It begins like a dark night in a mausoleum. At first, you venture into the dark like a kid on a dare. The outlines of things around you seem scary and threatening and big and silent, and you take the opportunity to stumble and fall and get up again. Falling seems like the right thing to do; it hurts you and makes you realize that one moment of pain can take the onslaught of fear away. For just a second, you’re cocooned in that blaze of pain and you forget what fear is, and that’s a good thing because at the root of most evil lies fear.

So you fall and fear backs away, and then you understand that the moment you rise again you’re going to have to face the fear again. So you brace yourself and you get back up, and all at once you glimpse something at just the right wrong angle and the world changes. You can feel the shift in the atmosphere. No more fear because some things are greater than fear. Courage is being useful in the face of fear, and you are filled with that. But there’s something more than that; you don’t fear the tombs and the coffins anymore. They are touched by the moonlight and they seem peaceful and romantic to you. You bask in the moon’s halo yourself and feel at ease and secure. Eternity slips into your niche, sees you caressing a pale, pretty corpse, mutters a silent prayer to itself and slips back out.

You are in love with the mausoleum now. The journey is complete…but not all journeys end in lovers meeting. Sooner or later the day will arrive and turn your midnight lover to dust and shadows. Loving a vampire is never safe.

—-

I should have stayed away from you in the first place. That happy hour never came. So now we’ll discuss candidly, you and I, why I should stay away from you henceforth.

You’re too beautiful for me. I can’t handle that much beauty. It fills me with an emptiness which the reed flute possesses and sings about. A longing to return home. A lament on the separation from the reed bed. All nine holes of the flute look out hopefully, emptily, towards an emptier sky. There’s more to you than meets the eye, and what my eye meets is more than I can take.

You’re kind. It insults me. It embarrasses me. In your gentle outlook, you damage harsher hearts. You’re immersed in a placid tarn that lies still at the bottom your heart. Your soul floats like a satisfied duck on the water, and your stillness offends the restless spirit of the winds on top of you. They still seek the ocean, the mountains, the sands, the skies, the vastness of space and the closeness of a whirlpool. You are a lake. You take everything around you and shush it to a restful slumber. I hate the mirror of your watery skin.

You’re pure. Pure as evil. Pure as the day which has been washed by a Lahori rainfall, when a medical student might have raised his head from his Step 2 books and glnaced at the instantaneous beauty tapping its fingers on the window outside his room at 7:30 in the morning. Pure as the possible wish in his heart to become a child once again and run whooping and hollering in the rain with nothing but shorts on his skinny, beautiful body. Your purity hurts my heart. I’m used to complications. Simplicity upsets me.

You’re gentle. It scares the living shit out of me. Gentleness and tenderness are tools of condemnation. We’re gentle with a child to make sure he enjoys childhood as long as he can before we thrust him out into a restless, harsh, confused world which is eating itself inside out. We’re gentle with the lamb as we lead it to the slaughterhouse. You touch me softly and whisper sweet words. They fill my head with death and decay.

You have roots. I have bags of bones. They go with me wherever I go. Memories and pictures and words and whispers wirl in my head and heart like raped banshees, shrieking away multiple layers of time. Your roots remind me of the ground from which I came. They thrust a sweet image of water and satiety into my mind. I don’t have a sweet tooth, you stupid smiling girl.

You like looking at stars. I’m afraid of them. Once they were children too, full of life and light. Time ate them up and spit yellow bones out. The light they give is an illusion. It has traveled over eons across emptiness and darkness to hurt and confuse me. The children are gone; their ghosts hang around. You see beauty and hope in that. All I see are yellow teeth of time getting ready to chew me up real good.

You like Rumi’s poetry. I like Poe’s. Rumi attained Ahad!, Unity. Poe died a drunkard. Unity means the annihilation of Self. Drunkenness means the forgetting of it. And who wants permanent loss? The price for Unity is too much! I’m quite all right with myself, thank you very much…even if my hangovers taste and feel like the very blood of my soul spilling onto a tongue of despair.

You have shining eyes and a quiet mouth. I tremble at the sight of them. They’re disgusting. I can never tell what they’re looking at or saying. The curves that halo them like rivulets of moonlight in the skin of a deep black ocean repel me. They’re too still and lit up. The shadow above your lips, the soft spot right in the middle right there! holds a quiet my heart will never know. The twin points of light in your night-black pupils follow me around with a silent laughter that makes my skin crawl. I reach the brink of a madness that seems to boil from the very air around me. My emptiness empties me out. I hate them hate them hate ‘em.

You’re a country girl. It damages me. I had dreams of traveling the world, tasting goods that have exotic facades and a bitter aftertaste, falling in love with whores and demons, climbing huge glacial mountains, talking to random strangers, taking lives of others and making them my own. You sit home and smile at the world around you, looking at just one grain of sand that the evening breeze might have blown in from a distant construction site. Cats piss on sand. Yet you nod and the light in your eyes grows deeper and lighter. I sense something vast and eery and empty all around you. Yet you’re still and comfortable in that nothingness. You lie, you lie.

You pray five times a day. I’ve seen that forehead with that black mark right in the center touch dirt and dust and clay and cloth. You kneel down, you prostrate before something unseen, something none ever saw, sees, or will see. When I laugh at you, you grin and laugh at yourself, but the rings of our respective guffaws are so different! When I call God unseen, you nod your head sagely and call him The Unseen. It doesn’t work on me, you get it? I won’t be fooled. When I warn you thus, you nod once again. You irritate me.

There was a time when I used to love you. I used to jump up and down and break my crown, declaring to the world that I loved you. I wrote on old parched paper with my own blood words to that effect. I worked out, ran thousands of laps, dropped down and gave myself hundreds, swam miles, skipped rope thousands of times with you in the center of my vision. You gave me hope, you gave me my standards of beauty, purity, innocence, wisdom, kindness, womanhood. I looked at others and glimpsed pieces of you swimming lazily in their eyes, breath, smiles, laughter. Your soul lived in every eye window I ever looked into. Seasons changed, mountains changed, landscapes rose and fell away, and you kept standing at the edge of a cliff I never dared climb up. I put on my dunce’s cap and danced to the tune of your love, and it got me nothing. You married a fool and you raised his child. And I traveled the world, living in dark corners, making a fool out of myself, soaking much, learning nothing, and my bag of bones kept getting heavier. My spirit is restless still, my eyes look into the distance, my conversations are uneasy, my words and music are lonely and wistful. And the keys of my heart keep turning the wrong way.