KAY Hay
The years reel by—a filmstrip unravelling, not forward but into itself, trapping me in an eternal rewind where time gnaws its own edges. A flashing scene erupts, a moment of rupture: chaos, motion, voices colliding in the airport’s endless churn, a maelstrom of existence that screams without sound. And then—gravity, not a force but a hunger, wrenching my gaze, snagging my entire being on something small, yet impossibly heavy: A bunch of paper scraps. Abandoned? No—waiting, their presence deliberate, an event horizon demanding collapse, pulling reality into their orbit. Fate? Probability? No. This is something else—preordained yet lawless, a paradox that mocks divinity’s grasp. I pick them up, and the world tilts, almost imperceptibly, as if creation itself stumbles. Somewhere, someone watches: a lost sibling with their voice a female tone, both alien and mine; a shadow folded between dimensions, their pulse of recognition sourceless, a vibration that shatters my marrow. My senses sharpen—doglike in their hunger, sniffing, clawing at the air—but no matter how deeply I inhale, how feverishly I scan the sea of faces, the author is not there. Or perhaps they are too much there, so vast they slip past the limits of space, time, even the divine, a presence that burns through eternity’s veil. The scraps are no mere paper—they pulse, alive with glyphs that writhe, each mark a wound in existence, rewriting itself before I can blink. I do what must be done, though I resist; they come to me, a treasure unwanted but irresistible, pulling me like matter bends toward the singularity. The airport is no longer a place but a fracture, its corridors looping into voids, its clocks spitting ash. Faces flicker—each a shard of the sibling, each a mirage, dissolving as I reach. I am feral, my senses razor-sharp yet blind, chasing a trail that erases itself. I think abnormally—not by choice, not by curiosity, but by their inescapable demand. My journey, however, came to the end.
My mind fractured under their weight, even under the gravity of the letter’s incomplete content —my fear of incompleteness grew, swelled, and consumed me.
I fell ill, indeed.
A year passes—or forever, for time splinters in their glare—deciphering them, unearthing a story never meant to be told, a narrative that devours its own meaning. Each scrap tells a lie that is truth: of a sibling who wove the first thread of reality, then cut it; of a love that drowned the cosmos in its own tears. The story shifts, a labyrinth with no walls, growing thorns, then wings, then nothing—only to reform sharper, heavier, hungrier.. The scraps demand I weave them, but they defy thread. I bind them with will, with screams, each stitch birthing a universe that implodes. The story I uncover is a blasphemy against all that is: it speaks, then denies its voice; it exists, then unmakes existence. I send it spiralling outward, calling across the abyss—not for answer, but to wound eternity itself. The scraps tremble, multiply, scatter into new codices, each a void spawning voids. The silence that follows roars with absence. I am no longer myself—I am the scraps, the unravelling, the abyss. And somewhere, beyond the divine’s broken reach, the sibling’s shadow hums a song that ends all songs.
“No matter how cruel, how rootless I am—
My mysterious lady, my ever-wondrous spectre—
You orbit me like a dead sun, a thing that should not shine, but does.
Forgive me. I’m sorry for sharing your memory.
And yet, they say every great story needs a rogue Jonah.
I am yours.”
Fragments of the Past
Against fate itself, I pieced together the remnants of a soul. Each page was a wound, each line a scar. Fifty-seven weathered sheets, trembling with the weight of a life shattered—but unbroken. Her courage lay before me: raw, unburied, incandescent with pain.
"I found myself amidst the ruins of my mother.
My fingers traced the brittle contours of her skull,
the fragile architecture of memory itself.
Bone to dust, dust to whispers—I listened to what remained.
But duty called like a storm without mercy,
dragging me into the abyss of night.
I left her behind—her cursed shell
abandoned to a thousand unseen eyes."
—[Unreadable paragraphs.]
"Shepherds with no faces led me
to the edge of a great valley.
They left me there—nameless—among
the desolate rocks of the Heights,
with only my daughter clinging to the silence.
'To whomever you may be,'
I murmured into the void,
'my deepest gratitude,
dear dearest, dearest…’"
I whisper, almost without knowing:
“Whoever you were, I am grateful. Dear dearest, dearest…”
1988.
