It’s snowing now.. – Part 2

In March of every year, I die. I die so I could be reborn in April soft and sticky, so that I could miss the age of roses, the breaches of larvae, and the invasion of all the silk. In march I bid a kingdom farewell just to weave another, a lie over a lie, and an oblivion over another. I spit out my blood and drink water mixed with wine, with the sap of sorcerers, and with the ashes of storks. I drink it bitter like muddy tears, then watch my new blood growing sweeter, one illusion over another.

***

I had a family and siblings, I did…

I don’t remember anymore. I cannot recall how I used to wave for strangers with my brother, hanging down from the balcony of the house waiting for our relatives. I don’t remember, how I died before them, and how in my imagination there was a house with no doors that I called home. How nightmares jumped out of my chest every time it pulled me back to an age that went away. I’m a widow of windows who spilled her dreams, screamed, and gave into death.

***

Here they stitch their dreams on my dress, as if nothing has ever been. Here I ran eighty days to fulfill the promise of death, accepting an antagonist named life, in the game of life, betting with life itself.

Here I win.

I won a dark basement to rest in, and a cane to knock routinely with on the coffin of life.

I entered this huge bubble about six years ago. After the word bubble, you might imagine a kind clear body that colors with light, flies away, and when it passes before you, you blow at it and laugh. It is okay, you are a part of the great scheme after all.

The bubble is not like that, and that one you know is called a balloon, a mixture of water and soap, while what I’m trapped in is a black bubble, maybe made from the exhaustions of cars and traces of the frying oil stuck on the ceiling of the kitchen, locked all the way up with two crossing guns, with the nozzle of the first blocked by the trigger of the second; any attempt to open my bubble would shoot me directly in the head.

Six years ago, I stretched my leg trying to feel its flexible walls, but it pulled me inside just like moving sands. I sat quietly at the beginning, I watched you from above, and waved to you, some of you saw me, and blew at me for a while, and some of you smiled passing me by and went away. Then I started trying to stand up, every time I gave in and fell down, then tried to stand up again. I started hitting against the walls. I started screaming, but nobody heard me, only the echo came back mocking me as if it was the sound of a cartoon figure. I tried to pierce it with my nails, but something like electricity shocked me back. Only then have I rolled against myself, and I cried. I cried loudly unlike me, I cried without wiping away the tears off of my face, neither with my sleeves nor with my clothes. I wanted my tears to fall on this world, I wanted to get your attention with my sadness, but nothing happened. The tears rolled back to me, and with all the hotness of the bubble, it evaporated and formed clouds over my head, then it rained a silly summer rain all over me.

Nowadays, I don’t care about doing anything. I just watch, I don’t laugh and I don’t cry, and in the few days in which the bubble touches the ground, I try to roll it with my body, I try to touch you, then I shrug upon this longing that’s invading me, this fake nostalgia from where I don’t know it came. Coming to terms with myself becomes hard then, and I feel that the walls of my bubble are watching me, following to see how will I try to exit one more time, so that it could start jumping violently, crushing me within. I’ve always felt that the sound it makes when it jumps sounds a lot like giggling. I’ve always went back to begging, crying, and screaming.

Screaming against the world, the overcrowded world with prisons and tyrants, young and old tyrants. The world that talks to us with its mouth full, that answers us from behind a suspicious dark hole, that puts our questions in the complaints department until they’re rotten out and decompose.

The world throwing its ropes around us like Mexican cowboys, holding our feet and dragging us over the rocks and sands and filths, the world that is not a world as much as it is a stunk theater, with the protagonists believing the poem by Shakespeare “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. But who distributed the roles of the oppressed? Those kidnapped to coops, those regretting everything, and nothing!

I wrote this on a rag I ripped apart from my clothes, I’m thinking about tossing it away before the bullet reaches my head. Maybe after I die I’d find an explanation for what’s happened, and maybe you’d look for those trapped like me, and you’d let them out.

How much sadness do you need so you could write? How far could you go to farm al your sorrow in a single October morning, to make it a rock that could be beaten with a paper, just like our childhood games. Maybe you could open your heart to the hesitant autumn of Homs, when it suddenly turns into winter while you’re under the drizzle trying to stop a bus that you already know will not stop for you, the bus full up to its throat, about to scream just like everything in this land, passing with all your immunity against disappointment pushing you to go sad, drag your feet on the wet stones, and try to run away from the reflection of your face on the elevations of the store.

A time has passed in which our mothers used to cover us with wool and send us to schools filled with commandments, this time has passed, we only grew up to become miserable children, paying attention so that our mothers wouldn’t notice that, watching out not to ruing the noises flooding out from the schools by the children in the streets, and trying not to walk side by side with the shouting of the teachers in their classes. Everything is grey, winter has only to move things around; trees are reeling like smoke, leaves are flying like the past, and stones are grave sorrow that hasn’t been written down.

How long has it been since I cried? Since I last loved perhaps, tears turn into rocks in the eye as if it was bullets, needing something just as vicious as shooting for me to cry, maybe for my teeth to clench while killing some victim, or to turn entirely into a wolf, and to eat everything, even the fog. I’ve wanted that in the taxi corner where a driver told another “Try like me to eat a chocolate sandwich, I swear my kids have ruined me to do so”, and then they both burst out laughing.

It would’ve been good had I killed all those who stepped over the heart and went away, or had I torn apart the very heart that kept their shoeprints. The vengeance was enough for me to turn into a tornado, to take out all the spots of separation we buried ourselves in from their roots.

All the luxury of the silly questions that have no answers to them, all the time that was lost on learning how to talk, so that we could be this helpless when saying what we want to say, so that we could bow down to the humiliation of geography that doesn’t save any effort to insult us. Just ask for a simple thing, make it a dream, and watch everybody take it except for you. Distribute your shredded pieces to those you love, let them chew, then walk with your sorrow in the beginnings of October.

Marwa Melhem

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