Thursday, February 17, 2011

Look at you, cradling that blue notebook like a porcelain doll; writing a story about a boy named ‘ Rami’ .
Look at you, measuring the widths of the page with a metal ruler and crossing the T’s, an end to an end.
You know you’ve never read a book with letters spiraling downwards and full stops falling off margins ;. So you sit on your elbows, knitting your eyebrows for hours, making sure Rami’s mother had a capitalized first-letter to her name, and his house, had a triangular red-bricked roof.
And you run, after each page ; my god you run with all your might ;
by the stairs, by the windows, by every discarded toy on the carpet ;
to grasp your dad’s arms and nudge him to see Rami’s smile as he buys his ticket to the moon ; to lay those well-crafted pages on his lap and pinpoint to the vase in the background, to trace the details you’ve prided yourself in,
Your heart is swelling, your heart is a helium balloon, your heart is that contained void in a closed-lid paint bucket; your heart is that dribble of a new basketball.
Your fragile little heart,
And your dad grins,
And he sits with his arms crossed;
And he tells you, with eyes that could only speak in steady volumes never in simple words
“ One day, the world would shudder at your touch, one day, you’d stand and know it all, and one day, every page of every book, would be watermarked by your intials”
And you,
Little fragile-hearted girl,
Believed,
Because you knew, there isnt a world but this – and it’s a just one.


Look at you,
Covering your eyes with the back of your hands; as the couple on screen kiss. You lower your head, willing time to tremble forth; the script to move along from that scene; it’s pitch dark behind your firmly shut eyes; it’s daunting to fear the loss of that grace they instilled in you ; it’s blasphemous, it’s the day of doom and those bones of yours would soon be igniting the core of hell.
You open your eyes, and you breathe ; that cold air of safety from within, the story is still intact without the kiss, it’s only here and there, that detail falters , but it’s alright ; you’re capable of justifying it all – Humanity sans kisses is the ultimate utopia.
Because you,
little fragile-hearted girl,
Believe,
Because you knew, there isnt a world but this – and it’s a just one.


Look at you,
Emptying your pencil case, searching for the thickest ink. Trying to scribble over that illustration at the bottom of the page ; it’s a six-angled star, gaping at you with that immorality and evilness they’ve warned you against ; you squint to shape it out, but you know it’s somewhere here, you’ve been taught to find it’s corners on architecture, t-shirts, mugs, blankets, ceramic patterns, and you can’t ‘unlearn’ such criticality. You just can’t. So you scribble, and scribble some more. And turn the page over; look at your hands, and hope that what you’ve heard them call ‘Judaism’ isn’t contagious. But it’s alright, because your Science page had been cleansed now, and that conscience of yours is polished. And words such as Zionism, Holocaust, Religion with an ‘S’ at the end; are merely concepts of someone else’s dictionary.
Because you fragile-hearted girl,
Believe,
Because you knew, there isn’t a world but this – and it’s a just one.



Look at you, now.
A fool,
weeping for a world,
that was never yours.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

I’d like you to know it’s mine – that Quill & Parchment Bookstore,

I’d like to imagine you coming upon it:
Walking down that damp street; lifting your gaze slowly to the corner, and finding yourself touching your glistening veins in an unconscious attempt to test reality.
In your eyes, I’d verify its existence; that picturesque passion I’ve poured into this creation; that tiny sharp-edged scrap of my heart ; and a thousand ghastly days turned inside out.
It’s exterior is Aqua-blue. That distinct shade of late January; That shade of disparities: hostility, fragility, stillness, and chaos all at once; that shade of ripe fruit bowls and embroideries found in cribs, nurseries, and vintage jewelry boxes.
Yes, it’s that Aqua- blue. The one that comes to mind when I remember Tom Sawyer’s raft or Kindergarten lunchboxes. It’s the shade that streaks over childhood; over days spent using waterpaint on used-newspapers and drinking Horlex out of Lipton complimentary mugs.
.
The rims of the store are Golden, just here and there; a pale gold that refuses to shimmer but remains resolute all the same. It outlines the edges of those nine small, well-proportioned squared windows at the center of the door. It also refines those cursive ends that form “Quill & Parchment” on the high left. The words glide; the words shatter; the words break down again and again.

The window; an octagonal corner, branching itself outside, forming a peach seating area from within. Just like Boo Radley’s gift-bearing tree in “ To Kill a mocking bird”, the side door is carved with empty cubicles, where poetry and paper swans are left every now and then.

I like to imagine you, walking inside:

You look at the carpet, and remember how it feels to step on something that yields beneath you, you remember how the insignificant details, can make you feel alive again. You stand by the door; your heart tries to take it all, and you whisper “ A legacy, “. You look at the shelves, and you extend your hands, stroking one book after the other, because you know, they wept for you sometimes. You know of the ache that streams down their pages, and you know they hold my lonesome soul amidst their typewritten texts.
You look at the walls, and you know they’d never know the obsoleteness of unliving things. Frames upon frames of raw entities scraped off my lifetime, Van Gogh’s starry night upon Edinburgh’s skyline, upon E.E Cummings words upon Joss Weldon’s fictional creations.

I like to imagine you, placing your palm on one of the dangling single light bulbs, thinking of the days I vowed to bring back their worth without camouflaging them with feathers and crystals. You smile as your ears fall upon the instrumental melody of the Beatle’s “ Yesterday”, and you wonder why, I chose piano over violin; and you wonder if time is capable of changing vowels and tendencies; and you wonder if I still miss you.
And what came together in my head, will then fall apart.

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