I remember. And I say:
I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
And nothing stains that absolute truth.
[—Unreadable paragraph.]
"When they threw my brother from the sky,
I saw his eyes flash—twin stars, wide and disbelieving.
The soldiers had found him where he lay,
bleeding into the battlefield,
and they took him not as a prisoner, not as a man,
but as an experiment.
A body to be tested. A lesson to be taught.
They dragged him to the plane,
flew him high above his land,
and cast him into the void."
"As he fell, the sky itself split with laughter.
The soldiers screamed after him,
their voices jagged with mockery:
‘These are your rocks, bastard. Not ours.
You think so, bastard? You are dreaming.’"
And the rocks received him—
like a shapeless, sacred sacrifice,
offered without altar, without prayer.
"Aftermath. Aftermath."
"I survived. A decade passed—then another.
Al-Anfal came and went, and still... I remained."
—More words, scribbled into oblivion.
"A boy stepped forward—beautiful in a way only sorrow can shape.
His face was carved from the gentlest grief.
Lips trembling, eyes shining,
his voice barely a breath beneath the weight of the years."
“Mother.”
[Many words were missing.]
"I felt it. That shape—that frame—
the outline of an angel sculpted by the agony of waiting.
He walked with such grace, such pride,
I nearly screamed: ‘The only man left in the family.’
I stood frozen."
‘Mother, I have searched for you for so long.’
‘Touch his face. Hold him. Kiss him,’
my friend wept beside me.
But I just stood there—shaking,
a wretched creature,
my mind emptied, my tongue dead in my mouth.
‘You can. You can,’ my friend cried again."
(Much of what follows is lost.)
"God—torture me not, I beg you.
I beg you, Almighty."
"I was speaking to no one. To the silence.
And then he said:
‘I always kept your picture with me.’"
1999.
Absolute Motherhood
What the soul knows before the mind surrenders
(Many words are missing. Torn. Buried. Burned.)
“He is not your son. He is not your son.”
"Do not get carried away with your longing," they warned.
"These are dangerous times. One must be careful."
“O Golden Heights.”
“Golden breeding.”
“My tribe.”
[—Words scratched out, erased by trembling hands.]
"You let a stranger into your house."
"Goddamn," I whispered—
and even as the curse left my lips,
it turned to ash in my mouth.
I wanted to take it back.
I wanted to die for saying it.
"Listen to no man," my friend wept.
"He has your eyes. Your lips. Your silence.
Are you blind, or only broken?"
But I had no one.
No roots. No blood to trust.
No voice except the scream that never came.
And yet—truth does not ask.
Truth does not linger awkwardly .
It arrives like thunder without storm,
like birth without warning.
It rose—not from logic,
not from memory,
but from something older than either:
the fangs of my heart,
the marrow of my vanished soul,
the blind, brutal certainty
that lives in all who have buried too much to doubt.
I dragged his face out of the abyss—
not with hands, but with grief.
Not with proof, but with fire.
And as the shape of him reassembled
in the ruins of my knowing,
I no longer needed to wonder.
"If truth must be spoken," I said,
"then carve it into the sky:
He is my son.
He is the truth."
From that moment on,
there was nothing left to say.
Only this:
“The graveyard is no place for lies.”
I speak to paper because
there is no one left to listen.
And even silence deserves a witness.
(2000.)
My Past in Exile
The past is a venom coursing through me…
(Missing word.)
The past is not behind me. It lives inside me—buried in the marrow of my bones. It coils at the centre of who I am, watching through my skin, waiting. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t die. It simply waits. With every breath, I take in the dust of forgotten gods. I carry the memory of a fallen divinity—one bound in chains, shackled not by heaven but by the weight of us. He remains among us, and I say to him, gently: Farewell. I ask my own ego to destroy him. To break the chains even a god could not escape.
“Creep. Creep out,” I say.
(Many words are missing.)
