On the other side
Early November and a film of listlessness has fallen upon me for some days, I walk up and down my room—thoughtless. Every time I try to break through this entanglement an anxiety would grip me instead—there you see me go on walking up and down my room waiting for the anxiety to wade and the listlessness be restored.
I miss my laziness.
And the ease to walk in and out of rooms has gone with it. The upside of laziness if one is at ease with it is that it can procreate itself without further intimation so long as it ain't obstructed. So I play make-believe with myself of lazier times when the anxiety refuses to wade, when my knees hurt from walking too long about my 15 square feet room, pretending to have gone back into my loom of laziness. The saddest but the best part about all this is most of these anxieties won't even matter in a few months time, only vaguely remembered if you try your best to recollect. It's like health insurance: you hope that you stay healthy but that means you won't get back your money. This time spent in somewhat less-than mode won't come back, and that's okay—I have to wait for my laziness to come back anyhow so for now this ain't the worse of all. I say this knowing well that reality only takes one snap to turn it all topsy-turvy, a wonderland to become a hinterland. The idea is to keep up that thing with feathers afloat. Our Emily called it Hope.
*
Another afternoon to turn into dusk, as I close off my phone having done with the day's scheduled string of classes. Now with a tiniest thing going right an insurmountable mass seems to unload itself from the pit of the chest, a worth surges in with winter's warmth of a dying afternoon, you tug it close letting its gravity pull on all your grace. Only a momentary mirage it is but draws an outlet to let the laziness slide in and interweave you in its salving strings. They create an electromagnetic field of equanimity—cup your ears to these strings and you shall hear all the histories waving through. For now it’s time for the evening tea—god bless all routines to save us from indefinite stagnation, tuning out from all the decaying memories, grounding itself to the present.
All replaced and anew but the late autumn and all turning auburn is repeating itself—like a dutiful daughter or a dream-forsaken mother? I ask; like a habitation that has no one to be replaced with, I say. Poesy returning to salvage, it’s the season of hymns, rendering the prosaic bliss fissuring into mosaic trodden glass. The token of warmth from the dying afternoon fills the window-shut door-closed room in a summer golden browning edges of hope. Hope for the exultant sprinting-platforms-to-catch-train days and jaywalking crossroads to resume soon; the heart race and the pulsing gaze to get drunk in glee and sleep all tried. Let's dart on the sultry summer on the season's dart board to be the season of my revival, let's make lists of casualties and causalities to start ticking off when the spring shall tepid its way to June.
All thoughts but then elude themselves as we glide into the depths of the night. I see shadows deepening in the nooks, shallower shadows hazed by the streetlights waver as vehicles pass with headlights seeping through the glass panes. The nights are longer, but you sleep even beyond, never to catch sight of the dawn, but waking all soaked in the winter's warmth.
*
Deep into the night and awake, bundled up in handmade quilts, some thought wired up into another and then another, to pop something in my mind like bubble wrap and my right leg involuntarily kicked my left, upturning my right big toenail in half. Succeeding pain give way to joining dots in my memory as I try to clip my toenail into an endurable shape.
In ways you bruise yourself, by happiness or by sadness, is how the scars on your bodies get filed in your memory. You try to trace out the differences without the memories attached; there are none, the bruises range from deep to faded in all happiness and sadness. In time you can't even remember distinctly if those leftover memories ever had any emotions attached; it's now veiled by an indifference, identified only by its actions. A quintessential bond is built with every new understanding of your body's ways to heal itself from its own doings. Skin growing over the hollowed wounds like life growing over the unbridged desires like moss growing over the crevices of concrete ruins—soft on touch, a pinch away from uprooting the balm and it's all bare.
Then come the ways they bruise you, in caressing or carelessness, is how the scars on your mind get filed upon your body. The body retracting with every indication of any of those ways, zipping itself in the bag of aloofness, and they're pointing at you saying sad things on how you haven't learned to enjoy yourself. But you know better than to prick on your new skin and make the wounds bleed; you nuzzle into your childhood quilt and comb through all the ways you've learned to love yourself well enough than others ever will.
Then there are scars from repetitions, from not letting go, from still trying—the body does it on itself again and again, as if to unearth that reason making it all happen, ceaselessly, like the boons and curses reaping themselves against all odds. Funny how then the most simplest things validate those scars and balm them too, like a good food or good sleep, or a cadence of a rhyme in a line or a style to capture the rapture of thoughts coming in rounds for hours, that fits in exactly into the hole the repetitions have caused.
