Long days are giving over to long nights. This means less sleep, more dreaming, & lethargy during the short days. I can't stand sleeping. It wearies me even when my eyelids are heavy, pressed with dust & cobwebs. I lie on my bed, in a state of half sleep, like some sated moth, waiting for the flame to finish its beautiful work.
My wings burn first. When atrophy begins, the first thing that is taken is motion. I promised Eugene I will come to visit him at Owerri where he is a practicing physician but I can't get up from my bed. A heaviness lies on top of me and I feel as if I float on water, half submerged. I can't move my arms but I can see through the windows. I can see the swallows empty their nests, scurry through air in jerky flight, alight on barbed wires & electric lines just to sing. I envy them. When I finally rise, it is a painful struggle, as if a thousand hands draws me back down among the dead.
The dead. I often wonder, when I am comatose like this, what it means to lose light, to lose sound, to lose touch with the world. It is strange to be in a limbo with your senses functional but without an outlet. It is like an electric socket with nothing plugged to it. It makes sense if the senses darken as well. Then imagine being alive without the ability to fly, to be free to see the world?
The long nights give me too much time to think. Thinking makes me anxious, then depressed, then angry, then depressed. It sinks me deeper into the water. I hear the voices of ghosts, a host of absences calling out in sudden voices. Some recite a line of poetry while some just call my name. There are others who just watch me from the corner of my eyes. These ones are like clots in the darkness. Their dark bodies shine in the night. I fear them the most because they have nothing to say. They just wait.
I wait for a lot of things. Sometimes when I read a book or write a poem, I feel as if the waiting as stopped, as if I am moving again, from the station, heading to a new place but once the last page turns over and I stare at the blank white space behind it, I feel inert as a pebble washed by tide. Sometimes the euphoria of the book lifts me tenderly all over the world. I see things anew. I peep at people's private conversations and thoughts, I see their motives and for a time, I am a part of the world.
But I'm not, that is, of the world. I never was, never will be. To be othered by everyone around you is a sad thing but to other yourself, that can be seen as a disorder, a medical condition, a sickness but first, something must be done to you, some type of traumatic experience must shape your clay, mould you into a disfigured soul and how can you place that blemish near vases of picturesque perfection? Thus, disorder.
The moon is yellow, almost red tonight. I like it when the harmattan dust cradles the sky. It makes everything soft, familiar and private. I can almost walk naked outside, sure that no one who sees me will recognize me. We are all ghosts here. I sit in the cold dark, mesmerized by the moon. I am drawn to its otherworldly light. Again, I'm the moth but not yet sated, not yet burnt, still a marvel in the iris of the stars. I stretch my body towards it, the moon I mean, a yearning strong as a ship stretching and creaking towards berth. I envy the moon its solitude, its quiet contemplation of time.
And the days have sped past, almost as if I didn't exist until this very instant and because memory cannot be trusted, how am I to know if this is not true; if I am not the product of my barren imagination? How am I to know if I did not just wake out of a thousand years of somnambulism to find myself completely formed, writing this tale. How am I to know if the days have not always been so? Because I somehow remember a slower time, a time filled with unending years, when my dreams where sharp and quick and almost walked with me in the real. Where those days true? Did I dream them? Did I dream myself into this body, this place, this time?
My mother calls me. She asks if I am fine. I tell her yes. She does not believe me but she says nothing. When I see her again, she will say I have grown thinner since she saw me last. I will deny that I have not been eating. I won't tell her that I have been drinking liquor on an empty stomach. I won't tell her that I go days without bathing or getting out of the bed. I will say, I am fine. At least I am growing even if my shadows are needles no one can thread.
Do you ever feel the edge of the hole inside you? Where the clean cut was made that severed you from potential? I wonder what was removed from me sometimes. I wonder what kind of god I would have made in my own image. I stopped wondering and wrote a poem:
Cut deep into the cloth,
night shudders & seeps
down the window,
into my fist, around where
the bruises form like flowers,
brilliant & purple, like ancient
kings, torn from top to bottom,
scissors still nipping away
at the threads, the hem
draped in rust.
Why write a poem? Elona once asked me to write a poem, when we still held each other in our eyes, when we were warm, skin against skin, heart throbbing in tandem with heart, breath whispering near ear lobe, fever sated. I tried. I wrote several lines but I did not believe them. They conveyed nothing. They did not hold her story, or mine, or ours. They smelled like sheep dressed in wolf fur— they did not bite.
Writing remained an instinctual thing for me for a long time. It doesn't anymore. I write. There's no rush of powerful emotion. I write. There's no flow or muse or music or the losing of self in the river of thought. I write. I'm a machine, a typewriter clacking away in the night, putting an alphabet after the other, a comma, a hyphen, a question mark, a period. This is not pleasure. It is not pleasing to the eye, the mind, the finger tips with which the reader may trace the edges of my thoughts. I just write.
Now with nothing left to do; love's flowers faded and lank in the still lake, music's push now stuck in the rut of my sinking flesh, too self inflicted to be a part of anything, I lie here on my back, counting ceiling boards, hoping an airplane will pass over my patch of sky, and I can check to see if the world has not left me behind. But even if it does, if the world picks up its bag and walking stick and sets out without me, what would be different? I will still be here, on this bed, thinking, dreaming, writing, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting…