Take a chance

I could not not write something tonight. 

It is Valentine's Day...exactly one year since I started blogging. 

Cancer was my Valentine then. 

Like all my relationships, my affair with Ca knew soaring highs and dumping lows.

Like all my relationships, I lived it fully, often burning myself with the intensity of the emotions it brought me.

Like all my relationships, I remember it with a mixture of strange fondness and acute irritation.

Like all my relationships, I have archived, boxed and stored it in my very soul.

Like all my relationships, I have, by my Allah's Leave, been set free.

This year, my Valentine is a heart that is ready to take a chance...take a chance at life, if not love.

No chocolate, no flowers, none of the cliche of love. 

This V day, we simply dared.  We chose a date.  Let's take that chance my love, for life's sake...

Born

There is a cyclone hovering around Mauritius these days.  Not doing much except for swishing around wind and occasional rain. 

There is something about cyclones (in fact any powerful natural phenomenon) that brings me an odd sense of peace.  Maybe the outside manifestitation of chaos and beauty nicks the beauty and chaos inside of me, letting peace sit quietly in my heart :)

See, I am a firm believer in equilibrium.  A good for a bad, a new for an old, a birth for a death...you get the picture. 

So lately, it felt inevitable that the balance should tip.  The coward in me wanted time to shift that balance.  But time has had enough of my antics :)  It pointed a finger directly at my face and asked me to do the tipping. 

And I did.  I bent low, reaching for the beauty and chaos of life. 

Alhamdulillah, the whispers landed safely in the palm of your hand. Born was a mea culpa. Born was I.

Secret whispers

I often wonder...could it really be that you are not of this world? 

What then of my secret whispers to you?  Those breezy incomplete sentences that tumble awkwardly from my lips?  Those guilty words of foolish hope?

My ribcage hurts.  The mystery shrouded in darkness knocks around looking for light.  Sadly, it comes back empty and lonely, lost and sorry.

You see, one of these days, I will scream...I will scream from the bottom of my belly.  I will scream so loudly that you will hear me, even if you are not of this world...

Hair, Kisses and Music

In this roller coaster ride with Ca, it had not occured to me that others might have feared seeing the physical changes in my body. 

I am not talking of immediate family and friends who have walked with me on this journey.  No.  I am talking of those people on the periphery of my life who were used to seeing me a certain way and then, with the advent of Ca, suddenly started seeing me with colourful head scarves that was hiding.....an almost bald scalp!

I must say that I had not realised that others might have harboured fears of seeing my metamorphosis.

Now, this post is not about hair...at least not entirely.  I am back here tonight to record a few things:

(i) January has never been an easy month for me.  It is too full of expectations, too new, too fresh, too loaded somehow...Feb and March are also typically not easy months. But I am hoping April onwards will see me more grounded and smiling at life the way I wish to.
(ii) Driving alone is therapeutic.  The other night it helped me listen to my own thoughts better.  Of course, I was angry.  Angry that so much life gets wasted.
(iii) Also therapeutic is placing a line of kisses on a child's chubby cheek.  Kissing is a human impulse.  It is the only way we can take into our own bodies and souls some of the the unique and exquisite melody playing inside someone else. 
(iv) Pain has an old familiarity that I am finding disconcerting.  I am not averse to pain.  But I am averse to pain in the same spot. I wish the pain would migrate to some new location,....go find itself a nice virgin spot and pitch its tent there...anywhere really, so long as it is not in the vicinity of my heart.
(v) Music could have been my middle name.  It is part of my laughter as it is part of my tears.  Tonight, I am picking two tunes....one for beautiful faces and one for beautiful feelings.

Letter to my Lord

My Dear Lord,

This...this tumult I feel inside...what is it?  Have I fallen from Grace?  Have I been tossed out from the raft of your mercy into the deep ocean of life?

The past few days, I have been breathless.  Deep inside I know time has suddenly shifted.  My heart has been beating faster, my mind caught in the traffic of dreams.  I am suddenly craving life.

It is absolute madness my dear Lord...absolute madness. 

I beseech you.  Please hold onto my treacherous heart.  It is safer with you. 

Your troubled servant,
S

How?

How do you say goodbye to a year that has held you tenderly in a loving embrace? 

How do you kiss goodbye to the days and months that have shown you the better side of yourself?

How do you send away the time that has healed both your body and soul?

2011, I don't know how.  All I know is that I've loved you.  And that is sufficient for me.

Fin Novembre, Debut Decembre

This song is entitled "fin octobre, debut novembre" (end of october, beginning of november).

If you slide the months just a little, it becomes my song.

Because that's exactly how I felt at the end of november, beginning of december....

Live on

Something strange happened yesterday. 

I received an email which should have put a smile on my face but instead I found myself brushing away hot tears.  After a long long time I experienced a sense of loss, something resembling bereavement.

For the good news inevitably meant the severing of a relationship that I thought had ended a long time ago.  

Human beings are wired to cope with such situations. Our minds shield our daily living from certain memories to enable us to live on, while hiding, in cookies and temp files, all those folders that contain pages of our lives we once lived but now cannot face. 

Unfortunately, there is no delete button or recycle bin for those memories.  So they linger in the graveyards of our minds and occasionally pop out to scare the hell out of us.

This morning I woke up much calmer.  More zen.  The corpses have once more been buried.  The skeletons are back in the closet.  The tears firmly held within their ducts.  The heart once again bolted behind iron bars.

Life goes on. I live on....with my growing hair and my silence.  My green water bottle and my dreams.  My pomegranates and my wonder....I live on.

Once upon a time I was rich...

Reading has been one of my hobbies forever it seems.  I like books, stories, words.  Reading made me rich.

But for the past 5 months or so, I have not read a single book!  No concentration.  No discipline.

Could it be that my own story has made all other stories irrelevant?

We all need to know our place in this life.  It took me a long time to find mine.  I looked for it in words strung like a beautiful necklace, in people that walked into and out of my life, in countries wide and far that swallowed me and spat me out.

Yes, once upon a time I was rich, roaming the vast expanses of faces, books and lands searching for my story.

Today, I know my story.  But Grace sold me into slavery. 

The story that I am is not mine.

The story, like the slave, belongs to Him.

Mistakes

I made 3 mistakes today.  In the midst of an otherwise perfect day.

One was that I mistakenly thought the piece of jewelly I was gifted was a necklace, when it fact it was one of the most beautiful tasbih (prayer beads) I have seen.  Mind you, it fully qualifies for jewellery...just not to be worn!  Thank you D&G :)

However, it was a mistake because it showed how far away I had drifted....lulled by the glitter of this life.  Lately, my thoughts are often occupied with the mundane, the materialistic, the superficial, the illusionary.  The filter that I thought would always be separating me from the rest of the world has, through neglect and temptations, been lifted, leaving me to mingle with the world.  That is dangerous.

The second mistake was earlier in the day when I talked more than I should.  My tongue said things that baffled my soul.  I regretted it of course.  But it was too late. The harm to me was already done.  I realise that sometimes the need to fill silences get me yapping awkwardly, saying all sorts of uncharacteristic things.  But it is not just that.  It is a need to fit in, to be worldly, to be normal.  I give out too much information, most of it quite unnecessary.  In so doing, I defiantly test boundaries, I play with fire, I tempt the devil.

The third mistake was later in the day when I allowed an old version of me to surface.  The impatience, the fault-finding, the curtness.  It was a mistake because it could have been avoided today.  All I had to do was find my way home and bow my head. 

I must be careful.  With my thoughts and my tongue, my eyes and my ears, my heart and my soul. 

I have already lost one life.  I cannot afford to lose the next one.