LIFE IS MADE OF COUNTLESS SPIRALS AND I HAVE MORPHED INTO A FAMILIAR STRANGER
Return To The Meadow - Locust Toybox
𖦹
Return To The Meadow - Locust Toybox 𖦹
(desktop viewing in full screen is recommended for an optimal reading experience.)
i. Change
I sat down to look at the child at eye level. Her eyes, as dark as mine, pry open into my brain and search for what the future holds somewhere along those curves. She doesn’t find the answer. She will soon realise that I am as lost as her, floating aimlessly along with the water droplets that are bound to return to the clouds. My fingers trace along the lines on her palms, looking for some profound wisdom that will help me make the right choices. There are no right choices, and the lines tell me nothing.
She looked up at me, her face barely covered by her bob-length hair, and asked, am I good? Are we still good? I told her no, we were never good, but we tried. We still try to be kind, I tell her. Despite the questioning tilt of her head and the slight flinch, she offers me a piece of her heart. Purest of pinks, it pulses with the stinging desire to be consumed and born again as something new, something prettier, something more divine. Its laughter echoes like a distant memory of humid holidays and footsteps running towards the school canteen, and it invites me to have it. The child says: You don’t have to kill me completely. But you have to stop bringing me along everywhere. Have this. Give birth to yourself once more. This time around I’m sure we will be better. And I take a good bite out of the pulsating heart. The fragility of its nature makes me gag and I question if I have to finish it but she insists that I will need it in the future. While consuming, I repeat to myself: I shouldn’t forget the softness. I shouldn’t forget. I shouldn’t forget. And somewhere in my veins, a new cell lives. A soft hum. A steady hum. It demands to exist and keep existing alongside all the hideousness that was instilled in me and my body recognises it.
Years later, I will sit on the icy tiles of my shower while I wait for her to come pick me up. I will tell her how forgiveness has been serving me well. I will tell her about the everlasting adoration I hold for the ocean. She will ask me questions, like: Are you okay? Are you strong? Do you remember the gentle innocence? Do you carry the whimsy of a child, still? Do you dream, still? What do you dream of? Are you full of hope? Can I have it? Can I have your hope? And I will look up at her and nod with enthusiasm. I will hand a piece of my red, beating heart over, and with undying trust that it will be in good hands, I will say goodbye to myself. I will grow like fickle sprouts that emerge after long months of winter. I am welcomed by the routine of change, sewed together by the fabric of the new and the old. I am the eye that looks inside of me, always observing, waiting, readying to strike at the opportune time, and when I decide it is time I call upon myself to swallow me whole and spit me back out again.
ii. Tragedy
Inheritance is the snake that coils itself around the DNA of a child and spits its venom in her bloodstream. The muddled cells that have gone through countless attempts to be pure will also be hosed down from this body again, just for the water to thicken into blood. I cannot wash it off, in the same way that my mother couldn’t wash it off.
She was my first muse. Her words have always pierced through me like poorly assembled arrows flying across all directions recklessly, and I pluck them out from my body, one by one, and turn them into poems because if my pen isn’t bleeding I am terrified to look at my tongue, how it has shaped itself into a bow but a weapon is harmless when it isn’t loaded. I needed to use the arrows elsewhere. And she taught me to let the pen flow freely like the mind wonders and my burning love for writing was oh so convenient for the both of us because by the time she had extinguished her anger, I have also sobbed and vomited all over my pages, folded them very neatly and tucked them away in such a perfectly planned way that in a few days, they were to be mistaken with trash and be thrown out forever. The case was closed. We would never have to talk about it again.
But the serpent remembers. The serpent remembers and every burning hot strike of a cane is a scale added to it and it grips my veins tighter as time passes. But I promise I wasn’t always like this, I promise I am kind and my teeth were once dull and if I had known any better I could have been a great teacher to my mother. I would tell her and the women before her that I can be the one to concoct some sort of antidote by a miracle to disrupt the ever turning cycle of generations. I would often ask myself when exactly this phenomenon happened, was I eating her desolation ever since I was sleeping inside her? Or was it something more frightening, like when she clawed her nails onto my arm, did she perhaps also inject some of her guilt and fear into me? Was I meant to be reminded by a few barely visible dots on my skin that I cannot run away from the same misfortune my mother has shared with all the other mothers before her? Has the serpent already eaten me, and I am merely living inside its stomach, morphing into someone with arms that ache to throw, thunderous and demanding to be heard? Who am I outside of my mother’s womb if not a stranger unbeknownst to me?
