In the space where my eye

Kisses my eyelid; there is a river.

With no snow for a splitting beginning

Neither an ocean for a welcoming end.

As my eyelids rest, I see no darkness

Or fireworks of phosphine.

Instead, I sightlessly gaze

At a perpetual river with thousands of streams

Flowing in the movement of you;

In the uninterrupted color of dreams.

The soft rolling of your shoulders

And the sharp bend of your knees.

The ankles I knew I would miss,

And the high-pitched way you sneeze.

The lining of your stomach and what I attempt

To hear of what flutters beneath it.

The marmalade split-second pause

Your body makes as it turns to leave.

I retrieve more sanity in my sleep;

When my eyelids embrace me.

When whom I love, gazes back.

It need not the sun to shine, this river

For it to gleam in gold and silver;

To break in shards of glass sun glitters.

It need not the light in order to appear

To be made of reflection rather than water.

This river, it need not the wind to carry

To retrieve and to hold,

Flower petals and vacant Lili pads

The pulse I gasp and the aching wrath.

Your touch on my neck, my body remembers.

It need not a pebble, this river

For it to swell in patches of ripples

Your laughter exists in the form

Of cold springs;

It resonates to create rhythm

In the form of waves and gentle winks.

In the space where my eye

Kisses my eyelid; there is a river.

In you, darkness I fail to see.

It need not the light, the wind, or a lonesome pebble

To throw me in its currents

-Where my body lays to float.

No life jacket or boat

Or a drifting log for support.

Through the void of pitch-black unconsciousness;

The tint of faraway space in the galaxy.

I blindly journey to reach the river

And place my feet in its waters.

My skin knows when we have arrived.

Surrender my flesh to its reflections

As I float; in the direction of many streams.

Between the flower petals and the wrath

And I expand my arms to feel them.

Where no sun trudges yet the water is still warm

I caress all the beauty I’ve ever found in you.

And it takes me.

Dear older self,

This is a note to remind you of 2020; the year you thought you would gain your freedom but instead the world lost its own. People were sent into their homes like their walls were made of magnets and bodies were weak to the charge.

I know time has managed to transform the past into another story. You are probably looking back through its pages like it happened but never really did. What an odd perpetual feeling it is, to live so wholly yet feel a replicate did it for you and that you were never there. Time turns everything into a story; remember the importance of re-feeling them before you turn into just a story yourself. This letter is to help you recreate the moments; let it brush itself against your bones. Let it ache your body like it used to – if you don’t become living words then who will? Remember what made you and what shaped the world. Stories and survival are only separated by a fine line and sometimes we need to stand with one foot on each side to remember.

Being locked

Locked in

Locked out

Locked inwards

Hidden

Silent

Locked away Burst

Underground

Waiting

Can you recollect what it was like to be a Russian doll? Always feeling trapped in a self, then another until the next.

It was the start of 2020 and you were raging for freedom – you had fallen in love until you got locked in love. Love faded and you had stayed locked. Where? Somewhere that was dark, lonely… maybe a little comforting. You lost yourself completely to someone you thought was love that doesn’t betray, it never was healthy but you had still decided to stay. For a bit too long; a lot of us do that sometimes.

Just when you thought you ended it and that freedom would brush against your face like drizzling rain. A pandemic attacked the entire globe and you were left in the same place – the sun shone differently and the streets from your window empty. What an odd time to live when you wanted to restart yourself. What an odd time to find a restart button when the entire world pressed shutdown. In instances the circuits fell asleep one after the other. All the hackers and coders fell into a coma and the system went to sleep.

It was fucking terrifying. You had no idea what was already locked inside your chest from being suppressed and undergrown. All that suffocation you felt that’s been raging to break through by dancing till dawn has lost its chance again. Instead, they were asking of you to dance alone and so was everyone around you. You became the Russian doll. Locked inside a self, with things locked inside its chest, locked inside the walls of your home, inside fear and inside a mind you haven’t asked questioned to for so long. You knew it was going to get really loud and then abruptly quite.

From completely losing yourself to suddenly being asked to sit with her.

She smelled differently and the skin below her eyes had shadows of the moon – and now you suddenly had to talk to her.

* * *

Recently, you had learned that there is a module in the left hemisphere that allows individuals to create meaning. Even in utter randomness the module finds a thread and creates purpose. It is called the interpreter, and its function is to interpret meaninglessness into meaning. The world started to create meaning during the pandemic and the human being was apparent in full force. The human being as an artist, a creator, a dreamer… a lost body always attempting find a way home. Our interpreters were aching to find threads of meaning during the isolation. In our books, in our movies, in texts we sent to people we haven’t talked to in years, in introspection … we were all forced to get creative in our interpretations.

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Dearest older self, allow me to confess what it feels like in this moment.

