Asghar Abbas's Blog - Posts Tagged "turned-back-into-fiction"

Finality or futility of the final missive, issued too late and too early.

For a year or two maybe even three, I was lost, unfocused working yet not working, welking away. My mind was almost gone, rewiring was needed, in fact, it was the only last resort but there were no whetstones to be had. Then I found it, that flint I sought with just the right amount of spark, intertwined with the madness of possibility. But this time around, it was more real, pure, and less selfish. On my part. This time I was prepared or so I thought. There was no sadness on this go of the carousel round, just the hope of happiness.

Even though there was no one there to catch anyone in the field of rye. I thought I would never feel that song again. But I did, without even knowing you, even through the crippling thought that your heart was already hocked for another. Even through that miasma, I let that feeling of certainty creep in, I held onto it, and I embraced the shame.

Although my mind garbed me in facts whilst in my heart, in my words, you felt mine. You were mine. I already knew you; we just never met across the planes of your reality. I never held you but I felt placated in your cold warmth. You loved another but I wasn't vexed by that, I wasn't fretting, not yet. You were mine in thought and in actuality but not in reality. This is how far removed I was, I am, from that reality and reality of things, of people in general. But through the veracity of my claims, in my veins, I felt I could cut through the haze of all the Others in the world and pour you into a bell jar of my own design. Though little fool that I was, I am, I didn't know the bell jar was actually an hourglass and time were already running out, but intrinsically I knew you didn't want me pouring you into anything. You still don't.

Nonetheless. Requested or not
You gave my words the music I felt they lacked, and needed but didn't want, or at least that's what I believed. I mislike giving you credit for anything yet being honest about how I think things are is my inherent flaw. I wish I could express how important and magical February of that year was for me. In that forgotten month, sans being inside you, the concept of mermaids took on a whole new meaning, or maybe it was just apt. Half fish half woman and dual mind; after all, you people lead men to their ruin, with your derision thrown in for good measure. Maybe the term drowning took on a new meaning as well. I don't know, I still don't know. This I do know though, I should have forfeited you then.

And yet at the same time, I wonder about this effect you had on me. I questioned this senile affection I felt for you from the onset of this sanity. I really did.

You are a single person waning even as we speak; you are just a person with a fallibility of your own, why should I give you any cause to be more than you really are? You are not my rebellion, leastways not anymore. Maybe it was the idea of you that had seeped in. No, it was. It was only an idea of you that had gotten deep inside my bones, making me desperate for the need I didn't need. But why, why did you move me so? Let's face it, we are not tangible and no matter how close we get, we are not really getting any closer, are we? Right now let’s steal some words, shall we; we’re all knaves here. What are you to me but a shadow on my wall, what am I to you but a flicker of an image on your windowpanes? I wouldn't deign to give you the credit for my lost wordlings when you do not want to bend the way I want you to. How can I trust you, you are still breathing underwater. You definitely don’t get me in your undertow, you are no Emily Kokal and this is not September. Yep, we are saying her name, but not yours. You are as nameless as your eyes.

Nevertheless, in the middle of middle of my nowhere, I liked you.

I liked every little bit of you. I liked all the flaws in your designs and all the qualities of your disquieted mind. And all of your machinations that you were gonna use against your own self One Fine Day. Of all the things, I loved your hollowness the most.

I liked your name foremost. Then I liked your brittle hands, the sallowness of your words your fingers left on paper in your pitiful attempts to make something. But you can't rule this papery world, can you?

Then I liked you fully, succumbing to the moonlight that wasn't there, blinded to the sea that was.

I love you (No, I am not saying your name. ) In simplicity, enamored of all your soft lies and even pliable imaginations.

Through whatever God you don't believe in, I love you. For you would be the only one who'd feel like any sort of victory against the pain of nothingness. In the folds of my fantasy, I was always so proud of you at my side, behind my words, your chilled fingertips resting on my temples while your body became my own temple, clung to you, you latching onto me so smug, pitted against the world that was not my enemy. In the far recess of my fever dreams, you'd be in my tee shirt, my belt around your waist like a tassel, what else could it be other than my watch around your wrist, but you in your boots, definitely your own boots. It's not like we became friends first and I started liking you, it was because I liked you that we became friends. So Catch-22 was always there. But you weren't.

I thought if I write beautifully enough I could write my own doom, that I get to keep you within my words. I shouldn't have bothered about being overwrought when simplicity wouldn't have been enough.

I wish I could tell you how shocking it was when you finally told me. How much your confession hurt. I wish you cared. I wish you didn't care. I wish you weren't real. I wish you’d stop singing your songs, all the longboats are gone, shipwrecked. Looks like Abercrombie wasn’t the only one after them.

