My last thought

I lied. Lied to everybody I knew. Until one fine day when I no longer remembered what the truth was. The truth, buried within people who could only be exhumed. People who had been brutally murdered. People who had once trusted me with their lives.

I am from the city of joy. The city couldn't afford me any, but I derived mine from my daughters. Everyday I watched them grow, it felt like a part of me was returning to the normalcy it had been starved of. I tried hard to give them a life they would’ve cherished. And harder to make them feel loved. I failed sometimes, for I had no idea how it was done. I was inclined to believe that I wasn’t meant to be a father. Yet, I never gave in to such thoughts of fate and destiny.

Often I try to remind myself of what I have been through, and I fail. Fail because I cannot withstand closures with myself anymore. Often I dream of the times that have been and the ones that weren’t meant to be. Places I now dread and people long gone. I feel time warps around me, only to let me experience what I have been through, again. Time was supposed to heal, but it has conspired in making every bit of me shudder in sheer despair as I unfold another of my hidden fears. I have given up on trying to beat the forces around me and confront the ones within.

I sometimes fool myself into believing that I’m happy now. I had loved those times when I suspended my disbelief and played with my girls, fed them, kissed them, held them like there was no tomorrow. But it is not tomorrow that scares me. It is my past that is holding me hostage.

Sometimes when I wake up in the nights, I feel I’m chained by invisible ties of blood and emotion. Ties that pull me down and choke me till I’m left gasping for thought. I feel the world passing me by and I cannot influence it. I experience the pain and I cannot shout. The only moments when I really wish someone would bail me out of my misery. I feel around for my mother’s warmth and I sense it for a second that fleets so swiftly that it leaves me miles behind. I am not sure if every passing day is helping me.

Life has been cruel to many people. I am not the only one and I am not complaining. I hoped to come out of the clutches of my past someday and live a life I had dreamt of, devoid of all the voids that fill my heart and bleed it. But the last bit of humanness seems to have ebbed out of me. I see no purpose, nor pain or pleasure. I can see myself losing it. The rest of the world seems to have left me behind. And I don’t think I can catch up in this lifetime.

In some other life, maybe...

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver