The Enemy
For some time now I have begun to dream of my childhood. That lesser me, so fresh and unknowing, constantly depend on something seems so apart from my daily self, as if the spice has carved through my body a channel dividing my world. The past me and the present me and the future me, seen as different persons bonded together solely through the incredible force of time unifying everything, bringing sense to everything, making my decisions the obvious seams that weave my life into a whole. Yet I know it is me who stands at the end of all these, it must be me living this life. During the night I loose all strings, I am bounded to my chair like a spectator watching my life going by back and forth, back and forth till I no longer care where it all leads to.
On one part it is my life back then - nothing but a puzzle of details, the smaller facts that grown-ups no longer care for, a collection of glimpses that my smaller body seemed possessed by. The corner of the table, a drop of water I dared to spill, a soft blue fabric tearing apart, a hand gripped on my arm rushing me through the distortedly huge grains of sands. My own legs, soft and powerless, a peril for the good of the tribe, my weak arms, my useless tongue. I was a prisoner of myself, desperate for help from the others.
I dream I am bound to this body I have no control over. I dream I wake up to my mature self who marches through a life I did not weave. Did I choose it? When did I pick that string leading me here, into this bed, next to this man I know as a boy in my dreams at night? He told me he dreamed of me, even before we met. He knew me. He chose but I did not. One has no choice when one's in love. And that I was and that I still am.
During daytime I stay real quite and move behind invisible veils that hide me from the others. I know everyone's name, their stories and their past weaved into mine. Friends, family, acquaintances, enemies, friends, lovers, enemies, acquaintances, people of no importance, servants - they are but an endless raw of figures passing through my life. I answer to them, I get angry, I am mean, I do all the things I know they expect from me, the things I expect from me and yet I feel so lost.
The spice gives me no rest lately. The more I take the blurrier the vision fades. I see nothing anymore. My body gets all tensed and my heart is strangled by the rush of feelings ruling my world. All that it reveals to me are my own desperate wishes, the child I want, the child I lost (the pain still so strong and withering), the hands I long so to touch me. Constantly. I would stay in his embrace forever. I would loose myself into the icy world of future and death that I see mirrored into his eyes, into his skin, into the shine of his hair, that world so apart from me.
I want to know that world. It is a desire stronger than the need to breathe. I want to explore it to its never found borders, map it with my hands. I want to see that world. I have always wanted this even before we met. The spice made me realize my whole life, from the moment I strode out of my mother, has been aimed to this conclusion, to this journey. I no longer now if this is true or it is just a proof of my love. Nor do I care.
He never lets me in. He used to tell me bits of it, like sending postcards from distant planets. He asked me what I though of it but my words got lost into the freezing air of a desert's dawn. I always begin but I never end my sentences. What is there to say? I want to touch that world. I feel no pity for him now. I wonder if I ever felt. How can one love somebody and feel no pity for their pain? Maybe mercy is not about love, but is about being afraid of death of pain. Like buying the mercy of God by sharing it for the others. Something so efficient, so self-oriented, so cheap and meaningless in comparison with love. The millions who come on this planet in a search of a quick way to bliss would bother less if they only knew that mercy is just commerce while love is never on stock.
Alia adores playing with market predictions. She is a prisoner of her wishes so much so. She tries to buy our attention with the monstrous revelations she has about things she never really lived. Even as a child she told us everything. Every single last detail of her dreams and thoughts. Was it the mere innocence of a child or her mature thinking that had made her say such things? Was she not skillful enough to grasp the terror of the elder when she said those things? She did not want admiration, she just played the card of pity. She hoped to buy the grown-ups' pity by sharing the horrible details of her existence. She has always been such a master in the puzzle of feelings. Quite a performance that thing she does. But she never won, did she? Not even once. Not even in front of her mother. To her I have always been the necessary accessory of her brother. A guaranty that her over-matured mind, lost from her present self, would not play her tricks into the identity of the one person who can understand her, the one man who can truly know her. And yes, he does know his own sister, he knows her and owns her heart by the same tricky games of efficient emotions. She loves him therefore she would never appeal to his mercy.
I have a low compassion for my fellow humans. I was raised that way. Not to help others be happy but to show them how to survive. By means of surviving myself. Maybe if I had not been brought up to this imminent destiny of Sayyadina would have known the other side of mercy. I would have pitied him and reach for his own pity when my time is to do just so.