perfumed umbrellas

a few words and letters on living

Because I walk into this room, and all I can ever think is the beaming grief of the day I leave. It is December, there is snowfall in a city an hour's drive from here, but no such thing here. Just cold hands, blankets of fog—and the excitement in my mother's voice when she sees the sun is out: "dhoop nikli hai aaj!" (“sunlight has come out today!”) The sunlight slants from the window onto the dining table, through brown mesh curtains. The one pink rose from my dying garden looking at my mom and I through the mesh, as baby hummingbirds flutter around it. All I think now is how much I will miss it. I will miss this city, this country. Though it was never mine. It has seen everything. Will I leave this light, this small world of my own, like everyone else, by next December?

My days have been filled with diagrams of biology, mechanisms of chemistry and formulae of physics. I think that this could be the last December of me doing physics and chemistry. I try to be focus and participate more in classes now. These subjects enter my dreams, as if I do not already writhe in lectures and notes as I am awake. And all I can wonder is how the both meanings of dreams are so interconnected—to think that there is a longing in both. The word dream might come from the Proto-Germanic noun 'draugmaz', which means illusion, or to damage. Those few seconds after waking up from a dream, those few seconds of asking yourself "was that real, did I really do that?". Those few days of dreaming of an ambition, those few days of asking yourself, "will it be real, will I ever do that?" All of it is damage. Is all of it an illusion?

I dreamed of you. And I keep dreaming of you. You are not even in my life anymore, you don't even live in this city like you do in my dreams. It is this peculiar emptiness really, to wake up so heavy, almost like my entire roof just fell on my chest and all I can see is the debris of my life falling apart in this cold winter night.

I have this rosy perfume I loved so much and used too much during a time when there was nothing but fake blood on my hands, and now it just stands there in the back of my shelf, with the dust of my room piling and piling over it. I put it on today, and it's almost like the the thorns of its roses microneedled through my dress, through my skin, through my lungs and it tried so hard to convince me that this fake blood is real. It took me back to somewhere I didn't want to be. So I hate that perfume. What’s funny is that I do this same thing now, but with a different perfume. It's like a constant cycle, and you don't even realize it. The name of this perfume is Fairytale, and I put it on everyday like it will take me to a fantasy world where "they all lived, happily ever after." Maybe next December I'll hate that perfume too. What I mean to say is, that there are so many inanimate objects in my life that I have associated with people, emotions and events, that it is nauseating feel or see those things again, to the point of destruction. That the things I love will become a sword, a double edged one some day. That the scent of time is so suffocating, but ever so fragrant.

I wake up so early these days to be alone for a while, to only hear the white noise of my 40 year old heater, the cats fighting outside and the diligent men replacing the dustbins punctually every morning, while I make infinite to-do lists to complete things that I should be doing now instead of writing. But I suppose this is a part of the list too. There is solace is doing anything when everyone is asleep. There is solace in trying to love life again by listening quietly to the poems of today. Sometimes I exist in their lives instead of living in my own. This is the price for derailing myself from my own heart. This is the price of not recognizing my own reflection. This is the price of being untranslatable to myself.

painting by Salman Toor

I want to dwell in houses of Possibility.¹ But sometimes I feel like I am holding umbrellas above my head everywhere. It can be dark, not a cloud in the sky, shielding myself from things that don't even exist. I dodge any sort of light that could pass through numerous of Windows and Doors. It is like I'm clenching my fists all the time, with my nails digging into my palms, but with nothing to hide. I want to do so many things—my limbs feels light at the thought of doing everything I want to do, my hobbies, my interests. To live within the poetry of life.

I remember many years ago, that teal labyrinth of a room, with open history encyclopedias on the brown carpet. My parents watching TV of a program I never understood. I would trace my small fingers over the Ancient Egyptian tombs, disrupting my parents’ show at any given moment to ask a meaning of a word, or to tell them a cool fact. Other slow Saturday mornings—the days I tried to make an origami lotus because it was my teacher's favourite flower. And she was my favorite teacher at the time. The complexity of folding paper in pre-ordained steps with certainty of what's next, was the most difficult thing my small hands could comprehend. But this certainty, is certainly not as complex as the uncertainty of time.

Time could be like origami. But it isn't, and life isn't. I don't have those small hands anymore, that teal living room has left me long ago, like I get thoughts of leaving this living room. And I only have 24 hours in a day, with overbearing responsibilities and priorities. Amidst all this chaos, I find time for the things I love. The people I love. Yes, I will live with MY heart, even though there is my exam timetable that wants to choke me everyday. Yes, I feel the umbrellas running away, when my cold bare face is held by the hands of people I love, the things and books I love. I've been trying to read more, to be more creative. To experience what that small girl felt on slow sunny Saturdays. To live in the experience and not to exist. To dwell and not dream in Possibility. To have my perfumes untranslatable, to have my umbrellas translatable.

I learned some months ago that the part of your brain that processes hope is the prefrontal cortex, which is right above your eyes. I think the world around me changes when I change the way I look at the world.

And I will leave without a scent of perfume.

love,

afifa

from pinterest

1.