Locked in

Locked out

Locked inwards

Hidden

Silent

Locked away

Burst

Underground

Waiting

Room

It feels like you are in a waiting room where when your turn is called, life starts again.

Where people are sitting in a crowded space yet never talking, just silence. Unless broken by the tapping of fingers on phones. This room where magazines are being skimmed through by eyes that are closed. Where kids are playing in circles while an elderly man has fallen asleep

It feels like a waiting room but there she is sitting next to you – the part of you that you had forgotten. And for some peculiar reason, you aren’t minding the pandemic. You both stand up and start dancing till dawn and it doesn’t feel like you are waiting for anything anymore. This room is just like any other room. This day will pass into another. The world does random things and we interpret.

** *

You will only know freedom when you remember how you freed yourself with the power off. You freed yourself inside of the system that was asleep. You pulsated life into the circuits and made a black screen glitch for a second.

Sincerely,

Your Younger Self

2020

The moon grows larger for its lunar phases by eating clouds.

It shrinks by farting them back out.

The sun sleeps in the ocean every night,

When it is pulled down by tiny people of the ocean

By their ropes and anchors.

It sizzles to rest.

Can’t you help but believe in how much is unseen around us, beneath us, above us and within our raging bodies. How things can slip right beneath our noses. How often things are said on the right side; but we turn left to listen. In a world where our sight only grasps the visible spectrum of the electromagnetic field, how can we be so convinced we have sight?

As a child, these spirits, they used to wake me from my sleep. I was persuaded the walls of my room are speaking. That my curtains have turned into swing sets, and the pile of clothes in the corner is a volcano ready for eruption or a cat starring right at me. Then, I taught myself to rub my eyes over and over again to squeeze my imagination back into my mind. So, I could see correctly.

With time, this unfathomable imagination outside the comprehension of adults slowly seeps out into the outside. We transform from bodies that create to bodies that conform; as our senses align to the expectations of the material world.

Suddenly, we sleep in rooms made of walls and floors, and when the door is slightly open we do not wait for something to creep out. We sleep in rooms that have desks, mirrors and drawers. And objects in our room don’t turn into cats anymore.

Spirits of the ocean, spirits of the skies. Spirits of my lovers, spirits of the stories I despise. You must find home somewhere – as we all escape you with age I wonder where you reside. You must have found a home somewhere.

From the morphing of objects due to an untamed imagination, their spirits roaming rooms. To spirits becoming stories of the past and the uncertainty of the future. Spirits becoming our loved dead ones, who we cannot help but feel in the sunlight or a good cup of coffee they would have enjoyed. Spirits becoming the idea of happiness; that we struggle to hold on to as it becomes abstract and not linear. Spirits becoming the future and what we deem of it; how our knees ache at the passing of time and our inability to be certain. Spirits becoming ideas we stop finding time for – as the repetition of the system becomes ever more consuming.

We live aside the unseen every morning till until we fall sleep, and as we sleep we become unseen to ourselves.

Isn’t it crazy we always have something intangible to believe in?

From a child believing in ghosts in her room, believing in Santa clause, and believing that love in a family is unbroken. To adults looking for God, looking for peace, trying to find answers. These spirits they change shape but do they ever leave us?

The human being is in constant need of finding connections. Yet, the connections we have are what can cause us the most pain. Having faith in ourselves, in someone else, or in something is a force as strong as the ocean that aids us through our survival. But that force in reverse; getting disappointed in ourselves, being betrayed by someone else, and losing and aching for something can be the wave of our destruction.

So we need to choose.

To either, live a life too afraid to love, too afraid to dream, and too afraid to lose. And as a consequence never know how it tastes to ache for something. Or have the faith necessary to believe in things outside our control and take on all the risks.

Faith is aligned with both creation and destruction. Just like the laws of physics, matter cannot be created nor destroyed. However, it is always created and destroyed in a cycle of restoration.

Faith in my grandmother meant that every time I would see her smile and hear her warm words, I would recognize that it might be the last time I do. But, also acknowledge that my faith in her smile and stories do not cease when she dies - but stay. They stay in the space she smiled in. If people do not know our stories the walls of her house do. If that house gets broken the pieces of concrete do. If everything is moved and the land is demolished, the air that touched her lips as she smiled over and over again is still carrying her laughter and words across the universe.

Faith in myself demands going to sleep feeling like my dreams are on a faraway planet and I will never have enough time to build a rocket ship fast enough to reach them. But faith is also waking up the next morning and trying to build a rocket ship again, no matter how many times I tried or how impossible the odds seem.

Faith is knowing the world’s poverty statistics yet giving a beggar in need a sandwich on the street.

Faith is loving;

and having faith in oneself that you will be strong enough to lose what you love.

Faith is losing;

because you had the courage to let the force into your life in the first place.

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