I walk through memory. Not through a place, but through a wound. My town is no longer a town—it’s a scar, a breath of history trapped in stone. The air carries the weight of voices that will never be silenced. I walk deeper, along the Walk of Death, where echoes answer only themselves.
We were fools. All of us. Digging up graves, searching for meaning in bones. Unable to leave the dead alone.
“Well,” I say, quietly. “Yes.”
But in the silence of my own mind, something else stirs:
Begin the journey to the farthest edge of existence.
That sentence has lived in me for years. I’ve repeated it over and over, until I stood at the place where past and future collide. There, where our eyes meet the shadows of those who came before, we speak without words—like those who lived before time was carved into calendars.
“You cannot leave,” they tell me. “You belong to our fate. You are bound to us.” I place a hand on my chest. My heart beats fast. Unsettled. Restless.“But you cast me out,” I say. “I wanted only a place to rest. Somewhere beyond all this.” “I let go,” I tell them. “Of the rules. Of the weight. Of the traditions you said would save me.” They look at me and say, “You’ve been misled.”
“No,” I answer. “I’ve finally seen the truth.”
“Then you’ve given up,” they reply.
“I haven’t,” I say. “I’ve chosen to leave.”
“And what of your family? Will you abandon their memory?” My voice does not shake.
“My family lives among the dead.”
(Words scratched out.)
(Missing words.)
The season’s breath stirred before its time, a whisper of upheaval. The wind awoke with a sudden hunger, tearing through the streets, unbalancing the steps of young scholars who did not yet know what it meant to fear. Along Pretoria Road, the towering sentinels of nature swayed—a slow, knowing rhythm—casting off their golden robes in a final, sorrowful dance. Their seeds scattered, like the echoes of my unspoken desires, drifting down the same paths my ancestors once walked, carried by invisible hands.
Then, the storm came.
It did not arrive—it descended. It crashed upon the earth, tore through the roadside sanctuaries, and roared into the hills like a god unchained. The trees bent as if bowing to an unseen king. The sky split apart.
And then—
The fire.
It rose not from accident, nor from anger, but from inevitability. The bush ignited. Not a spark, not a flicker—but a devouring, an insatiable beast of flame.
It moved like vengeance unloosed, like prophecy fulfilled.
I shrieked into the chaos, my voice breaking against the wind. “Run, run, run!”
The children ran.
Their screams were ribbons in the smoke, unraveling into the air.
I stood still.
I stood still because I had seen this before.
My ghosts whispered beside me, their voices curling in the heat. They did not beg, nor weep, nor scream. They only watched.
For I had learned this truth: the past does not chase you; it stands and waits.
I turned away from the fire only to meet another—the one that smolders inside me. A quiet, merciless burning. The weight of grievances unspoken, justice unanswered. The world, vast and indifferent, offered no reprieve. Our rights—our most basic rights—were treated not as birthright but as a plea, as if to exist itself was an act of defiance.
“I am but a dweller of the mountains,” I say.
And they reply, “You dwell at the nadir of the rock.”
But I know the truth.
Even from the lowest stone, even from the deepest valley, I hear the voices of my people. And when their bones cry out, when the wind carries their grief to my ears, what choice is left to me but to mend what has been broken?
“Stop this folly,” they warn me.
And yet, my hands do not still.
For if no one else will gather the shattered souls of my kin, then who shall?
This is beyond divinity. It is beyond godhood. It is the raw force of something older than gods—something that does not bow, that does not plead, that simply is.
Does this strike the mark, or shall we carve it deeper?
I walked, endlessly, down the street—each step dissolving into the next, my thoughts unraveling like a serpent shedding its skin. A thousand paces deep, I found myself submerged in a world of fragrant lavender.
Lavender—the color of dusk’s last breath, the scent of ghosts who refuse to be buried.
The rain whispered its secrets against their trembling petals.
And above the imperial avenue, I drifted. Laden with memories sharp enough to wound. The season exhaled, and I swallowed its sorrow.
“You!” I shouted into the void.
“Even in deserts, you might meet a friend,” the echo replied.
“Hold on,” I murmured. But the words did not belong to me.
