The sleeping man awoke, massaged his aching thumb and without need for an audience started exclaiming out loud.
My words are moot. I like horses and I am beating a dead horse. I didn’t learn of horses from a farm or carriages. I loved Boxer from Animal Farm and Black Beauty. Maybe because I have known them through books is why I love them. I killed her because she asked me to. A horse with no leg to stand on has no purpose. Why did I kill her? Because she asked me to. They shoot horses, don’t they? A puppet of a horse in a humanoid body appeals more to me than orators of high philosophy. The murder of god did not beguile him. Nietzsche went mad because he saw a horse being whipped to death.
I used to think that the deities and those that live beyond skies were moved by your actions. The flash of lightning was a god’s glare, and the rumbling of clouds their impending footsteps. Every cloud to me heralded to me the news of your latest sin. You could anger gods. Now you’ve fallen into the Devils good graces or the gods have lost their patience. The clouds come too often, full of tears that previously felt like divinity leaking from cracks in the horizon.
The humidity in the air frustrates me. It makes me feel like I am choking on something. It makes me cognizant of the congestion in my life. It cripples my thoughts and curtails every breath short. I am sure Seneca has said something about anger and how it shouldn’t be attributed to any cause. I feel no anger. I used to get easily angry. Now I just get frustrated.
Ammaan almost named me ‘Izzad’ which means God in Iranian. It would’ve done wonders to exacerbate my already crooked sense of narcissism. I would never change a single aspect of the life I have lived. I have regrets and have made mistakes, but I own them, and would not substitute them for a different set of miseries. Yet everyone else’s life is too faulty and there are so many better ways they could have, and still can live their life. I can only offer them divine advice. My son will be named god, if I couldn’t be. It’s funny how Christians call their God, father.
The way Baba ripped the wrapping sheet from his Father’s Day broke my heart. He did it with so much passion and energy. I have never seen that calculating, planning and ‘ever careful not to make a mess’ person do something so contrary to his nature. This wasn’t the first gift he had received. I wonder if the enthusiasm of opening the gift was also as tricky to decipher as the verve behind his voice whenever he acts excited on something that only excites me. Or something I did to try to make him feel better and which he knows should make him feel better, but it doesn’t. Because he is just a human. He isn’t the Father. His true holiness cannot be captured, it’s beyond revealed verses.
I don’t have pictures with the people I love. I want pictures with them where it’s just us in the frame and I am hugging them or doing something obscure that only makes sense to the two of us. A sanctuary of a memory. I don’t have many pictures of just me too. Most of my pictures of me, are pictures of me with a lot of other people. Why do I not let people take pictures of me? Is it out of a fear of a digital immortality? Or am I just afraid someone will see through my poorly fitted shirts and my attempt at being positive about my body? I wish I knew the answer.
Love has been touted to me like a honeyed morphine. I do not care for it’s taste, but for how much of it I can get. I want to give more of it away. What will I do by hoarding it except that it’ll go rancid. I wish I were more vocal about my love with the people I love. I wish the people I love were mature enough to say it back or courageous enough to tell me they cannot say it back. I have lived through the desert of people like a gypsy. I have stayed with no man for long. I have not let anyone affect me for too long. Your touch corrupts. I have much farther to go. To live by me, you must stop living, and pick up the purple crystal ball, the bright tents and become a gypsy like me. I am scared of living
Seeing a teenager wear a tie loosened to absurd proportions makes me teary eyed. It reminds me of simpler times when the tightness of the strap of my backpack was my biggest concern. I am here now. I have tricked myself into believing I have found peace here many times. The sight of blood does not phase me. The responsibility of having a human life under control of my flimsy hands that cannot even pour cereal without spilling it keeps me up at night. Maybe I’ll get more proficient when I grow up. Maybe I’ll just be bitter.
We sat on the bench in the middle of the park. And I saw a ghubaray wala playing with his son with one hand and holding all the balloons with the other hand. I thought how this might interest a certain person. I also thought I’d write a poem about it. But poems are too lyrical and have painstaking patterns which whether you like it or not you end up discovering. And once you’ve discovered them, the poem loses all of its charm, like the internal workings of a clock. Galaxies only feel alluring because we do not know what lies beyond them.
The full moon is behind the clouds; it’s shine gives the clouds a velvety border. The moon is concealed like the face of a dulha hidden by the weirdly lavish headwear the groom’s mother made for his wedding. He doesn’t want to wear it, but he must respect his mother’s wishes. He looks ridiculous. They have an unhealthy relationship. You’re not the sun because the sun can’t see itself rise and fall. It cannot see its beauty and it cannot know himself save for the shadow it casts over others and the way it lights up everyone else. It can’t ever be aware of its splendor. You can’t be the sun because you can do and be all of that and more.
All you have to do is look in the mirror. All I have to do is convert all my experiences into art. All they have to do is understand that it is what it is, but who will tell them this is it. All the slumbering man who woke to give a sermon to no one has to understand that life is not purgatory. And Dante who crossed through the entirety of the rings of hell, didn’t write a tragedy. He left the tragedies to the minor griefs. The highest forms of misery can only be understood in the form of comedy.
The next time you feel your eyes are about to rain; your throat clogged up; like God has deserted you; your mask defiled; your confidence shot; semblances of passion lost; pining for the past; ambivalent about the future; and dazed about who you are, stuck with an existential crisis, punctuated with bouts of gloom. If you find yourself here, do not despair. Chuckle out loud.
You’re not Othello
This is not a tragedy
Your life is a comedy
and you are Candide
