a personal pain, I heard a sharp loud scream and I went to check it out.
There was a huge crowd that called out for freedom, so I stood and yelled it out with them, then there were some other people who devoured a number of those people in cold blood and then they left them and went home, wherever that home was. And I stood in the wreckage as those corpses disappeared and those who called for freedom walked on every other path. Later I found that those thin men and women were still not as insane as I am, they were merely passersby in my world of insanity and then they resumed being part of the crazy village, they were the crazy ones now and they were crazy only by the definition acceptable enough for the rest of the village.
Every once in a while, one of them would scream and then another would die, they'd scream for a while because they think death to be horrid, and I'd scream because I think life to be horrid, because their madness is temporary, because they like humdrum fucking just like everybody else.
And one night I decided to scream a different scream than theirs, I decided to say that there's another truth that no one cared enough for, there was another truth that can set them all free and it's called madness. So one of those savages stood and looked at me with so much scorn, the scrutiny rose like a mountain in the crowd and he called me a heretic, a total bitch, a mad witch that needs to worship the same gods they did.
I had faith in a god, and little did they know of him, he is a god that requires complete dedication to the truth, and I had not completely found my path to him but all I had was my faith and a strong desire for submission to the greatest power in the universe, little did they know my path was far from done, and they did not care, they were determined to punish me for failing to be a part of their village.
The chief of the savages was a big strong man with colorful tattoos all over, to my eyes behind the glasses, he was almost surreal, I called him Samson, while they had another name for him...