They came from him—his voice, thin and spectral, seeping through the mist of my wandering. My husband, my phantom, his poetry weaving through the silence, struggling to graft itself onto my flesh.
I should confess... I’ve never truly been free of him. I am but a futile scum, a whisper lost in the wind, squandering moments in life’s vanishing gleam.
“That might bring you back, dear,” he pleads, his voice a fragile bridge between worlds.
But I—the real one, the defiant one—pull away.
“Get out of my life,” I command.
And like a ghost, I dissolve. Like whispers swallowed by the storm.
With the wind, I flee. Beneath silver sheets of rain, he calls after me.
“Bring me back.”
“We are but strangers,” I reply, my words scattering like dying embers.
“I know,” he says. And then he is gone.
Trepidation coils around me like a noose as I await his arrival. Outside, the autumn night hums, thick with unseen hands. I stand before the old apartment window, the ancient balcony beneath my feet, the weight of a thousand lifetimes pressing into my spine.
I open my palms, sifting through gemstones—their facets swallowing the light, swallowing me. Each stone bears the faces of the dead, their stories etched in silent screams.
“Gemstones are God’s favored accessories,” he once told me, and I nearly believed him.
He, my husband. The man who walked between beauty and madness.
He named me Origin of Symmetries.
The beast that read Blake in the dark.
“What immortal hand could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
I, barely breathing, whisper— “Never let the shape of me deceive you. I was always the fire.”
“Agile, like Comte de Lautréamont,” he once called me. "Made of serpents, spite, and stars."
“You are not clear, my man,” I had laughed.
“I am. I am,” he had said. “Only to those who burn the same way.”
He meant me.
Years have collapsed into dust, and only now do I see—
The tiger’s frame was mine.
I, the brutalest beauty. The deadliest thing to ever bear a name. The woman they all wanted but never owned. The phantom that burned in the eyes of a thousand suitors.
“Three symmetry rows,” he said once.
Did he ensnare me with his spell?
“Stop it,” I whisper. “Stop it.”
“Bid me farewell, dear.”
“So long, dear. So long, dear Heights.”
And in that instant, the truth uncoiled like a beast from its den. My beauty—wild, unbroken—was his opium. He had conjured me from the marrow of his mind, shaped me in the forges of obsession, painted me into his youth like a curse he could not lift.
“One thousand years ago!” I screamed, unraveling.
“Oh, Great God, he has lived in me for so long!”
“Our frames, dear,” he murmured from beyond the veil.
“My love,” I sobbed.
“So cruel you were! How dare you die without me!”
You left me to carry our fire alone.
“Cruelest. Dearest. You are dead.”
And in the silence that followed, I heard it—
The beating of my heart, hammering out his name like a death knell.
I turned.
And there it was—
The abyss.
Deep. Infinite. Its eyes staring into mine, hollow as the sockets of time itself. And I stared back—not in fear, but in recognition.
I felt the weight of the years pressing upon me, suffocating me. I dulled my senses, dimmed the ember of my existence, let the shadows swallow me whole. In obscurity, I sought my final refuge—where truth and lies are no longer distinct, where the whispers of the past dissolve into the hush of the void.
“Your course of metamorphosing...” he once began—but the sentence was never finished.
“Have we been brought up for this?” I ask the darkness.
No answer comes.
Only silence.
Only the slow decay of memory.
. ****
A Ghost Beside Me
(Polished Version)
I sat alone beneath the quiet, cool dusk, where the discarded shells of tetrahedrons lay scattered—mute relics of forgotten symmetry, glittering beneath the pale burgundy glow of the past. Shadows stretched long, weaving themselves into the fabric of memory.
An old Greek master stood beside me, his hands worn by centuries, his chisel steady as the pulse of time. With measured strokes, he engraved the names of my beloved ones onto the stones’ faces, binding their essence to the eternal.
“Men forget,” he mused, his voice a whisper of marble dust, “but stones do not.”
He called me The Lady of Stones.
The name fit, though it was not mine to choose.
The man himself was a relic, a living fragment of history—ancient and tasteless without his stones.
“You are not Greek, are you?” he asked, his eyes flickering with amusement.