Ah, but we were talking about your reaving. Something sundered from me then, something just gave when you told me about the end that was you declaring for him. I was ready for one but the other came out of the left field. It was like God had personally stabbed me in the back and then none too gently broke the blade of the dagger in my spine. How could the same thing happen twice? But then again, maybe not. Sometimes misfortunes are not what they seem to be. We see things for what they truly are only when they cease to be, that's the real misfortune. You are right; lately, I have been bitter, very bitter. So. I want to relinquish any parts of me that still want you so that I could be a better companion to you. No, that’s not true, mostly so that I could suffer in peace. I’d be able to finally pick up the pieces, shards of me would be still recognizable to myself that way. Withal, want is the wrong term for wanting you. How can you want something that is already yours?

Maybe I don't have any right to tell you all this, not anymore anyway. Maybe I'm the only one who has the fucking right, or maybe I still have enough bits and pieces of your fragmented thoughts to tell you this one last time, one time, and never again. To say all this properly so that it can get lost properly, all of it, all of you.

But meh, who am I to cry a river when so many people are riddled with problems? Fraught with real misfortune. Only this, my problem was real enough, you weren't.

Or maybe I am just another coward, a forsaken wanderer, a Moken lost at sea. Or one of those conveniently brave for we are only brave when we don't have to be. Retelling all this, reimagining this fable for you when nothing could be done about you. Why didn't I say any of this when you weren’t in fetters, free in your mind? Maybe I did, only so loudly that you didn't hear me, but you never gave me any opening. Even when I was storming your gates with all my empty legions.

So. Ergo, I freely give away parts of me that are still claiming any parts of you. Human or crustacean.

While I wish I loved you enough to kill you, I hope I love you enough to let you go. Because I know I'm not the best for you in a roundabout way, but other than that I didn't doubt you. I still don't.

Maybe you should just discard all that I'm saying to you. All that I've said to you. All that I'm going to say. I want you to forget the steam of our breath that was to be our future. This stream of thoughts that's frosting over our mouths.

I am giving you all these wizened words in this time and space only, to commemorate what I thought we had. I want an ending, mostly yours and it’s all about endings, isn’t it? So do what you want with these words, abuse them as you deem fit.

My paper valentine, your heart is not encrusted with gold and glitter from your skin; it's not studded with gemstones. It is barren of everything good, made up of rusty old bent nails and irondust that I had been trying to bludgeon with my imagination. I should have brought a warhammer.

But the straw that broke the camel's back for me was when you in guileless cruelty uttered him in the same sentence as Fools Die. It was then I realized you were never gonna break away from what you insisted was your perdition, you were never gonna leave him, were you? And I was the Fool who was dying every fuckin’ day. Would you leave him if I ask you to? Then there is the fundamental question; ultimately would I still want you to?

Let's face it, you weren't forced into this mismatch. Your consent, however misshapen, was involved, deep down you wanted to seal your fate because you had no faith left in others. What irks me the most is your blind, selfish arrogance that I am okay with your disinterest, with your choices, with this choice. That one day I'd wake up feeling alright with you being eaten by someone else, that I'd be okay with you kissing his whey shadows.

You loathe for anyone to pull your head out of the sand dunes. So long as you don't have to address the disaster you didn’t create. You'd gladly keep your head in the wet sands. I'll admit sandworts do look so pretty in your hair. I’ve got only one thing to ask you; where are all the moths? Did you eat them all?

But I know what Eva Green didn’t. I know at no cost should your bubble is allowed to burst, or your illusions be shattered or your sense of equilibrium is disturbed. So you can continue ignoring my pain, so long as you keep on living your myopic life. But look, look! Absolutely no one is left to hold your hair up, while you puke away your shine.

When you told me I got you forever, that we'll always have each other, we'll be friends always, I didn’t know whether that was a threat or a promise. Because honestly, I can't think of the worst purgatory.

For

Whenever you would want to tend to your emotional needs you'd flip on your back and turn to me, but for everything else real and concrete, you'd twist around in the silken sheets and go to him. That's not the Ménage à trois I had in mind. And besides, the real weal would be he didn't do anything to deserve all that; all of you, an insult to injury if you will, by that I mean he doesn’t deserve to be possessed by your fog. You want me to be on the sidelines looking onto your real life. You claim to be my ally, why would you even want that? I am not your thrall and certainly not a pet writer. I was to be your God, but here you stand accused, charged, and guilty of deicide, your hands stained with my blood as dark as the ink from your mind. Then again, I never really wrote for you. And I'm ticked off because of my selfishness of your worth. Though that’s in the past now. Hungry for my words but not for me, restive for them to be wrapped around you. What kinda trade-off is that? Am I sounding too real? Good. You didn't deserve my words, yet I deserved you- or is that vice versa? My feelings weren't decorations for you to don and shed at your leisure. I am so sick of being on the borderline of having something; the short end of the stick has become all too familiar for my liking. Your nameless friend knew I named you long before I opened up my wrists to you, it was so obvious to her yet you couldn't bother to bestir yourself. It shouldn't have been this impossible wanting to want you. But then you should have liked me back for all of me.

