Dear Flesh!
It’s not my first
letter to you, I always wrote to you whenever in the late hours of iron night,
I saw you calmly sleeping by my side, exhaling whiffs of indifference, in between
us nothing but centuries like two characters meet somewhere in the epilogue,
and whenever lavender lining of the sky descended down our cottage where only I
lived. In both despair and happiness you were the first one I narrated my own
version of our story crowded with comforting excuses to rescue your status as a
protagonist in my life. I walked rough trying to recreate myself with the
substance you needed like the ripples dissolving gently in the colorless eyes of
the sea or like a dream which bricks its own house and later demolishes it.
Remember? When the raven with his claws clenched in blood
landed on your expensive shirt, mounted over the rope to get dews of the sun,
and you so much wanted to kill it for spoiling its grandeur, a gentle voice
murmured inside you to be gentle and that was me. Though I convinced you not to
be a murderer but I forgot those blood stains on your shirt though washed a
thousand times never extinguished rather it chained your skin in beastly
selfishness. In moments, I saw your clay melt from an angel to a Human who is
governed by the bodily desires. For the reason, to win you, to please you, I
turned myself into a Poet, so that my words can caress your restless throbbings
and cushion your eyes in a healing Hellenic embrace.
Do you know how poetry treated me? At times it drifted me
to the soirées of saints and sometimes, it left me unarmed dying at the
hands of my so-called friends ‘words’ and other times it asked me to be a
messenger to narrate the story of zephyr to the Milky Way gurgling mournful
sighs . But I kept on talking to you though my tongue you often cut-off, as you
hated my nagging.
You on its reverse had all the reasons to defy my attention.
You were part of that world where carnal desires bulb the caves of flesh sellers,
where money is worshipped in the temples, where fake identity markers are sculptured,
and where rights are gruesomely skinned alive to live long. It never mattered
to you when down by the streets of the sea, alone I cried seeing the tale of my
heartburn and fleeting beauty unheard. When you had trillion of sentences to
shoulder the affected souls, I gasped bare on your door, for your single word,
for your only gaze and for your empathetic cuddle.
All the wars I fought were for you to turn you victorious.
When I saw you turning on the waterworks whenever his memories walked closed
and autumn reminded him of you, that day I tattered my own garments to patch
yours and I gladly sacrificed myself to the inferno of annihilation just to
give you one more second of a joyous life. I died many times to keep you alive.
Still you say, I am on the verge to lose my dignity in your eyes? Still you
claim to be owner of that chastity that never belonged to you?
Things would have been different if I were not by your side.
Dear beloved! We are made to part, I am immortal and you
are mortal. This paradox only illumines books of fiction but not reality. I am
sure till the time you will open this letter either I will be gone or your eyes
would be deprived of celestial light. Like my previous letters this letter too would
remain unread but I am sure some day crawling among blurred shadows, unknown faces
and strange smiles you would seek for someone you once knew, someone you
yourself said good bye.
Yours
Soul
Paras Ali/2018