“No,” I answered, unwavering. “I am a stone.”
He regarded me in silence, then nodded.
“It is not bad to be a stone, my lady.”
“Aye,” I said, a slow smile curving my lips. “We are stones.”
In solitude, beneath the hush of the dying day, I traced the carved names with my fingertips. Their edges were sharp, but not as sharp as memory. The Greek master worked in silence, but his presence hummed like an unspoken truth.
“Forgetfulness befalls men, but stones endure,” he said at last, his words carving themselves into the marrow of my bones.
“Is it an everlasting curse?” he pondered aloud.
“No,” I murmured, my gaze lost in the endless procession of time. “It is unyielding.”
He looked at me, perplexed.
“Perplexed?” I asked, tilting my head.
“Yes,” he admitted, his chisel pausing midair.
I exhaled, slow and deliberate.
“Aye,” I agreed, nodding toward the inscriptions, “but in our stone-like hearts, truth never dies.”
When the great heights fell—when the towers crumbled and the sky wept—every breath bore the weight of untold sagas. Each heartbeat echoed with the cadence of celestial hymns, yet my story lay untouched, though rephrased by the hands of divine destiny-makers.
Suspicion clung to me like a shroud. I felt the eyes of eager scribes upon me, their quills poised, their ink thirsting for scandal. They coveted my downfall, seeking to weave my ruin into their wretched displays.
But I stood, immovable.
A bastion against their voyeuristic hunger.
Never would they drink from the wellspring of my sorrow.
Never would they revel in the spectacle of my demise.
I swore, with the last embers of my soul, that I would deny them the satisfaction. I would endure, unyielding, until the final curtain fell.
“Nothing there.”
The wind answered with silence.
Midnight unfurled its obsidian cloak.
I sat in the dim hush, counting the spectral visitors of my past—ghosts of friends, whispers of kin, the weight of eternity pressing upon me.
“Almighty,” I murmured to the night, “what could men of that time be doing now?”
“Nothing, baby. Nothing, nothing.”
His voice drifted to me, an echo from the abyss.
“Nothing?” I repeated, a shiver slipping down my spine. “God forbid.”
“Nothing is the pinnacle of tragedy.”
“I do nothing, darling.”
“I know.”
And in that silence, I understood.
Nothing is the weight of a forgotten name.
Nothing is the absence of a heartbeat once remembered.
Nothing is the void where love once lived.
And we, the stones, bear witness.
In my time, you could find them gathered—whether by the dunghills, along the barren creeks, or within the tranquil courtyard of the mosque, where silence reigned like an unseen scribe etching fate upon the earth. They stood, cloaked in dark or khaki coats, their rifles slung across weary shoulders, their fingers dancing over the beads of long, winding prayers. Their eyes, fixed upon the mist-shrouded canopy of the cemetery, traced the towering silhouettes of ancient oaks, as if seeking communion with the dead.
Amid the tendrils of smoke curling in the evening’s breath, they spoke—not in hushed whispers, but in the bold cadence of men who wove history into speech. Tales spun from silk and dust, half-truths laced with poetry, voices rich with sorrow and bravado alike.
The ghost beside me, draped in sardonic elegance, exhaled a knowing chuckle.
“Deceit,” he murmured, “has a voice too sweet to resist.”
I nodded.
“Indeed.”
For even the most deceitful words carried within them the weight of a thousand buried truths, their essence woven into the very fabric of our minds.
A swelling wave of a renowned symphony washed over the boulevard, drowning me in the relentless embrace of dusk. Tears welled in my eyes as I listened—not just to the music, but to the solitary resonance of my own existence.
I was the lonely snowgum.
Rooted yet adrift, swaying yet unmoved, my voice lost in the distant melodies that rose from the brothels lining the night’s edges. Their songs, ghostly and honeyed, wrapped around me like a net of sighs.
“I am a lonely snowgum,” murmured a voice within me.
“Indeed,” I whispered back, baring my soul to the unflinching stars.
Beneath their cold illumination, I gazed upon the street below—a flood of faces, a mosaic of a thousand races, shifting like tides beneath the neon glow.
