4.48 Psychosis

I saw the reflection of her face in the mirror  in a dim light at exactly  4.48, when she stood with her wrists slit and the redness of her being dripping down on her white trousers. Love me, she said... Love me...
That's how I first met Sarah, and I've kept meeting her for so many years of my life... Night after night and day after day... Love me...
She kept waiting to be loved and I kept waiting for her to tell me whose love was she anticipating so much... Love me...
Until the day when I realised that it was me she kept calling, me she was waiting for, me she was needing. Love me...
She wanted me to love myself in her, something that she was incapable of doing herself. Something that I was not able to do for so many years. And what was stopping me? Sometimes it is so complicated to comprehend ourselves, our own needs and feelings.
Love me...
My wings might have been broken hundreds of times, but still I know I have the strength to fly again.
My body might have been torn into thousands of little pieces, but still I have the power to pull myself together.
My world might have been shuttered more than once, but still I exist.
And I don't want to run away from myself anymore. I want to stand in front of the mirror and whisper... I love you...

For myself and Sarah Kane.

Synchronicity

I am a magician in the greatest circus of the world. Each day I take myself out of my hat and place in front of you so that you could examine the wrinkled structure of my skin. The fears coiled at the bottom of my spine. The hopes trying to reach the sky like the balloons that a twelve year old child tried to sell to a half drunken crowd at 11 PM on the last night of the carnaval.
Sometimes I dig deeper in the hidden layers of my Jungian spheres of unconscious. I pulled out the feeling of insecurity the other day. It wore a sari and had long curly hair. We took the same bus together, but I decided to get down before seeing the turning face. The feeling left by the green DTC bus, but how much damage has it caused me in the past?
A rabbit of my low self-esteem was held by its otherwise dangling ears. He looked so funny in the center of the stage unable to squeak or move its legs while being held in the spot light. I let it hog on the grass as it began to complain about the pain at the back of the vertical axis of the body... or was it the horizontal axis of time? I heard him say that his back hurts.
I cast a spell and a street opened in the middle of the audience. The sign read it leads towards the eternal happiness, but my heart and feet chose to run over the black wire hissing, twisting and spiraling on its way to the lands of my dreams miles away from the reality.
I stood with eyes closed by the side of the street waiting for his arrival. My hand outstretched with a key to my heart, and that firm belief that one day he would return to find me. He would keep a gramophone to play the piano to the monkeys and I would follow him to the desert. And no... I will not see his FACE in a BOOK... He will come to say that he had seen me in a dream before. But they declared me mad and drove to the hospital instead.

The smell of a butterfly

She was walking through the city that day and somehow each end every smell reminded her of the decaying effect that city life had on society and culture. One more such stench and she might even vomit she thought. And to think that some creatures, whom we often don't even perceive as human, live all their lives picking up such dirt from under our noses. Do they constantly feel disturbed by the rotting values mixed with pieces of daily bread that the wealthy ones throw away from their windows? Or did they get used to their demeaning existence?
She wondered where did all the trees go, and then her eyes fell on two huge MCD dustbins. One was grey like the city around her, the other had the green colour of nature. Did they cut down all the branches and buried them in the trash? Uncivilised civilisation vs Organic nature. They burst some crackers after their cricket match last night, but she was not sure who the winner was.
Her thoughts drifted towards the boy who found her swimming in the river eons back. How peaceful and colourful their days were on the desert where he lived. She left her shadow far away and was just a little girl lost in the oceans of the world. But there was no danger involved. Only peace in the heart. Where was the boy today? Did he vanish together with the disappearance of a flight bound to nowhere? Was he still walking in the desert? Or did he lose himself in the wanton pleasures of the city?
As she was pondering so her feet came to a sudden halt. In the middle of a parking space there was a black and blue butterfly lying on the concrete. One of its wings was torn. She picked it up an kept on her palm. She was not sure what to do next but she knew she could not leave this flying painting of nature to a certain death under some heavy vehicle. She still had a vague memory of a film she watched many years back in which a dancing girl breaks her ankle and the magic of a puppeteer turns her into a butterfly. She could very easily identify herself with that girl and butterfly today.
A huge car stopped next to her and a wealthy mother of a fat child ordered in a high pitched voice "Could you please come here? He would like to see your pet. He has never seen a butterfly before, we still haven't taken him to the zoo."
Really? she thought... do you really need to go to the zoo to see a butterfly? You see, she would meet at least one butterfly each day. There were more butterflies around her than people she knew, and she could feel connected to the souls of those butterflies more than to direct ties that linked her with the outside world.
She thought of the boy again... would he think about her when he sees a butterfly? Or has he forgotten her completely?
She walked to the park and kept the butterfly on a small patch of grass next to some flowers. She did not want to go away, as if the magic of the butterfly captured her whole existence. She did not want to leave the colors and the wounded wing and dissolve herself in the world of those horrible stenches, fat children and the zoo with captivated animals.
She did not want to leave but she did...so that now she could sit with her fingers flying over the keyboard of her laptop to tell you the story of that day when she found a wounded butterfly in the busy market street.