Latest Posts by jean-elle-writing - Page 8
I am tired of hiding. Of being embarrassed. Unsure. Reluctant. Ashamed. I am tired now, more than all of those things. And it’s a fatigue I love, the sort that kicks in to spare me misfortune, and only spare me misfortune, in an awfully painless way. After all isn’t that fatigues purpose, to stop us from continuing on and hurting ourselves.
I can’t explain the joy I feel. And isn’t that so wonderful isn’t that so perfect to have a problem doppled in sugar and cherries with pits you suck on until they are bare in your mouth.
Scales painted like fingernails in an array of cobalts, blacks, and periwinkles danced around me in reflections and refractions in the crystal clear water. She circled me, playing with me, I thought. Though I know now she was playing with the sun, and I was a lowly witness, only in the way of her serenity. I didn’t intend to startle her when we met eyes, it just sort of happened that way.
Oh, I feel warm. I feel warm like the sun even in the darkest of rooms. I am me again.
Art by Jason Scheier
Smaller hearts beat faster, ever faster. Run rabbit run ever faster, ever faster. I’ll cut your finger cut your thumb, wear a plaster, wear a plaster. I’ll tell your secrets to the room, such disaster, such disaster.
Forgive me gentle heart, I didn’t mean to be a bastard.
Futureless moth, eating old keepsakes. Nothing else to be done in locked closets but eat. Soothing herself on the past, indulgently gorging on memorabilia, unbothered by the holes her little mouth leaves. No better meal than childhood. No better place to die than in wools, and silks, and cottons, refusing to batter oneself against the closet door.
The black beetle lies on its back, stomach burning by the tips of the sun’s low hanging fingers. I flip him over with my broom four times, and he can’t manage to stay upright. It could be the wind knocking him over, or the cracks in man made stone unfamiliar to his nature bound feelers. Or it could be that he just wants to die and I have to let him.
I don’t mind when her leather jacket burns my finger tips, that’s just the summer sun gettin’ jealous of us making love in this old red truck. A lick of hell on the way to heaven don’t scare me. Only being without her does.
-Confessions of a Southern Belle
How does a siren know your song? The proper words, the perfect intonation to pull you from the safety of your vessel into the sea? It is no small task, tainting minds with tongue, but a siren knows this well. Every sailor she devours shares with her his innermost desires, simply by being eaten. His mind is consumed by her, his memories dissolved and swallowed. Internalized. And when you’ve had one man, you’ve had them all. Or so she thought.
-Diary of a Siren
Before she swims to me, I catch her scent in the water. Like bath pearls popping in the laps of purple water against the yellow sand, I inhale euphoria, and I am intoxicated, immovable from the shoreline. I melt into the mud, and I am eaten alive, transfixed, infatuated with the shape of teeth boring holes in my skin.
-Diary of a Siren
What is all this?
It’s bioluminescence. You never seen it before?
No, I haven’t.
It’s little tiny creatures, every time something moves through the water they light up like itty bitty stars.
Do you eat them?
Do I-? No! They’re beautiful!
You don’t eat beautiful things?
You’re still here aren’t you?
-conversations with a siren
I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and floats like a sun in my mind. But she is a dying star. Her past self pervades my memory but her realness, her fullness in the present is nothing but black space where a blip of sunshine used to be. I cannot reconcile what I reminisce in my mind and what truly exists. I see her far from me. My mother is cool and white and explodes in my mind. The old light she used to shine will keep going long after she stops. And one day, even that false hope will fade. And there will be nothing left for me to peer at from a distance, but a stretch of sky I once called my mother.
Would you burn the olive trees if you grew them, if you felt their bark wind under your fingertips like locks of hair? Would you poison the water if it quenched your thirst, if you let the river stones touch your sole? You claim the land is yours, and you’re owed every grain of its sand but someone who loves the land would not demolish its beauty so recklessly. If that is how you treat what is yours, I dread the fate of those you call others.
She tastes of blood and salt, the siren I kiss on the rocks. I do not know whose blood I taste, but I do not care.
-Diary of a Siren
I don’t want to die knowing sadness last. I want to die in a happy moment. I want to die on the beach when I’m 8 years old, and I’m boogie boarding right for the first time. There’s salt water in my teeth and the sun is shining. I want to die suddenly. My head hitting the bottom of the sea floor hard and fast. I want to die a happy child.
16 years old, five people around my table, two legs, and no bombs. I eat dinner with my family and we laugh at my dad dropping Qidreh on his chest. He looks at me with an embarrassed smile and I hand him a cloth to wipe himself with. 16 years old, one person around my table, one and a half legs, one bomb. My dad amputates my leg as I lay on the dinner table. He looks at me with anguish and I cry out to him as I feel every cut he makes. There is no anesthesia, there is no hospital for me to go to, my father the surgeon looks out of place operating in our family home. But my leg must come off, and the laughter of past dinners must quiet to allow for my screams. 16 years old, one leg, too many bombs to count. I clench my jaw to keep quiet as my father changes my leg’s dressing. He looks at me with apologetic eyes and I hand him a cloth to wipe my wound with. 16 years old, one leg, and one hope left: to make it to 17.
