How are you?

The sea kissed our feet and went back, like that shy girl from Farm, hiding behind her mom’s curtains, revealing herself part by part.
We had laughed hard that evening.

I nodded to the question, the usual one eye closed nod that you hated. I heard a sigh.
This place hasn’t changed a bit.

And you?

Remember that one time we raced down a hillock? I wish I
could go back to that day and ask myself how I could smile when everything was going downhill so fast. How could I be brave enough to battle the winds with open eyes and laugh at my bruised knees?

A single rogue wave climbed up our ankles
and knowing how waves lead on to waves, I held her hand and we took a few steps back.

She looked at me for the first time that evening. Why did you leave?

For a long moment the question hung in the salty sea breeze,
circling around us like a cat waiting to be fed. Eventually, it went away,
searching for its answer someplace else.

She put an arm around my shoulders.
I felt warm and tears came easy.
Let’s go home, baby.

Evening spilled onto my stale bedsheets. They reeked of ruined sleeps, a year's worth perhaps.
Sleep came in strange patterns,
unannounced to the wrong clocks and evasive to the beggars.
My clock said wake up,
sleep had decided she'd grab me and never let go,
like a lover I lost to a crowded fair, now tearing out from the crowd to wrap me up in embraces and kisses of a past that now lay only in dusty diaries.

The corner of my one closed eye caught red on the walls. My hairs stood up in unison, my mind went blank and my heart started pumping blood hard into my cheeks and ears.
Whew.
It's only paint, a few drops of red on a wall of fighting violets.
A painter's peril, maybe.
A shake of his hand, a tremble of his lips,
a gasp and a sudden chill through his spine.
He was as human as me, as tired as me. Perhaps he even slept on my bed and masturbated to the sunlight leaking.
Maybe he smiled, his crooked rotten teeth shining through his peril.

I had ditched my slippers,
Useless and heavy as they were,
Full of beach sand, dragging me behind.

Not that I hated my slippers,
I really liked them.
One of them once said 'FOR' and the other 'EVER',
Of which only the 'F' and 'ER' now remained.
(I told people it said FÜHRER.)

The sea promised it'd wash away the sand,
And I had fallen for the sea a long time ago, so trusting him was easy.

I left my slippers and started walking barefoot
With sunset in my eyes.
Then the waves stole them.

Devastated, I rushed,
The sea drawing its sands back urgently,
Its roaring waves slapping me,
Citing remainders,
And hindsights and insticts at me.
Not the slippers, I was praying to Poseidon.

I found them lying on the beach,
Squeaky clean.
I decided to walk barefoot, holding my forever in my hands.

I was born at the midnight
On a stormy twenty second of April.
But I couldn't see the storm,
Or my mom and dad, for that matter.
You see, I was born blind.

I lived a blind man's life for 40 years.
I ate a blind man's meal,
I watched a blind man's TV,
I read a blind man's newspaper every aftetnoon.
I litsened to a normal man's music, though.
Anyways, I got my eyes when I was 41.
The local drug store boy wound up dead in a police shootout, with both eyes intact.

At last, I could see things,
Real ones when awake,
Realistic ones when asleep.

After two weeks of my surgery, I gouged my eyes out.

The reaction to my confession was a singular one,
Odd, even.
For a moment, just a fleeting one,
The eyes grew,
Swallowing the mask,
Revealing a booming laugh,
Or a nervous giggle,
Holding back the curiousity of a kid.

But that moment passed.
It was replaced, as it always should be, by an appropriate one.

It was my birthday when I killed a man,
Shot him with a Kalashnikov as he was running away.
The commander congratulated me,
"Mard ban gaya tu ab", he said, patting my back,
I had become a man.
I felt so happy, so proud.
I was thirteen now and finally I could grow a beard.

In the dead of the night,
She'd sit on the railings of that bridge
And watch the citylights sleep
Inside the river.