Layers of Person

Don't sit there and tell me that you're a failure. Don't speak those words, don't utter them in my presence or without. Don't ever think them or let them sully your mind and heart, not for a single second, not for half a moment, not for a heartbeat.

Don't look at a graveyard of half finished dreams and use them to judge your worth. Don't look at the ocean of bricks and stones surrounding you and believe the lies they try to tell you. Bricks are what remains of broken buildings but they are also the bits you use to build. If you're surrounded with stone and cement it doesn't mean you're standing in ruins, you could simply be where things have yet to be built.

Stop looking at the materialistic. Stop judging things with a focused mind that only sees what crops it's reaped. Look beyond the field to the lives that you built. Look at me. Look at us, and see the layers of person that you created within us. You might not have given us things from without but by God you gave us pieces that we used to create our within.

You built people. You built us cell for cell, one piece of character at a time and you made us to be worth more than any materialistic things you could have given us. You gave us resilience, you gave us strength of mind and character, you gave us boundless hope and endless ambition, you gave us curiosity, you gave us a love for knowledge that can never be quenched. You gave us us. You made us into the types of human beings that will never fail because they will never stop.

Circumstances can attack at any given moment and take away blocks of what you've gathered in your life, it can take away your gifts and the future you wanted us to have. But you gave us things no one can take from us, not even life itself. You gave us layers of person that we can use to stay upright whenever disaster strikes.

You're not a failure. You raised human beings that stand even as they are falling. You didn't build us lives, you built us into people that will one day build hundreds of lives. You're the biggest success I know, and the best builder and giver the world has ever seen. You might not know it yet, you might not see it, but I swear to you with everything that you built inside of us, we will show you. We will show you how wrong you are.

To the greatest man I know

True Words

Let's speak of the world. Let's speak of water and wind. Let's speak of sun and sand. Let's speak of nature, of God's creations, of beauty.. of anything.

Let's find distractions -things to pin our words to so they don't fall where they always do. Let's cover reality with a thick blanket of nonsense and play a game of hide and never seek. Let's use fake words and look through lying eyes and peer into pretend.

Let's not. Let's instead speak of feelings as they come, and let our words describe what they may. Let's speak of a loss so true and pure that you get lost within it. Let's speak of layers and layers of the same exact feeling spreading shades of the same flavor every moment they exist. Let's speak of that chest tightening lack that robs your heart of anything that isn't confusion.

Let's speak of feeling like you're floating in midair, in utter darkness, without knowing why for neither the present nor the future. Let's speak of the exhaustion of maintaining a semblance of normalcy when your insides are anything but. Let's speak of an endless stream of shadows made of pain and fear and loss that are held in place by nonexistent strands of strength.

Let's speak of an ocean of darkness held at bay by the dim flickers of a dying candle. Let's speak of living in fear of cracking under the immense pressure and falling victim to a world of feelings that constantly searches for a dent in your armor so it can engulf you.

Let's speak of a single limp human soul standing on water, drowning in shadows and carrying the weight of a stormy sky. Let's speak of imagination that speaks real better than reality and of unreal images painting nothing but the truest truth. Let's speak true words in their lying form and let's hope storms, shadows and loss find a way to drain out through them and leave a sliver of emptiness for serenity to find rest. 

Change

I want to take a step back. Or twenty, or perhaps more. I want to take however many steps back it needs for me to see myself and my life clearly. I want to see every messy corner, every broken piece of glass and every pile of ash. I want to see the good and the bad with a clarity that only distance can give.

When I can see everything, when I've developed sight and a mind that can fathom every facet of myself, I want to sit back and make decisions. I want to uproot everything and move it around. I want to reorganize my life, throw things out and put new things in their place. I want change. I want it so badly it is a need and no longer a mere desire.

I need to throw all olds out and bring in a big bunch of new. I want new hopes and new dreams, I want new goals and new plans, I want new ideas and new thoughts. I want a new mind, and a new perspective. I want to want different things and I want to want them differently. I want my surroundings to reflect that need for different -I want everything to be fresh and new.

I want change. I want to go through myself and my life like a tsunami and wash my insides and outsides clean and bare. I want to replant, I want to begin from zero again with nothing but a book of experience guiding me through. I want to change everything through and through, and then sit from afar and bask in the comfort of losing that restlessness that was my old. 

Loss, Faith & Surrender

I don't have any more fancy words in me. I don't have any descriptions, or elegant sentences that tell of how I feel in the most convoluted way I can manage. I have nothing in me but true, honest to god words in their simplest form -words that tell.

I feel lost. The only solid in my life right now is my faith. It is the only tangible protection I have against the madness that is surrounding me, and the only thing keeping me sane and whole. With faith you hold on to Allah, you hold on to him with everything you have and believe in his wisdom, and that your patience will be rewarded. With faith you surrender all thought to Allah, and await those trustworthy actions that make worrying pointless.

I have surrendered. But there are things that must be done on my end. There are fights to be fought, decisions to be made and paths to be taken. There are trials that test my faith and my patience. Life keeps happening to you even if you've surrendered it to Allah. And I don't know how to live it. That is my problem. That is my confusion and my loss.

If it were up to me, I would hide in the littlest corner I could find. I would hide in it with my praying clothes and with my Qura'an and I would spend every minute of my time praying and praying. If it were up to me I would not live, I would just worship, pray and believe. But it is not up to me. It seldom is.

Answers are needed from me. Decisions are expected. Strength is welcomed. Togetherness is required. And they are all things that I am currently running just a little low on. I don't have the wit to find the answers. I don't have the courage to make decisions. I have strength but it is the inward kind that keeps me from breaking, not the outward kind that can hold others' hands. And I have togetherness but it comes in the form of endless praying.

