Archives for October, 2004

i’m expecting that going back may feel something like a punch in the gut.

It was God who created you;
yet some of you refuse to believe, while others have faith.
He is aware of all your actions.
He created the heavens and the earth to manifest the truth.
He fashioned each one of you – and each one of you is beautiful.
To God you will all return.
He knows all that the heavens and the earth contain.
He knows all that you hide and all that you reveal.
He knows your deepest thoughts.

The Holy Quran – 64: 2-4

We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about.

- Joseph Epstein

I long have had a quarrel set with Time
Because he robb’d me. Every day of life
Was wrested from me after bitter strife:
I never yet could see the sun go down
But I was angry in my heart, nor hear
The leaves fall in the wind without a tear
Over the dying summer. I have known
No truce with Time nor Time’s accomplice, Death.
    The fair world is the witness of a crime
Repeated every hour. For life and breath
Are sweet to all who live; and bitterly
The voices of these robbers of the heath
Sound in each ear and chill the passer-by.
—What have we done to thee, thou monstrous Time?
What have we done to Death that we must die?

- Wilfred Scawen Blunt

it’s not so bad reading books, being able to underline the turning points, the epiphanies. being able to close the book with a sense of complacency, because you know exactly what went wrong, where and why. and you know how all the problems could have been fixed before they were made. you could bookmark the crossroads.

but i’d begun to suspect that life is like that too, without the ending part. that the seniors on the bus were once beautiful young people and that parents have stories.
so perhaps my having begun thinking about it was an omen.
a preparation, of sorts.

she’s nearing fifty but her hair is still strong, still healthy and deep black. but now, stroking her head, i see the strands of gray, the white curls at the forehead.
this reversal of positions frightens me. it threatens my sense of identity. i am no longer the one who has something to prove.

i’m crying now and the white still stands out against the black.
traces of salt now on my face.

this isn’t guilt now, nothing as complacent, as self-serving.
this is recognition, this is hurt, this is confusion and on a very primitive level, this is terror.
and bitterness. why the wasteland? why the years? why must there be scars?

we are the only ones inside, an hour before opening time.
the two of us stand transfixed before the TV. the words are hard to distinguish over the sounds of traffic, of cooking. the broadcaster’s voice rises and falls in accompaniment to the grainy images, in time to the heartbeats inside the black bags.
we stand unmoving, watching.

he joins us, reaches over a half-full pack of cigarettes for the remote and i tense for a second, thinking that perhaps he is going to change the channel. perhaps exasperatedly.
he puts the volume up but still the words are lost to me.

then it’s another story and he turns to the kitchen. “they are killing the Muslims everywhere,” he says.
he comes out a heartbeat later, through the swinging doors saying, “i dunno. maybe God is angry with us,” and he beats his chest lightly, twice. “i dunno.”

what’s there to say.
i don’t know.

outside it is cold despite the sun. and the flags flapping in the wind sound like gunshots (inna de air).

she’s not asleep. i can tell because her dry, painful cough echoes through the night silence.

he’s made himself a bed on the yellow futon with yellow cushions from the living room to match.
i stand with my head against the cupboard, watching him sleep. there’s a lamp standing on the stool next to him and a book on the floor.

i can feel the guilt; it is a living thing writhing in my stomach, crawling up my throat, stifling me. i want to scratch at something, claw at something, pull apart these bars.

in my search for a purpose, i have failed no one as much as i have failed myself.

you can only ever say goodbye once. after that once it becomes a farce, an embarrassment to be blundered through.

i spent all of last year saying goodbye and having said it and having looked to a future (mine?), i found that the past is not something you can close, like a book, or end, like a story. or send away, like letters.
it lives in you and breathes in you. it betrays itself in your words. it flaunts its presence in your happiness, in your hesitant steps, in the grey days.

it took the drawing of a line for me to recognise the beauty in the people i had known. this lesson i needed to learn only once, because i can see the beauty in the people i know now.
and this line, having drawn it, i can smudge, step over.

sometimes i am a middle aged mother of three.