Yet within this riot of beauty, I harbored an unspeakable sorrow.
For though I stood amidst them, I was marred, unseen, tainted by an invisible stain.
Caught between the call of freedom and the weight of sin, I curled into myself, tracing the scar upon my chest with trembling fingers.
“I saw a man.”
The man I saw was my husband’s friend.
“Aye,” he murmured, unfolding a scrap of poetry before me.
I thought him a genius.
Once, we too had been poets—bards, writers, singing like nightingales.
But that time had passed.
My husband had loved him.
And he had loved me.
He had struggled, desperate and silent, for a love he dared not name.
And today, with a hoarse voice, he recited a poem.
But the words failed him.
They failed the beauty they sought to capture.
And yet, the bastard had crossed the Pacific for me.
Victoria the Great
(A Lament for the Fractured Crown)
Victoria the Great,
Goddess of a bygone empire,
Once seized Zeus’s scepter
And ensnared a soul sharper than Winston.
Sovereign of her chivalry,
Enthroned upon the magic of history,
She filled the vastness of her own legend.
"Her majesty is frozen in the narrow sky of the city," he once mused. I used to sit beneath the queen’s monument, that cold bastion of imperial memory, and whisper the same old question to the air.
What might happen to us?
Had I revealed my secrets? I wasn’t sure. But something in his gaze—something in the tremor of his breath—unsettled me. There was a weight in him I didn’t trust. A depth I recognized too well.
He scared the hell out of me.
For a fleeting moment, I thought the beast before me might be my own man, returned not in flesh but in fire and fury. I knew, even then, that the bastard had begun his poem the moment he set foot here—this city, this shrine, this wound.
“I dare to say,” he murmured, “let’s reserve a place for you in the Genocide Museum.”
“Are you insane?” I snapped, startled by the venom of his tongue.
“No,” he said flatly. “I’m serious.”
“Get the hell out of here, now, bastard!”
“I’ll go,” he replied, calm as iron. “I’ll never return.”
“Wait, wait—” I spat, fury overtaking grief. “How dare you say that?”
“I am crucified,” he whispered.
“So what? We all have been crucified.”
He looked at me then, not as a man looks at a woman, but as history regards a wound. “We crossed oceans,” he said. “Spaces. Skies.”
“Alone?”
“No,” he replied. “With Ely Banister Soane.”
I was tired. Bone-deep. Spirit-tired.
“I’m tired too,” he added, as if echoing my breath.
And then the storm came.
It roared through the city’s underbelly like a god unchained, tearing beneath a bruised blue sky, until the wind crushed the city’s wings—her chest, her lungs, the last of her strength.
“Crushed her chest,” he said.
“Flattened the walls of her heart.”
“Stop it,” I hissed, voice sharp with rage. “They were children.”
The wind slammed against the trees, the schools, the windows, the doors we never locked. It shrieked. It clawed. It tore apart my husband’s frame as if it remembered.
“Right, right,” he mumbled, drifting. “So what? Gone. With tears.”
“He is here,” he said suddenly, pressing a hand to his chest.
“Bastard,” I muttered.
“The city?”
“No,” he whispered. “Him.”
Then he spoke again, voice low and reverent, as if reciting a prayer passed down in blood.
“He was the home of a thousand virtues, allegories, poems, and epics—flowers of mountains, songs of mountains, our fragrant bower... yours, and mine, and my own sibling.”
With bitter remembrance, I rose. A giant in grief.
The tempest had raged, had screamed, had swallowed us whole. Smoke billowed from the heart of the town. The streets we knew shrank into splinters and embers.
And then—without warning, without farewell—he was gone.
Vanished into the ether, as if he had never been.
Goddamn.
I stood there, barely breathing, murmuring the only words I had left:
How dare you?
A passerby startled me. His voice broke the silence, casual and cryptic.
“Are you waiting for the Happy Prince, Your Majesty?”
It sounded like a jest, but there was something in his eyes—something deeper. A flicker of ruin. Of knowing. A wayward soul.A wanderer, like me.I regarded his figure with a bitter gaze, tracing the outline of his shadow as if it might speak. There was something broken in the way he carried himself—something nearly as flawed as my own reflection.
