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Unexpressed Feelings

Page 4

by Khadija Rupa


  That day I brought you home and read you the whole night, page by page, word for word. Sometimes I sniffed your yellow and worn out parts. I threw myself so far in your depth that it took me a month to come out and notice I was actually sitting in my room. Nowhere else. Not with you.

  I know I didn’t even thank you. I just took my purse and closed the door in your face. I don’t know if you stood there in shock, or left instantly. I don’t know what you were thinking and if you wanted to meet me again or if you thought of stealing my poetry that would forever stay unpublished. But that’s what I didn’t want. I didn’t want a story—a beginning. Not anymore. I have long ago stopped walking on a road where my dreams walk around. I change my destination a hundred times if I ever see an old wish of mine standing there in its real form. I don’t know them. I don’t want to. They too must not know me. They too must not recognise me as their owner.

  Maybe you think I am a mean girl. I wish you could hear how I cried behind that same door, cuddling myself on the floor. That evening I read you again. All night. You were seeping through my skin and flowing into my veins. At four a.m. I clutched you to my chest and wept. The next day I didn’t leave my bed. My curtains guarded me from the sun. And all day, I read you.

  And all day—I loved you.

  And wondered…

  Maybe after fifty years, someday, somewhere, you will remember me and my poetry while telling stories to your grandchildren? I hope they learn and tell the next world, some people aren’t meant to have a story in life, and that’s absolutely okay as they become a story instead. Sometimes we finish all our right times meeting all the wrong people. This is why when the ones who are right—eventually appear—all we are left with is wrong times. Things could have been different between us. So, too, our stories.

  If only we had met when I was ready to let the whole universe enter my heart.

  Unreachable Soul

  Where each season goes for celebration

  when not its turn

  to paint nature,

  you will find me there.

  Where the cheerful children

  of unwritten poems,

  play all around,

  you will find me there.

  Where the night sits

  beside the small window

  of a girl who collects moonlight

  in a black pitcher,

  you will always find me there.

  Release

  Where there is no law

  of truth and lie,

  where there is no rule

  of wrong and right,

  beyond what we wish, what we fear

  and answered-prayers keep chasing behind,

  no obligations to explain,

  no questions to ever answer;

  only to close these eyes

  to sleep in the lap of love

  and stay there forever,

  I will be found surely there,

  even if the body is swallowed by earth—

  only if ever

  someone searches truly

  and wants to find me.

  Life Goes On (Part One)

  Almasa. What should I tell you about her? She was a wonderful teenage girl who had the miraculous power to cure herself from any wound, either physical or mental. With her own salty tears, she would cleanse her raw wounds. And her breaths were given, as though not to breathe but, rather, to fan her sores.

  The witty, six year old girl that used to play with her every afternoon, always teased her saying, “You are a blue sky that is completely hidden by the white cloud.” When Sasma—that was how the little girl called Almasa—asked why, she always replied, “You look astonishingly stronger with teary eyes and heavy breaths but no one notices that. They think you are very weak.” Hearing this, the smile that sometimes rippled in the corners of Almasa’s otherwise frozen lips, was a melodious tune with no musical instruments.

  One day, Almasa got injured again. This time her pain was so intense, she screamed as if a fire was burning her alive. All the people of her village including her own family urged her to let her tears stream down on the wound and to fan it with her breath so that it would heal, so she kept crying and breathing, breathing and crying. But the wound would not heal.

  Time went by and that little girl Almasa used to play with, turned into a beautiful lady. In a beautiful twilight evening, a handsome knight married her and took her away to his castle far from the village. With time, she forgot Almasa.

  After many years, this little girl turned into a cute old woman. Her face was glowing like a crumpled diamond. One afternoon she noticed the sky was completely cloudless, as if someone has just coloured it with pure blue paint. For the first time since her childhood, the memory of the beautiful self-healer knocked her aged mind. She remembered how the girl would heal her cuts and bruises with her own salty tears and seek all her peace by pouring her breaths into those deep sores. She hurried back to the village and asked for her. She did not even remember her name; all she remembered was how one day she was severely wounded and all the villagers advised her to keep crying and breathing.

  “Almasa?” the farmer asked.