One day I’ll be old, and teenagers will record me doing mundane tasks with my wife in public, and post it somewhere, on an app with a name I don’t know, appreciating #humans being humans. Appreciating how adorable old people are like we’re rabbits in a wooded glade or something, never thinking they’ll be me, holding the hand of their partner, helping her step from the street to the sidewalk with weary bones and wrinkled faces. One day I was them, and one day they will be me. Though I’ll never know their names or faces, they will have taken a moment of my life as their own as a relic of humanity, though for me, it is just a slice of my morning commute. I wonder if I’ll feel the camera on my back then. I wonder if I’ll wish I was the recorder and not the recorded. I wonder how many likes the essence of my self and my life would get, as a moment of my life is turned into an online commodity by a stranger.
It took three. The first killed her parents, in the home they used to share. The second took her legs, leaving only her arms to hold her. The third took her life. It took three bombs for Israel to murder a little girl. But it only takes the death of one child to devastate a world.
What secrets I would tell you if it would not take you drowning to hear them
-Diary of a Siren
A mermaid is born when a heart is buried, deep in the trenches of the blue sea. A mermaid coveting motherhood need only snatch a sailor’s heart and offer it to the seabed, and within hours, her baby girl will rise from the sand and into her arms. What happens, though, when a mermaid steals the heart of another mermaid? How will the others forgive a murder, even if it is done out of love?
-Diary of a Siren
Loving cruel people doesn’t change who they are. It’s like holding a morning star to your chest hoping it’ll become smooth. It just leaves you bleeding.
I was 12 the first time I was catcalled. A middle school boy I’d never met found his eyes lingering on the hem of my school uniform’s skirt. I wish I’d worn the long navy blue pants instead. I wish I’d worn a cock and balls as well to keep more boy’s eyes far away from me. But there was no way for me to avoid the screaming missile of womanhood. All I could do was listen to my girlhood ripping itself out of my fingers; my fingers that used to hold dolls now holding my tongue. A brutal silence I wore as woolen armor to protect me, and enrage me all the same with its intrepid itch. I shouldn’t have had to be quiet in the face of boys lusting after me, so eager to pursue manhood that they mutilate my girlhood. It shouldn’t have been taken from me by someone who used to see me as a cooties carrier, or on good days, a friend. I can barely remember all that they said now, but I cannot shake the feeling their nasty words gave me. I shouldn’t have had to understand what it meant to be a woman before I bled. But the world is not kind to its creators. Every foul mouthed boy crawled his way out of a woman, only to seek another to whittle down into a Venus doll. The boy ogled me alongside my two friends. He too, was not alone. He asked his friend toddling alongside him with an audacious voice which of us they preferred. “I like the tall one,” he said as if choosing flowers to pick from the ground. An act of collection, of killing the thing you covet. My friend piped up and said, “we’re not objects on a shelf,” but I still felt their eyes burning into our backsides. The boy and his friends spat words at us under their breath that I cannot remember, and we walked into the middle school gates feeling heavier than before. Unwillingly we were no longer school girls, but vessels of sexuality tempting men and exciting boys. I felt my crotch turn from a place I peed from to an open wound. I felt my skin tighten, I was trapped in a budding teen girl’s body when I yearned to keep my childhood just a little bit longer. I was 12 the day before. But in a matter of sentences I was dragged into womanhood, and I lamented having known girlhood at all.
-diary of a former girl
If only she understood that I ate her with love, and not hunger.
-diaries of a Siren
Ode to the Red Boy
I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.
On the Photos from Gaza
She screams, but her mother can't hear her. She's only inches away. But the soft, floral blanket caked with dust is heavier than the broken concrete that used to be home, than the missiles that stretch out cold metal arms to dismember and destroy, than the guns young men tote in old men's wars. It holds her mother's dead body in a vice-grip, but there is no grip tighter than the girl's on the blanket. She screams harder. She wants nothing else than to lift the veil, between life and death, between her and her mother, but it is too heavy. It is too heavy for a little girl who only wants to be with her mother.
It is relieving to write what I think. I hadn't realized how ravenous and independent thoughts can be when left to their own endeavors. They can swarm behind the eyes so fiercely that they may pop out. And perhaps that would be a good thing, for a dangling eye can see oneself from an outside perspective, and not one manufactured and manhandled by pesky buzzing thoughts.
How pathetic. To spend my days reassuring myself that they are not wasted, all the while wasting them in trivial debates with the wretched thing in the mirror about the very topic. Why I should answer to her, I do not know. She is the opposite of me. Her left eye is where my right is, and her right eye is where my left is. Her hair is parted on the wrong side, her college chosen wrong, her days spent mindlessly, her work set to waste, what a rotten thing she is. I know who I am. And it isn't her. It can't be. Or every poor thing I think of myself would be true.
What softness could I find for myself, if I allowed it. I feel a tightness in my chest every time I love myself or forgive my failures as if it is a betrayal of who I am. Maybe some people are meant to hurt. Maybe love smothers some fires that are born to burn.