With all that thought out, I wonder where all the scars come from and go or stay, how they are inherited and passed down—from blood and memory untainted, for spite and in spite of all efforts to be ripped away the past from oneself, how the repetitions copies itself identically in every which way you are bruised, you were bruised, like rippling no matter the wound is a puddle or pool.
*
Mid November already and about 10pm now, I see a hunger finally forming as a sizzle in my throat and stoning in the pit of my lower chest. It's been three lunches and two dinners since I last felt a complete hunger. During lunch today as I unwillingly ate the little I took just to not be on an empty stomach, I tried to mind-list the things I would want to have if given an open choice—there wasn't much I could come up with to excite my appetite. Now, as I lay in bed I can perfectly conjure up the process of having this omlet I'm going to have for dinner, nothing extra but when the hunger strikes right, everything conjoins to become whole again.
The room whiffed a strong smell of smoke of mosquito oil when I woke up the following morning, the sunlight readily veered it all out as I opened the windows. Yesterday's dinner offered a good sleep, so much so (at least I like to believe it is so) that I woke up an hour earlier than what has become my usual. Words soon started creeping in my head, webbing my thoughts into imagery laments. One cannot ever be unawed by this process—of how art comes to being.
Turning Tables Unattended (a poem)
written on 24 Nov ‘21
—
Teething troubles, jarring jokes
Picking fights in grocery stores
You'll never know when I showed
You are loved, but you need you
in lieu
When your hidebound piecemeal
left me founded dumb
You thought you won, while I was
already gone and done
To not be brought down to a trial
as your outstanding case
You'll witness me again though
as the prime evidence
Seeing you out the dreamscape
you wish me the same
Never knowing, never growing for
being the better self
And you'll never know what bled the truce
Rowing in shadows was all you knew
'Cause you never came to know
When I showed
You are loved, but you need you.
Then when flashback starts
I see you standing for me
Smiling like knowing it all
Wishing to be forever this
*
Tattooed tears, calling names
Leaving halfway down hallways
You'll never know that I waited too
All along for you to return to you
in lieu
You pulled every pieces you broke
vilifying scars it made
Trying turning tables forevermore
as you center about
Never knowing any better where
the sun rose or set
Running down your dyed wool days
spotting signs of spring
Voices upon voice building up until
roofing heights
My threaded words to ricochet upon
your strait sights
And you'll never know how I broke losse
Of your handcrafted calamitous noose
'Cause you never came to know
I waited too
All along for you to return to you
With the flashback unfazed
I see you standing for me
Your hand holding out
Assuring of my epiphanies
*
To be taken with the fault lines
With all the strings attached
Was all you wanted
My fault lines but grew deep
as you drew territories
Along your virtue ties
Turning gravedance into grace
Sinking me into quicksand
Trying for a grasp of your hand
*
You never knew how
It could have been you
instead of me
You called for my blood
But couldn't see
How they stained you
Just the same
As they marked on me
'Cause you never knew
You needed you
in lieu of me
That it ain't a one-way,
could've turn around
and drove homeway
But you couldn't tell apart
the lies from the wrongs
Couldn't see which side
I was standing on
Tossing rage like qualms
till I'd none to lose
and lost it all
And you'll never know why this goes on
For you it's done, dusted and forgone
'Cause you never came to know
You're made up of
Eons constituting indign laws of love
Then the flashback comes
I see you standing for me
A stepping stone footnoted
If your victor's voice will will.
Recommendations
YouTube channels: summersentiment (analyses song lyrics' like poetry) and Karolina Zebrowska (vintage obsessed fashion and everything related)
Pairing classic authors with Taylor Swift albums (no wonder I’m currently reading Plath and Woolf while listening to Red (TV) and Folklore)
Now I’m at both Goodreads and StoryGraph
Trying to think of themes and routines to take up as my 2022 resolution. (Should I start daily journaling? What do I write so I don't get bored in few weeks? Should I trying something new with my reading habit? What else can I do to explore my writing?) Let me know if you all are thinking of something like that for next year.
Until next time,
Keep the hope aflame.
Hehe came here to know what's you've been to these days 👀😅. Daily journaling might get boring, trying something new with your reading habit will be intresting I guess.👀
All the best for your upcoming new year resolutions 😊