Helpless…

… to do anything but weep and feel that knot of fear being pushed higher up in my throat along with the helpless, useless, impotent anger at the apparent worthlessness of our lives…

Today, my city mourns.  Innocent casualties of war and the death of our spirit and self.  With the burial of those perished today, will be the laying to ground of the death of our identity, morality and our faith.  Not we ever had any of these things to begin with but at least there was hope.

Students were killed today in another link of an alien war that has been brought to our country by those for whom we are no more than pawns.  Students!  Young women and men conversing about studies and class mates and books and games, maybe some had a wedding to go to or to arrange… Some may be sitting there thinking of the things they need to do when they get home… Some simply thinking how hungry they were…  And the walls came down on them along with debris, fire and scraps of metal that silenced their dreams, and their ordinary concerns…

And left forever echoes of screams and agony in the hearts of the parents who were seeing their future in those bright eyes that are now closed; who were now seeing that hardest labor of love coming to fruit…  Parents who will now bury those dreams and hopes under dust and dirt and leave a piece of themselves with them.  I can visualize the agony that is going to scream through the minds of those families today and wonder how people can not think of the repercussions of what they’re going to do?  Self sacrifice is all good and noble where you’re concerned but slaughtering others… Spare a thought, you miserable brainwashed machine!

How can any cause justify the death of this innocence?  Do these people truly feel that targeting innocents and civilians is going to make an iota of difference to those who sit in the seats of power?  As if we are worth that much!  And how many of us truly care anyway?  We will be saddened for a while, be worried a bit about maybe this being us but in the end we move on; going on with our ordinary lives.  We are conditioned to be cold now.  We have no feelings of remorse nor guilt nor retribution.

We have no sense of self.  Those who have died have done so in vain.  And those they have left behind will cry and mourn their loss.  And we will go on as we always have in the face of everything done to us.  We take it.  Here are our collective asses… Stuff whatever you can up them.  We can take it and more.

As to those who believe they are carrying out the Almighty’s will, why is it not Allah’s will that the oppressor dies a painful death?  Is it open substitution?  some kind of macabre play where the understudies for Zardari and Chief of Army Staff or Musharraf are always on stage to take the bullet both literally and figuratively?

Bloody bastards, if you must do something to right the wrongs committed against you, then do so against the perpetrators?  Go on and blast Musharraf and Zardari and Altaf Hussain and all the rest so your revenge can truly be complete!

Frank Herbert said: “If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.”

I don’t even want to blame the USA.  Why should I?  I have no right when I know that the fault lies within our on money grabbing, power hungry little hearts.  But DAMN!!

People say that standing up to the US and its imposition of rules and bills; drone strikes and elite forces would eliminate all this.  Saying it is rather easy, but doing it requires spirit that understands sacrifice.  Not the free for all, kill one-dozens free kind of spirit but the spirit that maybe we need to re-evaluate our lives.  Some comforts, some luxuries that we could do without, if it could mean breaking this narcotic hold that money has on everything we do.  It is money and silken sheets and crystal decanters that prompt the drive for governance in our country.  Never an actual spirit of changing the system.

I’m random and I’m ranting…  and everything has gone uncomfortably numb!

Satin Raindrops

It touched her like the smoothest satin,

Liquid heat flowing from the tips of her fingers,

Coursing through her body like little flickers of flames

Where they stopped, a sliver of lightening splits through

Dazzling the pale smoothness of her skin for just a second..

Making her sheen as silver, sheer as a clear cut crystal waiting for that one flash

to turn to diamonds

He could just watch, mesmerized as still as she was with the rain falling on her.  He wanted to save each little droplet of water that kissed her hair, her face and went on to trace silent, still contours of her body that somehow still hummed with the spirit that was her.  The spirit that sensed him and showed itself in the lift of a cheek flushed with heat and lips that glistened with moisture…  And then was there, in eyes that sparked with mischief and innocence and within that innocence a knowledge of what she could do to him, lending confidence to the hand that lifted to him and the finger that beckoned..

The thunder echoing around him was inside him now, drumming through his heart beat, till he could hear nothing else; the lightening crashing around him just illuminating the path that led to her; till he could do nothing else but reach and allow her to draw him into her… melding, melting as the water cloaked them into one…

Broken

It’s like splintering into pieces from within…  Shards splitting from the center into slivers fine and sharp…  The kind that burrow in and make you bleed and you can’t get them out.  The fine edge just slides over your skin, through it leaving a sting sharp enough to make your breath catch…  Imagine thousands of those shards slicing through you inside out at the same time… so you don’t quite know where to hold the pain first…. you don’t quite know how to make the blood stop… even as you fade… all you feel is the agony…  all you see is the red…  all you feel is the helplessness of knowing that all that waits is darkness…

My Little Lost Boy

What do you do when you realize that the man you love is just a little lost boy?

It was agonizing to watch him break down that way.

I don’t mind saying that I am always cynical in the face of his declarations of love and devotion.  I return them but I try and keep it real.  Injecting doses of reality into romance kills it but at least it keeps one grounded.  Or so I tell myself.

Yet, tonight, I was helpless in the face of his misery.  It’s a little daunting to watch a six foot guy dissolve into tears in front of you and you being helpless to do anymore than just hold him.

My own grief?  That comes later.  His tears did more than tell me that maybe the love he says he feels for me is real.

His tears also told me that the time when he could maybe take a stand for me is not too close.  And even when the time comes, there is no guarantee of him and me being any more than what we are today… unnamed, unrecognized.

