bedouin stars

sing me to sleep, before i fall too far. tomorrow in her eyes, forever on her mind, bedouin stars in a bedouin sky; that’s all we’ll ever be. and what are we? well-situated dots on a badly-situated page, too little white paper to fill with all our thoughts.

 

there may be nothing left to say; i may have nothing here at all, nothing but the feeling that i cant get it all out. there may be nothing but illusion sun on the sidewalk, glittery pavement thinks its gold. all that glitters, i think i have a sidewalk complex. doomed forever to a mundane existence, all that glitters is not her. all that glitters in the sky, all that flutters in the wind, all that matters in the world is what she hopes one day to be. unmistakably precocious, we want everything there is, everything there will ever be, more than this universe has ever seen. more than god could ever know, more than the stars could have ever told it. we are all here, in this circle, further in the dark than we would like to believe.

 

but the shadows in our eyes cloud the future from us; even so-called gods have limits- cataracts in their celestial vision. in our orbits we see only one side at a time, one line of the rhyme, one constellation in the sky. the power moving in us is our uncertainty; a power born of mortality, of temporal value and the fear that one day we will cease. our worth is our fear, and fear begets our love. there is no love where there is no fear of loss; we are what we are because of what we fear to someday lose. fingers grasping at the sheets, footprints merging with the sea, close enough to touch me, too blind to ever see. we are the end of things, the edge of the trees, an unraveling thread.

 

see me touch me feel me we are human enough to breathe. like fishes do, in a sea of nitrogen and hydrogen and just enough oxygen, our gills open our closed eyelids to the patterns of the waves. singing girls in long-lost villages, wells long-dry after a drought.

 

what does an eyelash think of its purpose? what does an atom know of depth? caterpillars and butterflies, we are all in this conundrum. a puzzle of existence; pieces missing are what makes us who we are.

 

drop from a faucet, not quite turned off, just barely plinking in the kitchen sink we drink we think therefore we are. and what we are we are immeasurably, we are recklessly and desperately. one shot in a million, but we are what we have.

 

bedouin stars in a bedouin sky, she says. not all the veils in the world will hide our eyes now.

p.s.

i'd be trini.

obviously.

this is sort of an apology. it is not a very good one.

i was thinking. that i am, perhaps, an exhausting human being. she is always writing, always thinking, always singing, always reading.

and maybe i would be more... manageable, if i could just take a day, or an hour, or 10 minutes, and watching some effing television. play a video game. fold some towels. organize my itunes library. eat a granola bar. do some ridiculous facebook quiz about what color of season 1 power ranger i would be.

but all i do, all i do is write. and read old things i've written, and write about them. it's awful, reading things you wrote when you were someone else. i have been reading things from 2 and 3 and 4 years ago. (hint: timelines are significant), and i am alternatingly amazed and mortified by the things i wrote and thought and was then. and i want to change them, and delete them, and make the prior me (who is so far away, now, i think of her as "her") sound more intelligent, and less brainwashed, and less desperate, and more like she's got a teensy bit of self-respect. i hate the things i wrote then. they are relics from another world to me now. and they are ugly.

and still, i can't change them. they're ugly and they're awful and they're, frankly, embarrassing, and i don't think anyone who knows me now would recognize me in them, but they are sacred for what they are. they are what i used to be, and instead of drawing lines in the sand between that girl and me, i have to leave her words alone. people change when they have to, and in order to launch that process of change, they tell themselves they are new people. they are liars; i was a liar when i said it and i will be again. there is no such thing. new beginnings are a myth. we are all what we are, spurred on by where we came from whether we admit it or we don't. and it is a useful and a beautiful lie; it gives us courage to be what we want to be. 

as much as i want her to never have existed, she did and does as i do. and to expand, the way i'm desperate to, and to grow and become and exist as something i could call a tolerable self, i have to read the old things. all the time. i have to live in time collapsed, in kaleidoscope identities of she and i and all the intermediary transparencies that i could call a self. 

 i cannot deny her. she was as much a human being as i am now. and this, this now, is why i am so exhausting. i am absolutely, unequivocally determined to figure this out, to come to terms, to see with eyes open, to sleep better, to sing always, to remember without fear, to write pages and books until i've got something coherent and authentic that i could feel comfortable setting down in front of a television to watch american idol or some such nonsense.

so i guess this is an apology. sort of. the kind of apology where the person says they're not really sorry about what they're doing, but they feel bad because it's making all their friends miserable. like if your sister just started playing the violin and it sounds like a fight between two nails over who can make the biggest line on the chalkboard, and for the entire 3 hours she plays she apologizes: not for playing, but for the death she's inflicting on everyone else's eardrums. this is that kind of an apology.  so i'm sorry, to everyone who does not wish to, on a daily basis, discuss mysticism or trauma theory or gender or how time collapses in religious rituals or hegemonic masculinity or iran or pacifism or my old stories or violence or love or what art is. to all of those people, i am truly sorry. really, you should say something. i can put you on a do-not-call list, except for talking. or something. 

these days, we are nothing if not dynamic. and the nights we don't sleep (hardly) and the days we don't sing are just steps in a direction, inshallah the one i'd like to think i'm going in.

i am less, these days, a pile of secrets, and more of a whirling dervish of them. spinning and spinning til i can't see anymore, letting the circles take me and hoping that when i stop spinning i will see clearer than before. until then, we are what we are. and i hope it is, in its current state, tolerable.

writing, dancing, free people. i wrote that quite a long time ago. it is still, even still, true.

perhaps some things i write do not become idiotic with time.

then again, that's a long shot. well, we live and see.