****
The season of a quiet toll
Years had to pass before the weight of them settled on my skin like silent dust—inescapable, unyielding. Time showed no mercy, bringing me back here, to this street, to this face I had tried so hard to forget. George Street stretched before me like my wound, raw and open, aching with memories I couldn’t close. And there he was—my husband’s friend—walking leisurely, as if the years had been gentle with him. His gaze met mine, lingering too long, a familiarity that pulled at some invisible thread neither of us could sever. “Mother sent me binoculars and a new radio when I was a little guerrilla,” he said softly, voice thick with nostalgia, lips barely moving.His watching wasn’t new. A chill ran down my spine as I muttered, “Bastard, you were supposed to be gone.”
But he didn’t flinch. His eyes searched mine, as if seeking proof I was still alive, some remnant of the woman he once knew. Tears, unexpected and out of place, welled in his eyes. I lifted a cynical hand—a faint, almost indifferent wave. Yet even after he disappeared, his presence clung to me like a shadow I couldn’t shake. “Have you ever had an objective plan in your life?” he’d once asked. “No,” I’d replied. “I haven’t. I’ve never had one.” That was the truth. It was the hardest time for both of us—a period of restless immaturity where we hovered between knowing and not knowing, wanting and fearing. He lacked the courage to face me, and I, wild and merciless, was too much for him.
The moment he glimpsed my seriousness, he recoiled, shielding his face and fleeing through the crowd—a wounded ghost trying to escape the world of the living. I wanted to call his name, to hold on, but before I could speak, he was gone.Still, he never let me break him completely.He found refuge in forgotten streets and silent corners where poets go to die. His craft became his shield, his words the last barrier against a world that had stripped him bare. He had known prisons and battlefields alike and wore suffering like a second skin, his wounds medals he bore with quiet pride.And I, cruel and reckless, tried to tear him down with my words. Every savage insult, every venomous syllable aimed to hollow him out, reduce him to dust, make him weightless in my hands. But he remained—unyielding. Through it all, he saw me still, something pure and perfect in spite of myself. And that was the cruelest cruelty of all.
“I am a bitch,” I confessed to no one, the words heavy on my tongue, soaked in self-loathing. “A terrible woman. Mean and cruel.” I whispered it again, letting it sink in, letting it cut deep.The northern bay stretched before me, restless beneath the night’s breath. Lights danced on the waves like shattered stars. I stood rooted, hollowed, waiting for a revelation that never came.In the hazy reflection of the water, I saw her—my former self—tall, resolute, a storm I had created. “I won’t ever be...” The vow was unfinished, a silent promise to rise—not necessarily to redemption, but at least to understanding. In solitude, I sought the queen beneath whose feet I found the only stillness I’d known in years. She did not answer, but she did not turn away. Her stone gaze was comfort and anchor.
And as I looked up at her cold, grey face, I thought of his poem—words he left behind, words that refused to fade. When I heard them again, they felt strange and intimate—like whispers of a truth I’d long buried.“When I stare unto thee, further up to thy grey face, akin to me...” The rest was lost, but I knew what followed: “My bleeding wounds may torment thy conscience.”His words seemed like my discreet consciousness—quiet, secret, and painfully true.
