5th November 2013
I’ve never considered writing before.
I always thought it was for people who are mentally weak, and in many ways this is still true, but I know now that there are exceptions.
You see I am an educated woman. I am a practical woman. And as such I am a person who will be difficult to understand as people cannot know the ascensions they’ll never reach because said people have faith they know everything.
Therefore only you are capable of being a part of what I have to express.
Regards,
Farida
11th November 2013
When we married we married in black and he in brown-green because everything around us was forced to decay. My cloak waved with the remaining grits of sand, rubble and flesh as the wind covered all or most of the missionary’s words so that I only watched his split lips for the words ‘I do’ and my soldier the same. Neither of us could see each other besides the squinted eyes that told me he was sad and old and therefore trustworthy. And when it came to the kiss I allowed him but he wouldn’t do more than a kneel and peck on the hand which I was grateful for.
In the years following when I belonged to his new country, I would begin to tell him more as though he wasn’t the reason I had to leave. I would share all kinds of things, tell him that someone or something should compensate all the men who grow old, but not to leave the responsibility to me, or that I’d like my body more if the unnamed never saw it, but I like my body more because he never saw it even when we did the things we did, and I became romantic when his eyes would start to water pink and red all the times I narrated about every fist that shared a blooming warm.
I took a break from torturing him with the stories I forced to be heard, to admire how I painted the ochre wall with its red swirls above his greying head, greying far before the natural time for when it should, remembering that if I never gave in to anything I’d have nothing to paint. And that’s when I think about that word, nothing. Think about the place they renamed as such.
I realised then that I haven’t seen the molten sky of home since turning 12. And before he came the 12 disciples would take pieces from the grazed regions of my skin to eat. For every piece I honoured with my memory the church bell outside bellowed for the unclaimed middle kingdom we reached. And there he asked me something, to which I sighed and replied,
“It’s not just that, we instead belong to nothing because I belong to you and you are nothing. So I am less nothing than you are. But you won’t feel what I mean.”
23rd November 2013
Sometimes I am tempted to act like a wife to him. I pity him when he looks at me like a stray dog because I refuse to give in to the peace he needs. He has no understanding that I have to be harsh; every creature’s want for conflict is greater than their need for peace. If we were fully satisfied the mind would go hungry and seek problems beyond our control.
30th November 2013
A sweaty sheen glowed in the red swirls above our heads; they mirrored the red swirls in our eyes that refused my body to wake. Conversely, doing this was one of the few things that brought him out of his fatigued limbo. Yet he halted all the forces wrapped around us only because, ‘my face had a kind of look’. And he made me demean him after because he wouldn’t explain, he refused to develop the strength that I forced myself to have in articulation.
I understood him regardless, but still you should always push people to a greater standard, otherwise you will find yourself exploited and wasted. Especially now that the man has had access I must be more strategic and more confusing, lead him to the idea of a greater reward but who knows what. And I worry that I no longer have some upper-hand.
The first time which was not so long ago, but much long after the marriage, I initiated just like all the others. I appreciated that about him. But what I didn’t appreciate was that he wanted to affect me as much as I could affect him. Worse were his successes.
After his first ‘success’ I waited for him to be done wiping with his warm towel on me. I looked down on him. Already then he appeared even closer to the grave then in all the days merged together before. He returned my scrutinising eyes without warning and asked me a question but I replied nothing, whether the word itself or just the silence.
Leaving him unanswered I let my head hang upside down from the simple floral bed and sought the morning flooding in to our patchy-golden walls. It would have been easier to accept this but that would have been the lazy approach. So I pushed his arm away got up and took my clothes with me without too much rush but brisk enough that he couldn’t stop me.
2nd December 2013
Today I made him cry again.
He turned on the TV offering to watch some floundering fuzzy-lens romance that nobody cares about or at least nobody should care about. But he cared and I’ve started to care a little bit, not too much, so we watched some parts together. But the obnoxious reds goldens lavish and pretentious greens only made the depravity of a made-up place more stark, so I stole the remote from his loose hand and changed to the news. He stayed still, besides some restrained flinches for the quiet sounds of war in the background.
I thought he would have forgotten everything by now, cheered maybe by the bright patterns of the flag he hung above the sofa, or the colour that surrounded us for the Christmas coming. I waited for a moment because I was desperate to get to the interviews, but he kept on looking the way he did so I had to revert.
By the time we got to the part in the film where the protagonists have a child, he tells me he’s always wanted to have children but would go without if it’s what I wanted. And I told him, knowing I would hate myself for it but equally aware it was necessary to do so,
“It’s not about what I want, think of yourself first. What position are you in to consider yourself capable? How can you be a good father if you’ve killed the fathers and mothers of many children before? The children they were about to interview are no less valuable than the children you wanted to raise. And in any case you’re too old. Greater chance of mutation.”
That’s when he started crying and I let him go to sleep.
8th December
I want him to die so I can be a widow, but without him having to die because I quite like his company now. Of course he can never know that.
He can never know either that I’ve started to develop an aggressive fear that he will soon be called back to fight.
I don’t think he was meant for military, unfit for it. I’ll see if there’s any way I can intervene when the time comes since I know the language and the systems now much better than he does.
Inshallah.
Until then.