Maybe I was seeing magic where none existed. Might be you sucked the magic out of it and that wasn't what you were supposed to suck! Maybe I'm just resentful of the fact that I don't want you anymore. After all, I set a limit to my helplessness. You have literally made me stop loving you. I can't forgive you for that. You made me stop caring. You killed it -or maybe you made me kill it- either way, job well done. It is more than a miscarriage into a dead thing that is now residing in my arms. It was stillborn to begin with, whatever that I was nurturing, you put it to the sword so unceremoniously, so necessarily. I don't feel the heat of my words through you anymore; I don't feel your heat through them. The sad part is I am OK with that. What I thought was the end wasn't truly the end, maybe it was a beginning, nothing really is the end of the world, not even the end of the world. It's just you weren't supposed to be a failure, let alone a ritual of my failure. But how can I deny you have helped me grow, the thing is only parts of me grew up and parts of me flew away. But I grew anyway, though not what you planted in me.

Mayhaps you dispelled some of my loneliness, for when I chanced upon you I was friendless. That has changed. I learned the right way in all its brutality never to depend on anyone, never to make anyone the center of my attention.

So, thank you (Yes, again not saying your name. But what’s in a name? Well, EVERYTHING), lesson learned and digested. And yet here I am not, making history repeat my mistake again. It was hard letting go, it was difficult accepting what you are. Stuck I was in my own muck, because like stumbling upon a once desired book you were like a granted prayer, or is that a broken prayer; an unceasing litany suborn in nature? Thousand years ago, I told you I loved you and I meant it. Even though I have reconciled with the fact you are in fetters of your own making, I still wish you were severed and far removed from your own singularity, for when I uttered whilst stabbing you with the dread of these insipid, useless little words; I love you. But you are a single thorny rose in dirty Snow, lost before I could reach for you. When I had gathered the parchment, inkwell, and quills eager to pen all this down, eager to pin down something none too eager to be pinioned down. This started out as a celebration, but it quickly wynded down to become a cold cut of a farewell, embers burned out long ago. You were always a peccadillo, not really my sin, but close enough. I can't let you become more than that, I can't risk it festering into something it never meant to be. Whatever intensity you had brought out in me, you more than winnowed out of me. I won't even stay to watch you dance with my dragons; I won't even be bothered to wait for your joy to turn to ash in your mouth, whatever debt that I think I owe you, I more than paid it. See, the more I got to know you, the closer you appeared to me, the uglier the stains would become across my fallen body, more filigreed the wounds would get. No longer susceptible I am to the sound of your name. Your name which meant so much to me has no effect on me now, it does nothing for me. Your name raises no hosts to quell the storms swelling in me. I may have built you up in my mind but you alone knocked yourself down. I thought entwined in your thoughts, I'd finally stop looking over my shoulder, but not stop looking, was my answer.

Death of my words you are not, though clearly, you want to be. You are not even a ripple in my stream now. The birth of what we had wasn't in blood but in the hatching of words, so it's only fitting I put this to rest in words as well. Time to exhaust my ink on you just as you’ve exhausted me. It's time to put pen to paper, with succor from my soul friend, I am there. I am me again unbent, burned again but rising again halfway in love with my own words. Words that I will coax now will be weltered in my blood granted yes, but at least they won't be the results of wounds you bestow. The cask is finally empty. Your emptiness no longer sluicing over me. The moon is not there; all the wolves ate its shyness. And because of their fickleness, the sun and stars are gone too. You are a fucking idiot. But thank you. I tried. And you did too. You did. But it’s time to make peace with Odin. You'll always have the skeleton of what we had, you can keep the bones.

Fact or fiction, all this, all of you? I leave that for you to decide. But in a twilight that’s civil, in a smoky dusk smoked once again, who can tell the difference? Like Victor Frankenstein from Penny Dreadful said, Who can survive dreams? I can, mine and yours. I can survive this. You can too, you will survive your no, and your ambivalence will wash away, along with the rest of you. But you? Who could tell? You didn’t cease to be. The spark didn’t catch. I should have known. You wouldn’t drown, as you swim only too well. It wasn’t your city that invaded me, it was you. It seems to me I have made you a victim in this dies irae, sorry about that. You certainly deserve to be the villain you thought you were, in all this, you are definitely the villain in your own story. But there is no waking up from this for you. I will let you believe this. If not this, what can you believe? Why don’t you believe it? Why don’t you dance, dance, dance? Like Jenny Lee and Co-Conspirators said, CC hey!

Me? I know this dance, only too well. And here I must quote, rather quoth though it’s all wrong, Mads Mikkelsen said in his best incarnation yet.

Put your head back, close your eyes, and wade into the quiet of the stream.

You didn’t explicitly forbid me to forgive you, but I believe in Brenna Yovanoff. So I am forgiving you. Now you are free to limit yourself to the rocks all you want to. You can stay there to your heart’s content until the world ends. Which one of those things do you reckon would happen first? What will give in and surrender, your heart or this world?

Nothing is planetary anymore on this planet. Nothing is left, no bees, no beetles. There are only shadows left whispering lies about wars to come and monsters that are going to save us.

-Abbas, that’s still me.