  “Yes, yes Al…Almaasaa! Where is she? Is she fine? What happened to that wound? How did it heal? Did she…” The farmer replied even before she could finish, “Almasa is still there where she used to be.”

  “Her cave-like unlighted room,” she abruptly whispered, knowing not how she recalled it.

  Life Goes On (Part Two)

  The minute she entered Almasa’s room, she observed a very old woman, wrapped in wrinkled skin and wearing a grey dress matching her black and white twisted thread-like hair, sitting beside the broken window.

  “Almasa!” she cried. But Almasa did not respond.

  “Sasma?” This time she raised her shaky face in tiresomely slow motion and looked at her visitor. There was a minute of black in her fading eyes yet the smile she flashed later was as young as it used to be in those childhood days. It was only the music that was missing. And then without any words, any keenness, any curiosities, Almasa slowly lowered her shaky face again, and continued pouring her tears and puffing her breaths into the same wound that she’d been nursing for fifty years.

  “Nothing has changed in her life except time? Can that ever happen in real life?” She wondered while leaving the room, deeply traumatized. A mass of grey cloud suddenly covered all the blue in the sky as if all the moments of life became a single moment—of goodbye.

  Even Before I Knew

  There was a dream I used to see

  even before I knew

  why this story meant so much to me.

  There is a love I used to long for

  even before I knew

  why I must never have it all.

  There is a sad end I used to live

  even before I knew

  this is how I was meant to begin.

  Part Two

  School of Lost Souls

  Soul’s Power: Kintsukoroi

  You repair you,

  your collapsed body of clay,

  your wrecked heart of glass,

  with hopes of gold,

  confidence of diamond.

  And the world shamefully witnesses—

  How your soul becomes

  so beautiful

  so magical,

  just for having been

  painfully broken.

  Life

  This Earth is a funny planet.

  Life in it is nothing—

  but a game.

  We all are players.

  Some play with toys.

  Some—

  with hearts.

  Butterfly

  A perfect time

  for transformation

  is when you experience

  an intense pain

 
and feel simply

  out of control.

  Know that

  it’s time

  for the caterpillar.

  To become a—

  Butterfly.

  Love

  One day.

  One day, I told the world, that what I felt for you—was Love.

  Today I’m not the same soul anymore. My heart isn’t the same, my body isn’t the same, nor are my two hands that you proudly un-held. You left me and this one lesson was instantly unlocked. I looked up above with teary eyes astoundingly wide seeing the light and glitters that hardly reveal themselves to anyone. This hurting moment of abandonment convinced me to be its student and so opening my heart, stretching my trembling hands to the unseen immensity, I’ve learnt—Love is one of the strongest weapons human beings end up using to achieve success and freedom: the two most priceless things for which hatred and wars have been destroying the world since its creation.

  Being a student of ache that is universal, I learnt the rule is simple—success, through Love, doesn’t seek anyone who is already a failure. And freedom, of course through Love, doesn’t hunt for someone who is already a captive. Love sees no situation, no condition, no reason, no rule, no law, no right and no wrong. When it is meant to enter your life, it just enters. Yet, the success and freedom one attains through Love, even if this person continues to stay a failure or a captive in other matters, they would still achieve a kind of success, a kind of freedom that even the most victorious and independent people would never achieve otherwise.

  However, many times we human beings end up expecting Love at our door when things are going wrong, too wrong, when we are half or complete failures or brutally caged or have a little bit of absolutely nothing. One midnight, all of a sudden, we just decide to stop waiting for achievements and independence to enter our lives; we just hold the hands of Love tightly, sometimes even grab it by the hair, and drag it along the ground toward us. We think, this, this Love will bring us triumph, deliver our liberty.

  And thus, in our rush and anxiety and grief and fears and suffocation, to fall in Love we end up choosing someone who is available, reachable, who is near, and who has the ability to solve all our problems. Or maybe some. Or just one. Or who can benefit us, give us what life kept hard to reach. As a stubborn and impatient creation, amidst all our problems, we don’t understand—actually we don’t want to understand—that when Love enters you, it will continue to choose the same person for you again and again no matter what your situation and condition is. Your Love will choose the same person when you have everything and this same Love of yours will choose the same person even if you have nothing. Your Love will choose the Love of your life when you are a winner and this same Love of yours will continue to choose the same Love of your life if you are nothing but an awful failure.

