We seem to be living the
blur yet again. We seem to be walking the same damn line. Take me back 10
years. Take me back to the summer where we house hunted, where we ran naked
through our pockets in search of pennies to pay for a home.
Shelter is not just
an aluminium sheet anymore, the rain seeps in, orders. The mattress you sleep
on today has a story, it was stolen. Hungry hands grabbed it away, a bachelor
turned it into a wedding bed, and then threw it away when a baby was born. When
your baby was born, 18 years ago, was your home small? Or was it large, was it
too big to hold? The feeling of having to be a home for another being? Another life
you held in the palm of your hand, you would be the hand that fed it, you would
be the brush that painted the smile on its face, you would take it to school
and help it live.
You would show it the world, a world that was too ugly to be
rolled into a diploma, you showed her the chasm between theory and practise. You
broke the sound barriers when you educated her with those words.
When i write,
i talk at a thousand people at the same time, to a hundred people in a single
glance and to a handpicked few in a single breath. Today, its 18 years after. And
the both of you are here, another came in between to define the prism of light
growing in her womb. And it shone brighter and brighter, but she grew weaker
and weaker, and no matter how hard i try and save the hands that taught me how
to live for the one that still has to live, age has caught up with you. and
although the wise one tells me to be brave about death, how can i when your
story has yet to be told? I stay away from it all, I’m sheltered by the walls
that enclose me, the wings cover me, and so many others that try escape the
shrewd nature of the world that lies beyond the walls of barbed wire, beyond
the grizzly screens, and further beyond the pictures in the paper, black and
white and red all over.
Still in the midst of all this instability, in the
heart of this wall of text, there is a beating fighting young poignant heart. There
is a point. Sailing across the gulf that separates us, you come to build me a
home. I have a few more years left in me, i still have them. All i can say is I
can still step into my Father’s House, I can still look up and praise, and I
will still look up with no shame until there is nothing to look up to anymore.
For that is how I came into this world, with my head thrown back, and my eyes
shut, and my hair covering my ears.
Not the pretty way words are supposed to
look on a page, no the beauty you bring is when the intensity of your eyes
burns life into every syllable of this prose. When finally you swallow your
fears and your pride and every single piece of your mortality that remains and
you pause. Your stomach churns, because the hardest thing to admit is that you
have reached the end of the page. So until then, i’ll put a stopgap in the
inflated importance my generation gives to procrastination, and i will
shamelessly waste away my days with you, until all we know is taken from us
again, and we will be hurt.
And still from the ashes we shall rise.
Golden children
of the sky, you golden children of the sky.
