#chahida

It wasn't possible for me to meet all his needs.

how the years go by. go to sleep one night in fear and stress and wake up with only a very slight will to finish this task or that. wake up and wait for your will to intensify, for all the reasons to become present. you love this, you don't want that. after this is over, imagine the lightness of spirit sure to claim you. that is the measure of your happiness. that all things live where they should in your house, all your tasks are done before bedtime, and all your dreams are about the future.

speaking only for myself, i've noticed that there are only a very few slots that must always be occupied--hastily replaced, never left vacant for too long--in order to calm down and not pine. i am not talking about maslow type things, or self-help 'goals' like happiness and fulfillment. those are only secondary to an irrepressible compulsion to think, to imagine--the finest pleasure ever, the worst torment possible. some people can grow in a soliloquy, others can't think in a monologue. one splits oneself in two, and strives always to fashion a sort of crude mirror, a sentient mirror, something good enough for a dialogue. one writes. they who have their own mirror always in front of them are the wisest, the most astute. they have made all their counterarguments and truly know their minds, both their minds, their many minds. for them, thinking is not impeded by the cacophony of their other selves, their anti-selves, their objecting selves, but bears the full weight of consideration, of having envisioned every proliferating point of divergence, every forking path, every node in the rhizome. imagine a vision like that. you would know the past and the future, because you would know yourself, and you could sit still and play in your labyrinth, unraveling it like so much string, while everyone else around you makes noise with their mouths and their hands. me, i can't maneuver through a conversation with my other selves quite so well. the other end must always have someone, someone else looking in, reflecting, refuting, speaking. that is the only value, the only bond, the only bind i have ever recognised in people, and that is why i pine. a state of paralysis is torment, but it is less terrifying than thinking, truly thinking through the labyrinth, which is the precipice one is always drawn toward, the abyss into which one tries very hard not to look too deeply lest the inevitable happen, the inevitable already intuited as such, yet denied, deferred, demurred. if only time would hurry up and end. 

peace is clean hair and bright warm sunshine. maybe a breeze across a river and the prospect of chocolate or something gingery at the end of a long walk in comfortable shoes. peace is clean linen and a fridge with three meals worth of food. life is base like that, at the moment. life is an endless and indiscriminate search for something, anything really, to occupy the restless, always dissatisfied mind. push the past back, rearrange the future, and just hang on, hang on just for the briefest moment longer. this, this living here in the middle of nothing, in the middle of a purely selfish endeavour, in the middle of a journey undertaken in bad faith, is like living in no time. i will look back and perhaps wish i had discovered all the tricks other people have up their sleeves in this time. all i have discovered so far is that people don't much like to think that they were convenient. 

the problem with trying to be grass is that after a time, you realise that you've spread yourself too thin. grass is resilient, and you're taken in very much by d&g and all that rhizomatic thinking business. you are a common thing. you want to be resilient. but they'll just keep mowing you down even as they pamper you with sprinklers. grass is a terrible thing to be. there is no center. there is too much pruning. resilience comes at a terrible price. perhaps it's better to break like water, scream like eagles and refuse like a raging tornado instead.

[i wrote this as an fb note, and i don't usually crosspost things there over here, but i like this, and sunday, february thirteenth was a bit of a breakthrough, and i like the way it came out so suddenly and so effortlessly. so here it is.] ****************************************************************************************************************************** you make me myth, i make you anecdote. let us meet like children again. you sulk, i cry. we rejoice the next day. i don't know you anymore. i may never have known you. in front of the others, i circle a spot of bright light and talk incessantly about the tyranny of meaning. i want to say something. i want them to understand. but i don't take enough care to see if they do. a week passes. i am surprised that it has only been a week. i wrestle with the unhomely, the uncanny, the unhomeliness of...everything. i want to say that i have no home because i have always been playing make-believe. i don't know how to say it. we don't talk anymore. work piles up. i make small talk. i have a lot of crepes. i see myself in full hijab. then it is sunday evening and i think, "that is a rather abstract way to narrate a story, this fable you jealously call your story, a story which would be solely yours," is the best thing i have read in a long while. a crow flies past. i pine for long, very long hair, perhaps grey, maybe all white like a woman i saw in an airport last year. hair until the middle of my thighs so i can wear it like a dress. the skin over my knuckles dries out and i can see thirty years into the future between the bifurcation of my veins. i am quite, quite alone now. i don't worry. i should be worrying. i smile. everything is going to be alright.