In Ghalib’s words: “Duboya mujhko honay ne,
Na hota mei to kia hota?”

It’s true. Poetry really is that which is inarticulate in us. You search for the words to describe your condition – you wonder if there even is a name for your condition – and then there is a chance meeting between yourself and an obscure book. Or a lose page that pops out with heaps of dust from behind a blue and red sofa.
A surprise encounter and you begin to speak someone else’s words through someone else’s mouth.
But the heart that feels them is yours alone.

I want to be able to write like I used to before: with that poet’s weakness for symbols, that innocently brazen imagery, that blithe whimsical air of absurdity. That wooziness; a soluble nostalgia that could be whisked into lightheadedness.

Whose place is it to say what I must feel; whose right is it to feel for me.

I have bitten my nails to blood and fish-skin thin strips of human flesh.
I have sunk my teeth into my lips and drawn blood blisters. I have drowned myself in my own bloodbath. The scene of carnage; the massacre – it is my own making, my own doing.

I die a different death with every flip of the card, with every roll of the dice. And what would have been if I had not been?

Would there have been a tiny Mehreen shaped hole in the universe?
A gaping black whirlpool that would have managed – despite the absence of life – to suck everything into it.
Would I have still administered destruction? Would I have walked around in all my blackness and felt my skin?

Perhaps someone could you have put their ear to my ribs and heard the silence of a place where a heart should have been.

What a black thought; blank - filling you up - to the little arteries in your brain with despair instead of magic. Salt instead of water.

Let me now swim to safety.

On the green leather top of my desk in a textured silver frame is the picture of a woman in a maroon skirt. She is smiling in a distant time when smiles came easy. She is smiling out into a time when no one has the time. She holds his arm with a certain air of reassurance. She needs some of her own. She entwines one arm around his, clenches her grey handbag with the other and looks up – in a flash they are twenty-something forever.

Even the bronze vase next to them – with its cheap pink and yellow plastic flowers – will never break and is forever immortal.

- posted by Mehreen Malik @ 11:31 AM