سکوت – Stillness

Time. Can you count it? Seconds, minutes, hours, years… yes years. They pass. Can you count them? Ofcourse you can. It’s been 2 years since we last met. It’s been two and a half years since i last layed on this bed in my room. Where time stands still, like all the toys in the huge wooden shelf standing tall against one of the walls. All my dolls, books, teady bears, trophies from school and college, photographs, diaries and my old broken computer. My whole life. My everything summed up. It all stays here, on the same spot, collecting dust and memories. Silent. Still. Nothing ever moves. My mother, who is a bit weaker now than she was two and a half years ago, she doesn’t let anything move. She pickes up things, cleans them and put them on the same spot as they were. It’s been two and a half years since i last visited my room. It’s been 20 years since i put my toys in their spots for the first time.

My room.. it reminds me of you. All those years that i spent talking to you in this room, when a second would feel like eternity. The air, it smells of you. Of us. Of what was never meant to be. Out of all the feelings bubbling up in my heart while lying in this room, your memory is the strongest. It stands still, on its spot, in my room, in the air. Like other toys in the big wooden shelf. It won’t move. Years would pass. Years have passed.

But time… it stands still. Frozen. It hasn’t passed. It can not be counted. Like years. It has made my father older, my brothers stronger and my mother weaker. But everything else is the same. As it was two and a half years ago, three and a half years ago and five years ago. I am home. I feel as if i float here, weightless and still. Burden on the shoulders feel lighter. Walls surround me, walls of unconditional love. Walls that once suffocated me. After years now, they make me feel safe.

Some things, just a few, have changed though. All those years did not pass in vain. They have filled my father’s life with some more hardships, some more pain that’s intense. My mother’s life with some more dreams and uncontentment and my brother’s lives with sime tough life experiences. Their faces look mature now, it breaks my heart. Their eyes shine with the same naughtiness that was there, years ago. One of them is still the most sensitive, one still the most angry and one still the most calm and sensible. Like they were before the years passed. When we were children. When i lived with them. Here. In this house. Where time stands still. Nothing has changed after all the years. This, is still my world. I belong here. In the world that doesn’t change with the years that pass. The world that holds the six people, who mean the world to me. Yes, including you. It’s still you. It always were you. My heart, after all those years, never opened again. Like time in my house, it stands still. On its spot. Closed. Shut. Holding my world of straws. Protecting it from years that pass. Through time.

Time. That can never be counted. Only lived.

 

— My visit to Pakistan. 10th March – 24th March 2019.

My Childhood Home

Alone beneath the shadows © Lalarukh

 

With her back leaning against the wall, she sits down on the ground. It feels cold to her palms. Despite the fact that it is really hot out there, with sun at its peak in the noon, and with almost forty five degrees temperature, there is a row of trees behind this wall that keeps the passage way where she sits a bit cool with their shadows. And she has her history with deep shadows and darkness.

It’s ironic. Right in front of her, with the opposite wall she used to make a home with long sheets and pillows in her childhood. She’d make a kitchen with small plastic utensils and some snacks and then invite her little brothers to have tea. And she had this pink box with small clippings of extra cloth drops and pieces of laces and threads and a needle and she’d sew these things together to make random designs and what not. And she’d sit there all day busy in her little chores. It felt amazing.

The pink box is gone along with her childhood. Her brothers are grown up and living far away places. Those tiny plastic utensils, her mother safely placed at the shelf in her room along side other useless items she used to play with. Her mother dusts these daily but never ever thinks of throwing or giving away. Mothers. They have their own ways.

A bird chirps from the trees above. Their is a mud pot placed right beside her, filled with water for the birds to drink. It is really hot out there. This house, it used to be filled with laughter and shouting and excitement where a strange kind of silence and sadness resides now. Her mother and father, they have grown old. They look tired when they smile.

Tear, a tear rolls down her cheek and falls on the ground, cold enough in the presence of summer’s bright sun. May be its the tree’s. It’s their way of grieving. Over beautiful lost memories and a cheerless future. Or may be it’s the coldness from inside of her heart. It’s dead, after putting up with so much pain and faking happiness for so long, it’s finally dead. She is scared, this home with all it’s memories and charm, what if it wakes up her heart again? But then dead can’t be woken up, can they?

She thinks of her room. It feels haunted to her. She remembers when she was little, she had an art wall in her room. She would make drawings,paintings,scribbles and art and then stick those to the wall. Her drawings and art work improved as she grew up and it was all there at the wall which she was proud of. And then once while the house had to get painted, she had to remove her art from the wall with her own hands. She was sad. She was a teenager at that time. A long cupboard with lots of shelves was then placed alongside her wall. That cupboard now contains fragments of her childhood and they get dusted daily by her mother.

Those albums with her baby photos, school functions and their family day outs, that car which saw her and her siblings grow up from children to teenagers and then adults, that same TV they used to watch cartoons on, the fans the ceilings the walls, nothing’s changed, everything haunts her. The memories are beautiful. It’s the fact that nothing like this can happen in future that wrings the heart and wrinkles the soul.

She weeps. Head in her lap, hands wrapped around the knees she weeps. Her shadowed self, this mud pot, all these trees and those countless memories that crowded in her mind and flowed through her veins while sitting here, this scene, it would freeze in her eyes and would be a valuable treasure for the rest of her life to come, away from her home.

That day, she buried herself right there, in the passage way, beneath the shadows and under the weight of good old childhood memories to live inside them forever.

 

 

 

Enchanted Illusion

Copyright-Dawn Q. Landau

She lives at a place far away. Perspiring sun rays of hope caress her face to welcome her mornings. She opens her home’s door and walk through the stairs like a queen. Butterflies take her to the seraphic valleys. She dances in ecstasy. Tickling winds make her giggle. Her laughs are loathed in euphoria. She opens her wings and flies with the birds. Sparkling sea water washes her feet. She sings with mermaids and fall asleep in ethereal embrace.

And yet in this monstrous world, resides her body void of soul – indulged in the weightless mysteries of naked truths.