  In Love, always ask yourself these three questions: the person whom you have chosen to Love, would you choose this same person if you had everything and if you were tremendously successful? Ask yourself, the person whom you have chosen to Love, would you choose this same person if you had a little bit in life? Ask yourself, the person whom you have chosen to Love, would you choose this same person if you had nothing and you were a complete failure with lots of restrictions and calamities? If even a faint ‘no’ echoes in your heart, then your emotions and feelings and longings are not Love. You might have accepted that person in your life out of helplessness, or out of fear, or compulsion, insecurity, greed, selfishness, ego, pride or mistake, or even an immature decision—for any of these reasons, but not for Love.

  When I didn’t have the freedom to have everything I wished for, when I didn’t have the option to choose what I wanted to choose, when I was nothing and I had almost something of nothing, was exactly when I wanted to have you. If ever I had just something of everything, you wouldn’t have been the choice.

  This is exactly what hundreds of thousands are doing right now. We pretend to be happy with whom we could. We Love, whom we shouldn’t, whom we must not.

  But whom we—could.

  A Historic Lesson

  Some people enter our lives

  as an answer to a hundred questions—

  that life will someday ask us

  through some destitutions.

  These same people leave our lives

  as a question to a hundred answers—

  that life wouldn’t give us otherwise,

  not even through any disasters.

  Lack Of Love

  Some people understand,

  who you are,

  reaching to the bottom of your heart,

  from a distance so far.

  And surprisingly,

  some take a lifetime

  to understand who you are not,

  despite being someone so close.

  Living Through Nightmares

  For some,

  they do not need

  to fall sleep,

  to have nightmares.

  They go through them,

  even in their waking moments,

  feeling every fright—

  with eyes wide open.

  Know That

  To be completely in love,

  with someone who loves you

  not as much,

  is what will always break you,

  in the end.

  The people who mean,

  too much to you,

  will one day

  make a daily routine,

  to hurt you too much.

  Ego

  The greatest distance

  is not the distance

  of a thousand miles.

  It is actually the distance

  we create between two souls

  whose bodies touch.

  Between two souls

  who were once together,

  who were supposed to stay together.

  Laughing While Bleeding

  If the sun leaves at night,

  what more damage could moon do

  if it threatens the sky

  to withhold its light?

  No moon, no stars,

  no new discoveries,

  can darken the universe

  more than the sun.

  So when the people inside of us,

  cause our destruction,

  what more damage could be done

  by someone from the outside?

  Why Do You Write?

  To leave the world

  for some time,

  to rephrase myself

  and edit some parts of mine.

  To put some full-stops;

  to hear, with hands,

  all that other voices

  fail to tell;

  To un-live some regrets;

  un-speak some words;

  un-feel some aches,

  some mistakes.

  And come back to the world

  completely different—

  absolutely ready

  to repair any of its cracks.

  Poet’s Poetry

  Throughout history,

  poets have always been

  an unsolved mystery.

  No one knows,

  if poetry is for a poet

  or a poet is for poetry.

  Why they write,

  for whom they write,

  is but an unknown story.

  My poems are every poet’s sadness,

  through them I give the world

  a rhyme of secret victory.

  Two Sides Of The Same Coin

  Some truths have so much power,

  if told at the correct time,

  even the truth of extreme disloyalty

  brings oneself the title of honesty.

  But the same untold truths

  wil
l remove the veil of lies,

  showing the face of a betrayer,

  if told later by another.

  Patience

  By pretending,

  it didn’t hurt you

  as the spine of your trust broke;

  by remaining content,

  simply not knowing

  the things you wanted to know;

  by continuing to smile,

  with a bullet of remorse

  lodged inside your gut;

  by realising,

  every misunderstanding, every doubt,

  doesn’t always need an explanation;

  you do—

  the greatest justice

  to your very own self.

  You Silly Girl

  If his voice

  makes you forget

  you have a choice, too,

  if his eyes

  make you forget

  you can see, too,

  if his luring words,

  make you forget

  you can control yourself, too,

  if his presence

  makes you forget,

  that you even exist,

 

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