The questions are chipping away at my patience. Questions all around, all the time, from everyone and everywhere. The one person that should have the most questions is me, and I keep those hidden and locked away in a vault labeled "none of my business". I can't answer any questions because I don't have the answers, and I don't want to have them, I don't want to seek them out and I don't want to find them. They are none of my business. They're Allah's, and His alone. That is what surrender means. That is what my faith is.

Alas, I must find answers to give. There are only so many questions you can leave unanswered without tipping people over the edge. My edge might be some distance away, but I have established long ago that I am less than human and my edges seem to always be misplaced. People mistake trust and faith for denial and retreat. But perhaps they are mistaken for each other because they truly look alike.

They need answers, Allah has them but I do not. And so I must once again hunt around inside myself and find some extra patience and strength. Perhaps there is some left on that furthest shelf, or in that corner labeled rainy day. Wherever they are they must be there somewhere, for I need them to brew a potion of answers out of dust. I need them to keep my smile, and to offer up things that I've never had. I need them so I can be for others what my faith is to me -the rope they hold on to when they fall off the edge. 

Tell Me Lies

Hide me away. Tuck me in a safe little corner where the monsters can't find me. Tell me that if I close my eyes then I am invisible, and not a thing can harm me. Hold me in your arms and promise me that the shadows won't consume me. Make me laugh and smile and assure me that as long as I do the tears and pain won't find a way towards me. Feed me a mountain of lies and let it hide reality from my sight. Let the feeble lies shine so bright they blind me from everything that is true.

Look into my eyes and see how bare and broken my soul is. I promise I will try with everything that is left in me to let you see what it truly looks like. Strip away my outsides, pull away the shell, the little pieces of hard metal and unyielding rock. Scrape them off the skin they are stuck to, and peel off the masks that became a part of the bones. Get those hundreds of layers out of the way and tend to the creature that I am underneath. Rock me gently to sleep and promise me that as long as I keep the shields away the nightmares won't come near me.

Tell me everything will be alright. Say it over and over again. Yell it at me as loud as you can until your voice drowns out the endless noise that surrounds me. I promise to try to let you say it, I promise to try to believe you when you shout. Comfort me as you would a child. Tell me empty words that won't make a difference, and make me promises that you can't keep. Hold me as I cry and don't try to make me stop. Tell me that you will never leave. Promise me to be my constant in an ocean that is anything but. Tell me to break down, and promise me that you will hold all my pieces and keep them whole and safe for me.

Make me a child that can hide and believe the troubles won't find them. Reverse the clock and undo my adulthood. Take that horrid thing called being a grown up away from me, and throw it far enough that I can never find it. Do the impossible. Hide me from my responsibility. Tuck me in a safe little corner where I no longer have to fight. Tell me that if I close my eyes then I am invisible, and invisible people are allowed to give up. Hold me in your arms and promise to keep me safe from everything,  most importantly myself. 

They Never Tell You

They never tell you the full truth. They never tell you that your life will never be whole again. They never tell you all the things you need to know, and they never tell you all the things that by all rights must be known.

They tell you you'll be homesick. They tell you it's going to be a difficult adjustment. They assure you that eventually you'll be fine. They tell you time flies, and eventually you'll come back home. They tell you a lot of things, but they never tell you the bits that matter.

They don't tell you that you build a life for yourself. They never tell you that the homesickness goes away because eventually it feels like home. They forget to mention that you find yourself friends that become your family. They fail to tell you that you get attached.

They don't tell you that it feels like that very first goodbye, that first time you left home, when the journey ends and you must go back. They don't tell you how much more it hurts because it's permanent. They don't tell you how painful it is to say goodbye to a place that became your home.

They don't tell you that you'll be filled with a sadness that doesn't ease when you should be happy. They don't tell you that you'll shed tears when you pack. They don't tell you that you will break down what you built brick for brick, and you will end up missing something that is a mere memory for as long as you live.

They don't tell you the truth of it. They don't tell you that it starts with being homesick and ends with it as well. They don't tell you that your life becomes nothing but a series of goodbyes and hellos, and that you'll spend the rest of your life missing someone, something, or somewhere. 

Choking

I'm choking on contradictions. A hundred opposites coursing through me and fighting their way to the surface. Happiness and sadness. Excitement and dread. Hope and fear. Faith and loss. I feel them all. I smile as I sob and I find myself crying when I laugh. I skip around in joy, and then all of a sudden I shrink back into myself and drown in despair.

I feel too many things to feel anything but a lack of air. The tangle of emotions inside me is too loud to be ignored and too messy to be faced. I try to figure them out and to feel them all, but the more attention I give them the stronger they grow. The more I ignore them the more tangled they become. Any way I handle them they grow heavier on my chest, heavier in my throat and behind my lids.

I'm suffocating. My strength is battling my weakness, trying to dislodge the mountain of rocks that is keeping me from breathing but it won't budge. A hundred contradictions is one too many and I'm just lost in the storm they've all wrought up, running around blindly looking for air. I'm tired of it all and yet I am so energized. I want to despair and yet I am filled with boundless hope. I wish to cry but every tear comes with a laugh and the balance carries no relief. I want to scream but the only sound I carry is a whisper that's lost before it ever finds its way out.

I'm being torn to pieces by my contradictions. I'm choking on their fights, and I'm losing my battles because of them. All I know to do is to ride them out. All I can do is choke and choke and choke until they somehow all balance out.