We bloom with our little hands holding on to abstract gifts that our beloveds in heavens gave us on parting. We hold on to them tight, as tokens of the memory of their faces bruised with sorrow—ravaged apart like wheat fields preyed upon by heartless windy nights; their artifacts stolen, life robbed—left with deserted desolation.
Open our eyes to the world, watch people fall in adoration with the transparency of magical liquid that lingers in our eyes and reflects the light into thousand shards of crystal hues like the dance of a pious river under an innocent sky.
They start to feed us with simple words, sing to us the rhyming songs, waiting for us to open chains of our tongues and repeat but we, we quietly yearn for one last note of euphonies we had grown used to in the paradise.
Stare at our mothers that hold us, smile, and we, mistaking them for angels that used to swim high above the skies—casting soft reflections of their glow on land—extend our tiny arms up to their faces and mold our own plump lips like gentle curves of the valleys that stood gracefully in horizons of our homes.
Sometimes we fall asleep and all the missing peace comes back like a goodly giddy fairy floating towards us, allowing the glittery dust to take us away to the land where we so lovingly belong, what we so patiently long for. We meet the strangely familiar faces through our dreams until someone far away makes a tentative sound and our sensitive ears drag us back to the roaring reality.
We then begin to cry and strangers try soothing us back to sleep with jingling toys and swinging rides as if playing a jolly jester could please the kings inside of us; we don’t stop our shrieks until the faces of our guardians appear before us for only do they seem like ones who could take us back home.
We hear people speak a stranger language before us and try our best not to listen for it is no near as beautiful as the music we hear in our sleeps. See our mothers mouth out some words to us, whispering us to repeat, hoping we would oblige but we never do. Sometimes they smile in response to our silence; but with time, our immobile tongues only cause a night to creep over their profiles. That right there, on our own mothers’ faces is where despair comes and introduces herself to us.
We we— merely to make her go—utter our first words.
We watch the sudden bursts of volcanic smiles on their faces as splendid shadows of shimmering suns crawl over their entire countenances; they call up in shrill voices for others to come over and watch us speak. Such queer it gets as we, raised as royalties, become the ones performing feats before a chanting crowd. But we do so, we do so to watch the pride on our mothers’ faces.
Pages of our books roll on; we start combining the scarce collection of our learnt words into broken phrases and try our best to fit our thoughts in those shallow bowls. Once upon a time we promised ourselves to hold on to memories of past and gifts of goodness we brought; but we start making friends that are just as little and confused as us. We invent our lawless games, play our lifeless toys, uttering our faulty speeches and the memory that we once lived and loved starts waking away without us noticing.
We still think about it but only in our dreams.
Day by day, we grow like petite seedlings forming into clumsy saplings. We fall down, scratch our knees, we get angry and cry out our rage; we laugh and bloom and watch people adore the scent of our flowery lives.
Our speeches become consistent; our sentences rigid. We began making our own hair, tying our own shoelaces and wishing for things we once thought unworthy of our love. Our eyes become translucent and dim. We try drawing shapes on papers that they call alphabets and start learning their patterns by heart.
Time by time, our alphabets, like stars colliding on ecstatic skies, form into words; words queuing themselves into clauses. We grow and grow, marveling our branches, polishing our leaves—living the world, dreaming the world and dwelling wholly on it.
We grow accustomed to the dark, learn that night is just as inevitable as day and to survive the blinding dark we befriend the monsters that claim to know the way to joy. When it rains, we question the sun for the sake of our plants, when it shines, we beg for rain to quench our dry tongues.
We, little babies that fell from the skies with giant flowers attached to our backs, pluck our wings away and grow into youthful, excited trees. Drowning in oblivion of our own secrets, we master the art of masquerade and learn to justify our actions with vacant excuses. We practice hunting and haunting and hurting only to be punched in chests by our spears.
The fungus of hatred grows inside our hollow trunks, ***** the goodness out like termites gnawing away a wooden charm and burns our smiles to embers— carving from them their evil twins: smirks and simpers. Fire of pain takes root in our leaves, squeezes our lungs, as if grasping a soaking piece of fleece by neck, making it puke out all its hope before hanging it to dry. We gasp and groan in sorrow and angst until despair comes to our rescue.
We, little crowds that once laughed and joked roam around the land like defeated kings and play the beaten pawns merely to move another inch. We spit from our mouths the made-up languages and handcrafted curses and allow those fictitious, barren and illusive nothing to divide us into groups and tribes despite the fact that we live the same lives, walk the same disguises and come from the same bygone, forgotten lands.
Our lives revolve around abysses and priorities the bewitching buds devoid of petals or pollens or life. The moon still shines and the sun still gleams but we have forgotten to notice for we invented our own suns and glued our own stars to the ceilings of our prison homes.
From the moment that we were born, we began learning a language that was empty of emotions and full of words. We let go of our memories and, at some point, our fingers forgot about the gifts. At some point, too caught up in ever thinking and inventing, we stopped feeling.
We stopped dreaming about the ever-lasting skies, immortal horizons smiling with goodness and glossy rivers shining in purity; the sweet scent of angels that glided in soft winds and silent air of the fluttering laughs that used to echo all around—from the tender dips of green valleys to sudden twists of proud mountains.
At some point in our lives, we forgot to live and all the darkness came sailing towards us and pushed our hope away. We began turning to beasts, fur bursting out our skins, our teeth elongating to daggers; we howl on cliffs of our own regrets on the dead of nights.
The despair who once was frightening becomes our only hope.
But even in all this blindness, I sometimes catch a glimpse of the shy moon behind veil of clouds and I stare, a little too long, at all it scars wondering how it still manages to shine. Wondering if it bleeds out its light only to guide us back home.
I, sometimes sit down on the grass and allow the vastness of this generous sky to gulp me in and, surrounded by the echoes of sleeping humans and ringing of insects as little fire-flies whirl about me, my mind shifts back to a memory I don’t remember recording.
I try and try to grab the feeling, to clench at it; that strange nostalgic emotion that sings to me the chapter of my book I never wrote in these words. I struggle to grasp at it, it slips away, I reach out my arm, it backs away and so the battle in my skull goes on.
Sometimes, I can swear that I hear faint, remote sounds of distant harmonic laughs and smell the aroma of merry and love but I can’t trap the sound in my ears nor convince the fragrance to stay. I can’t tie that peaceful pulse, that stays for a fraction of second, with ropes to my being. All I can do it hold on to that second and never let go. So i do.
I cannot say that I know what those voices are or where the sudden glimpses of moon-stricken faces come from but I can tell you this: I believe that someday or some night, in the dungeons of our enigmatic emotions, you and I, we can sit by a fire on a grubby moor, or rock on a silent hill or a wall of a sleeping house—or just where we currently are—and look into the sky; past the clouds and beyond the stars to the distant land that calls us home.
I cannot say we will finally find all the answers but I can and will say this: if we stare into the bottomless bottoms of the sky around us; and we listen to the morning chirp or night yawn as the wind around us grows into an infinitely vast ocean full of distant tides and friendly waves—dancing and bobbing around uncountable stars and suns that shine in glory—and if we stay completely and ardently silent, we will be speaking a language devoid of words and full of emotions.
And if we cling to it, the language might translate the mysterious mirages of songs that sometimes play in our sleeps; that translation might lead to understanding and the understanding may guide us to remembrance.
And what do we need but the remembrance of life we lost on our way to survival.
∞
Sorry this is long.