If you don’t have a balanced hand, it is impossible to imagine how someone else draws a full and regular circle. The same, if you can’t play the piano, dance, or chop parsley.

This torments me ever since I started thinking, since I had two stupors. I forcibly inserted schizophrenia into my brain, walked long ways imagining that I was my brother, or my mother, trying to perceive the world through them. And I failed, of course, and I felt the emptiness exploding inside me like an endless exhalation.

Whenever I saw someone crying, I tried to jump my eyes to a transitional vacuum that I don’t know what it was, but out of my body, trying to enter the crying eyes, to feel their tears, and I failed as well, and returned of the vacuum, spitting blood, like throwing out of me out of my body to fill it with void.

Now I wonder, really, who knows if we all are seeing the very same world? That we call squares squares and we mean one thing, that we call blue blue meaning one color. Who felt the touch of water and fire on a body other than his own? None.

And whoever tried to, ended up like me, with a lot of voices speaking through him, thinking with him, but none of them would pass him his talent. He can’t draw a semi-regular circle even, can’t understand chopping parsley and playing the oud.

What a humiliating life that one lives lost in his soul.

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With you, it’s not that I love you, but it’s that I want to be you, to feel you from within, to be content with you and me at the same time, I envy you for being you.

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Not a single night I slept in my place, I close my eyes and leave, until closing my eyelids had the sound of doors slamming, house doors, cars doors, trains, caves, stars, soil, coffins, skies doors.

Marwa Melhem