His tears told me that for all we mean to each other, we may never be.

His tears told me that for all I may do to have him with me, at the end of it, I may be alone.

His tears today may very well be my tears tomorrow…  Except that I wiped his tears away and kissed his brow and held him as he tried to gain control…  I doubt anyone will be there to wipe my tears away…

For one who believes as strongly as I do in being the mistress of my own destiny, it stuns me to see my greatest defeat in the eyes of another…

Of Senses, No. 1

She hated this feeling of nothingness that wasn’t quite nothing…  It was a great yawning, gaping emptiness inside that she could physically feel.  She had gone into it knowing all the NOs that would echo around, thinking she could handle it, keep her distance. After all, she had been burned before and yet, she was here again, waiting an endless wait…

The cold and fear and insecurity still crept through, raising goosebumps on the arms she had wrapped around herself.  The breeze coming through the window caught her hair and sprayed the rain on her face.  Her eyes weren’t on the lightening that lit the sky just as her ears were deaf to the rumble of thunder.

She saw only those leonine eyes smiling before his lips did as he watched her, she could hear only the muted sound of his heart as it beat next to her, she could only feel the warmth of him wrapped around her as he held her in his arms.  How to explain the feel of it?  It’s not the physical sense of him that she missed although she would be lying if that wasn’t a part of it…  There were things associated with the strength of him and that golden skin that were so much more potent in their absence…  things that went beyond what he looked or felt like.

It was warmth and heat and scents…  mysterious…  associations…  like walking though narrow cobbled streets of a small town in the Meditteranean in the heat of summer where the smell of the surf and sun mingles with the aroma of fresh summer fruits…  or the shadowy streets in Arab where dark skinned peddlars sell sultry, dreamy spices that carry undertones of magic…

It was that scent of deodrant and shaving cream; and dust and sweat and below that something essentially him that made him burrow into him when he held her (oh how he laughed when she did that)…  It lingered in her hair, on her skin along after he had gone…  Her fingers tingled with the sense of him.  The scent that drove her to smother her face in the pillow for hours at a time…

On repeat…

Cleansing

I cried today, long and hard… Sobbing till I was aching and hollow on the inside.

I’ve prided myself always on being a strong individual.  And part of my strength has always come from my faith in Him.  Not just in Him knowing best, but also that I have no need for any but Him because He grants me all I ever need and beyond, whether I ask for it or not.  At the risk of repeating myself, in spite of offering prayers 4 out of 5 times a day, I feel that faith has been lost somewhat.

That guilt plus pressure for studies plus issues at home shook me enough to break down in front of my mama.

My mama is one of the strongest people I know.  Her childhood stories sound like something out of a historical novel, yet all true.  The 4th daughter of the 2nd wife of a landlord who migrated from Iran, and settled in a village in Punjab, who lost her mother at the age of 2, gained a step mother and lost a father at the age of 12.  She grew up with step brothers and sisters straight out of a fairy tale with cruelty and property wars.   And the years in between had her and the other sisters who were unmarried, being shuttled from one married sister’s house to another’s wherever a baby sitter, a washing/cleaning/cooking person was required.

Fell silently in love with her sister’s brother in law at the age of 16 and touchwood is very much in love with him still after 32 years of marriage.

And she survived it all!  And is surviving it still!  Seen so much; the death of parents, and the death of a child; her children’s successes and their failures, personal and professional; lived in luxury in a house of her own and living now in a rented portion and through it all, thankful to Him and all He has given her.

As I cried today, I felt hopeless and despair and all my mother had was hope.  She said that His forgiveness, His mercy is far far beyond the sixty-seventy years of sins that we have to our name.  Where He has given so much before without asking, how can you allow yourself to even think that He won’t grant you something when you ask for it?

She reminded me of how when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old, I saw my papa offering prayers.  Papa got up leaving the prayer carpet where it was.  When he came back, I was there on the carpet, with my back towards the ka’aba, in my little dress, asking the Almighty on a one to one basis for a brother, a car and a house.  My mama said that every prayer that little girl offered was accepted because it was offered with timeless, innocent faith in Him, offered with unconditional love and ownership of Him being the one who can grant her everything.

Who knows, maybe this bout of tears, will allow me to find that girl within myself again…

Active-Passive

“What will you do if I was with someone else?  I’ll tell you… Nothing!” 

He’s absolutely right!  

I will do nothing because if all that I am and all that was or is between us is not enough to keep him with me, it means I’ve already given him more than he’s worth.  I’ll cry and rant and rage but in a place where even I would not recognize it although I will acknowledge it.  

And when I walk out into the world, my eyes will have no recognition for him.

…

…

She was babbling.  Talking too fast, words rushing out on top on one another to fill the silence between them, rushing from one end of the room to the other, trying to keep busy…  Except when she turned around, he was right there, too close, and all too real raising a finger to place against her lips…

“Ssshhhhhh love.”

Is it really necessary to say all these words when all you need to do is feel this?  - and a hand lifted her palm to where his heart beat in a reassuring rhythm…

Do we really need to speak when all that is real can be felt? – And gentle fingers caressed her face, brushing down her hair to clasp her waist to draw her closer…

Silent Night

What she hadn’t and wouldn’t give for just another moment like this?

He was there, with her…

Shrouded in the darkness of the room, it was through his touch that she knew him and allowed him to learn her…

Just the catch of a breath here and a sigh there and fingers interlocking, holding on…