I want to brush my daughter’s soft hair and not howl against it, I want to hold her grief and kiss her wounds without my canine teeth sinking deeper into them. But I will most likely be her first muse, and she will most likely sharpen her pen to defend against mine and we will exchange letters trying to reach each other but there will be an irrefutable string of evidence that she carries my blood and the tragedy that lives in it. But perhaps this time around she will not have to fold her pages and discard them and perhaps we could sit in uncomfortable silence together while I flip through our family photos to show her what her grandmother looks like. And perhaps without saying it out loud, my daughter will recognise how I tried to push myself out of the serpent’s body with all my might but how I got dissolved halfway through and how it shed its skin right after. I hope she can forgive all of us.
iii. Life
Impenetrable silence engulfed the darkness, along with everything in its vicinity and far beyond it, and the outer husk of existence was still until it wasn’t. Singularity is the mother and everything else is her children, and they are hungry. Always hungry for something. Insatiable. To connect and to destroy and to become. New. New form. New beginning. The cosmos chimed, with an echo so loud it reverberates through life and death, we demand the formation of something beautiful. Let love exist. The cosmos chimed and the stars started dancing gleefully and they contracted and they expanded and they collapsed under their own immense density of being. And the stars, so burdened by the weight of their years through transformation, carried out each of their final performances, their magnum opus, before giving the world permission to create a rendition of their songs. Borrow the materials that make us and become something beautiful. The constellations offer me their stardust and await my response. What will the next verse be? They demand to be remembered, to travel through the eyes of wanderers as a part of themselves will live inside those histrions passing on tales of their glory and returning to the cosmos as they once were. Abiogenesis begins.
Mixed in with the steady heartbeat of the earth’s wet soil, there is another slow mumble. A faint hymn. A melody repeating itself time and time again, reminding me to pay attention. Pay attention to the nature of the cycle that invites itself into its creations: The way a fern coils. The eye of a hurricane. The calcareous shell of mollusks. The melody reminds me that the husk hosting my soul is made up of borrowed materials from the waves that strike against the rocks, continuously sculpting them as time passes. The blood travels throughout my body with the veins borrowed from leaves and arteries borrowed from the roots underneath the ground upon which I stand. My bones spike like the mountain ranges and the sun shapes my face. I am formed and sculpted from the salty water and like its character, I am unpredictable and violent. Hungry. Always hungry for something. Insatiable. To understand and to consume and to change. Shed. Shed the ego. The anger. The pride. I have walked miles after miles and layed my body against the sharp edges of the rocks with calloused heels and a crying heart, leaking a pool of blood from which a mantle is created for me to emerge like a naturally imperfect pearl once again.
Once out of the shell, I try to sing. To conduct some sort of astral verse that fits into the much larger symphony of the universe, as it demands. I live and continue to live as every waking moment is a key that belongs somewhere on the music sheet. Not good enough. Not good enough because I am human. I need to be something more than human. The hunger distracts me. The hunger distracts me and my fingers slip when I conduct. I keep looking for a better tune, a prettier way of being, and I walk; shoulders tense, heavy with the task I have been burdened with. The seafoams call my name and I follow directionless, holding nothing but faith that at the end of this road I am walking on, there is the answer. How to stop being hungry. How to consume so much that there is nothing else left. How to return to the primordial ocean. How to be reborn again, ridding myself of a bit more sin each time. But somewhere between the Big Bang and the present moment of walking, something must have translated wrong. I must have been led astray by miscommunication, for this body is still leaking pools of blood and forming thousands of mantles. When does it stop? This futile attempt to be new, this push of hope swirling around the carcass of my being, is performed over and over and over again until the wrinkles on my skin beckons me to return to the rivers as I once was, a part of me lingering, a part of me lost. I reach my hands back inside; inside the mantle, inside the pools, inside the belly of the beast, hoping that some sort of higher entity would hold me back and teach me the correct ways to return. Surprisingly, there is a soft voice talking back to me. She is gentle and wise. Content. No longer hungry. No longer starved for something unspeakable. I asked
There must be a way to break free of this. Every time I live and die and live again, the mechanism is at some kind of fault.
What should I do? What should I do?
The ocean and the stars are a part of you.
Surrender.
I need a teacher. I need someone to tell me what to do.
Don’t you think if something isn’t working the way you want to,
you should change how you go about it?
Isn’t this all we ever do? We eat and are eaten.
We are spat back out. Born anew.
What do you wish to become?
Free. To return. I don’t think I belong here.
You are the cosmos and you are on earth.
Am I selfish for wanting to leave?
Am I selfish for wanting?
Am I selfish?
There is no answer. I close my eyes and instead of the darkest of blues hovering over my line of sight and I can see specks of light. For the first time, I start breathing properly, and like the dew drops slipping down from each foliole, I take my time taking notice of the swelling of the chest and flattening of the ribcage, how the breeze travelled. The light envelops me and my pools of blood stop leaking. The hunger subsides like withdrawing tides and I am no longer here nor there. I am right in the middle. I am right in the middle and I start to understand; how simple it is, how the answer is right in front of my peripherals while I was too busy spinning myself around looking for the way in the mist. I understand now. I understand now and I am no longer walking, nor forming a new mantle. I am singing.
As I stand there, still and breathing, the nebulas come down to greet me. The symphony is complete, they declared with their roaring voices, the symphony is complete and you are coming home.
I let the stars surround me. Something in the air tells me that I’m never returning here again, for my journey has ended.
cover image taken from Pinterest