Threshold of Resonance (Exile Cut) George Street choked on its own disquiet, the city a feverish beast writhing beneath me, dreaming in the clatter of heat and the stench of diesel. Its every exhalation was thick with the broken glow of neon and the dust of universal forgetting. Rain-gored bars bled light into puddles like shattered prophecies. I moved through them—a ghost among the living, untouched, unwitnessed. The world had ceased to offer reflections. I simply was. I wandered without aim, each step an obeisance to something older than will. My body navigated the grimy avenues not as my own, but as living inheritance—a memory unowned, carried in the bone. Whether I turned left into the gaudy glare, forward into deepening dusk, or backward into the gaping maw of ruin, it ceased to matter. My path was not chosen. It was inscribed beneath the blood, a silent scripture above speech. I was being summoned. My destination: St. Mary’s. The cathedral did not merely stand—it brooded. A monolithic verdict carved in stone, its gothic ribs torn open to a God long deafened by silence. Mist, thick and funereal, draped its spires like burial shrouds, obscuring the heavens it strained toward. The air, heavy and calcified, held the echoing thrum of prayers too ancient to be interpreted, too wounded to be heard. No absolution resided here. Only resonance—fossilized in every grain of mortar, glorified in the shattering silence that permeated its hollow chambers. Victoria awaited again—fixed, imperial, and terrifyingly blind. The bronze queen, sentinel of forgotten ages, presided over an expanse of palpable absence. Her crown was a cold mockery, forged from the ashes of vanished empires; her face, a mask etched with the sorrow of regret and the bitter triumph of conquest. I did not look at her. I looked through her, into the void where her spirit once was. And something deep within me—a phantom nerve—trembled, as if memory itself had flinched from an unutterable truth. She was not the statue. I was. The poem pulsed in my hand, a relic still warm from the crucible of grief. His last words—not ink, but scripture encrypted in ache. Each line a throb, like bone remembering its fracture, a nerve reliving its severing. And so, from somewhere deeper than lips, from the marrow of my being, I exhaled the question: “Who walks beside me?” Time buckled. The air folded inward, soaked in unspeakable meaning, becoming a medium of revelation. The voice that answered was not mine. Was not hers. It was not singular at all, but a chorus—a convergence of whispers and roars, ancient and immediate: “You do. We do. We are the answer unfolding.” We paused—not as thought, but as recursion. Echoes contemplating themselves. The universe, mirrored in a drop of dew. “Perhaps someday.” It was no longer a statement. It was a dimension, a place one could step into. A future forged from the ache of now. I envisioned confronting Mao then—the spectral archivist, the curator of human suffering, who catalogued trauma like fireproofed relics. “Fuck you, Mao,” I whispered, but the profanity felt hollow—a performance without heat, lacking the raw power of hatred. So I didn’t curse him. I deleted him. Not with fire, but with the obliterating indifference of irrelevance. He became static, a flicker of forgotten noise. A watermark on history’s failed draft. My existence no longer fit within his ledger; I no longer belonged to the biology he documented, nor to the suffering he codified. Time was no longer a thread. It was an ember, a loop of fire, consuming and renewing. And I—the match, the ash, the breath that stirred the flame. The poem inside me began to move, not across the page, but beneath the skin. A living force. No longer language. Mutation. There were no more sentences. Only wounds shaped like truths. I felt them ignite—not burn, but illuminate, forming an internal constellation. Coordinates written in scar tissue, legible only to grief, decipherable only in the language of irreversible loss. The wind read me. The city read me. And the stars, ancient and silent, read me in a tongue that predates light itself. I stood, spine humming like a taut wire, my mouth salted with the taste of centuries. And then I heard him—my husband, gone beyond time, beyond reach. His voice settled on the skin of the world like fog, soft and everywhere, whispering Dante: “To behold the other pole, and saw four stars Ne’er seen before save by the primal people.” I inhaled. The vastness of the moment filled my lungs. “But I can see them,” I said. Because I am one of them—the ones who left. The ones who crossed oceans not of water, but of silence. Emigrants of history. Refugees of meaning. I see the four stars not because I am holy—not because I am chosen—but because I am elsewhere. Because exile, with its brutal clarity, honed my vision. Because loss, relentless and merciless, polished my perception to a blade. The stars—fierce, untamed, primal—hung not as guides, but as witnesses. Neither kind nor cruel. Just there. Like truth. Like gravity. Like the inevitable conclusion of all things. And beneath their ancient, unwavering gaze, I understood. There is no redemption. There is no forgiveness. There is only resonance—the sacred, terrifying violence between what was and what will never, can never, be again. I was no longer seeking. I was no longer mourning. I was finally in tune. So I stepped forward—not to be remembered, not to be absolved. But to rupture. To... [Words are Missing ].
The End
Autumn 2004
0 comments:
Post a Comment