BIRTH

iv, FOR THE PARTS THAT NEED FIXING

I notice the ivory-coloured paper on my desk. Mother and Father are at it again. What started as a hushed conversation has now improvised into a full-out blow. They are in the other room, and I'm here trying to shut them out. But we live in a small house drooping like Mother's tired, heavy eyes, worn out by her time spent doing housework. I can't ignore what they are accusing each other of. I don't have the energy to write every word they're spitting at one another so I could write a prose about it later when I have the life to do it.

But for now, I pick up the ivory-coloured paper and scan my eyes over the lines sketched on it with black ink. I see five questions imprinted on it, with a postscript saying: ❛To the parts you've hidden inside of you.❜ On the bottom of the single leaf of page bears my name. I must've posted these questions to myself for who else is going to ask them from me? I'm celestial. But I don't show myself much to anybody. I see things - good, bad, it varies - that people don't put effort in to see. I sit on my bed with a sharpened HB pencil and I start off with the small list of questions.

What colour do you speak in?
━━━━━━━━ I think I have a grey soul. You find it colouring my poems sometimes in masses of smoke and ash. Some lines in a poem turn charcoal. Is that how black sucks the marrow out of inks? I rarely speak white. Only thing I remember about the colour white is how poignant I feel when I am nothing but empty. Just like the colour itself. When the holes inside me get bigger and bigger, I fill them with brown, crunchy leaves and sunshine from the village. Most times it works - I won't heave and my ribs won't release a troubled sigh. During the times my soul grey constrict, I adore myself with self-love, lighting chocolate-scented candles to snuff out loneliness. I think it's brown. Yes. I talk in the colour brown. The foreign version of my motherland's English sugars: the likes of hillside rivers, mountain ranges, and my grandfather's wrinkled knuckles. I'm not a colourist, and sometimes I don't speak. But I come in different shades and tints that I'm mistaken for a colour itself.

Would you rather be the night sky or the day sky?
━━━━━━━━ I'm an hourglass of both. I am nothing but a skinned antique if I don't carry the sky in my womb and nurture it with my light and dark. The sky expands endlessly like its first land, me.

Then sky it is.
━━━━━━━━ No. Earth is the only safe place I know. The soil rejoices when I sail over it. It births daffodils and buttercups in euphoria to greet me. From earth I grew. To earth I shall belong.

Then earth it is. Or you'd rather be something else?
━━━━━━━━ I want to name my firstborn 'qamar', which means moon in an old language I still can't speak. I've been kissed more by moonlight than I've been by the sun in my house - my mother. I dream at night about the children I want to take home. In my dream, they all illuminate my heart, my eyes, my soul like tiny lamps. As if all the moons had joined in hand to put me at ease. I had never thought I'd grow to want children nestled in the valley of my breast. Either I cradle them in a hospital bed, or they hold me in a small home for children in need of care/love/a family. I want to be their moon for bringing light into my life. Even if it is just a dream. I can imagine how brighter it would only get when I go to all of them one day.

Final question, though I know the answer: the moon or the sun?
━━━━━━━━ When I become the light/warmth, I pray I see that I'm the heart of my own sun. What is giving/loving if I can't uproot it from the pits of my soul first? What would be there to offer if I don't begin here?

I finish answering and mail it to myself. Amidst the war brewing in the adjacent room - there will be more blood to clean tonight than it did the other days - I find myself blooming beautifully in all this ugliness. A flower on the edge of a blade. A flow of water in a burning house. A single thread of hope in the eyes of the saved one.

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i absolutely love this piece of writing.