DAY 4 // HAYAT

I know how is it like for your thoughts to be so detached from the now that it drives you to your own recklessness, George. 

I sat on the toilet and thought about you, felt the lighting of the bathroom around me, I went on on my day as I read about how you lived your last and it was all awfully still and ordinary. I suppose this is why you dealt with it so casually, the whole life thing, without clinging too much to the waves of rage and happiness that caught you. And letting a younger body catch you off a real wave that could have killed you and made you from the past like your lover way before you drank that scotch before bed. 

I went to the park and read you, George. It was all so much yet it flowed; kids running, people going off with their day, men like you were jogging. You were moving as they were, I was just in-between the world and your thoughts, while smoking a cigarette, drinking coffee. 

DAY 3 // HAYAT

I’ll share a piece of cake with you, call your name differently than I call others’, shake my shoulders indicating the little party in my heart when I look at you whenever we share a glance in a crowded room. 

I’ll make you coffee before I leave for a long day that I have nightmares of, I’ll doodle your curls in class, hum your phone’s ringtone while running errands. 

Such things, certain things that we can survive without but do anyway, like drinking tea in the blue mug only, coffee in the whites. 

I’ll call after I hang up shouting at you to leave me alone, I’ll come back home to you even when I know I’m coming home to a fight, I won’t be upset when you forget that I do all of this for you. 

I’ll leave and come back, I’ll leave for a day and then call in the middle of it to ask you if anyone had made you smile to be jealous for two seconds and make you giggle about it, I’ll leave for a month and ache for weeks, I’ll call you and admit to you my helplessness, I do such things, I don’t leave, I do such things instead.

I’ll love my words more, my solitude, my dawns, my songs, all more than you, sometimes. 

I’ll still come back, I’ll still call back, I’ll still share the last cigarette in the packet with you, I’ll still look at you mid chapter while we’re both reading and smile at you. I will I will I will. 

DAY 1 // HAYAT

The history of letting go in order to get in books started with Moses, they don’t mention it, but if you set foot close to his grave you’ll see the crowds of all the words God couldn’t sing into his left ear which he cut off, you’ll see the other half of the truth that wasn’t handed to us. A man’s desire to stay a king, to stay in between the walls that held his mother’s perfume, and just as I am trying, to stay a storyteller.

Sometimes, we need to shed parts of us to stay faithful to the stories we’re telling, Van Gogh and Moses cut off their ears, the modern storyteller misses a step on the staircase, forgets how much sugar to take with their tea, not pack books when travelling, fall in love more often than they should or claim that they don’t believe in love in the first place, publicly, in our papers or in cafés where atmospheres and people with better stories than us come to get their coffee are sold. In the romantic era, John Keats decided to leave Fanny Brawne for his body to ache for her so that his poems would swell. Milena and Kafka never touched, and that turned him to an insect, something so ugly and gruesome that the norm of crushing a bug was created. 
 I stayed in bed for so long the other day staring at a wall the furniture pieces started making noises afraid that my silence will eat me up and turn me into a sibling of theirs, or that’s how heavy my heart felt anyway. I couldn’t reply to the messages confirming the ride to my mother, it’s been over a year since I last saw her but I tell the nightstand with a short hand that it’s because of all that I put into the paper the night before, the paint chips on my eyelids and I refuse to not write again. This is how far one would go. If you’re not a Majnun howling with the animals, if your pain isn’t as big as the world the words will come out dull, the vocabulary will be home-work good enough only.