# 61 || "Look up at the sky. Ask yourselves : is it yes or no?"

( WARNING: UN PEU HYPERVERBOSE )

"This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world."

-- Le Petit Prince.

Over the last twenty-five years ( give or take an hour or two ), I have learned that a lot of things slip through the cracks of clichés and words of wisdom combined. Maybe they’re best-kept secrets for a reason, so you don’t lose your belief in magic somewhere down the gutter : the place where you sometimes lose your hope, your faith, your integrity and self-love. In my wildest dreams ( or nightmares ), I never could have imagined the courage it takes to shine a light in the dark and see all those imperative features of reveries laying there all in a heap. But it doesn’t stop at courage, the strength to pick it up and dust it all off is beyond description. The merit in effort far exceeds the eminence in an effortless A+. Show me a pair of grazed knees, dirty hands and a tearstained pillowcase and I’ll give you five fucking stars. 

Sometimes I feel like I got lost somewhere in the middle of naivety and and this persistent guilt that won’t ever leave each and every crevice of my heart. It’s a mix between a curiosity and the desire to know absolutely everything that ever is and was and will be, combined with a fear that it’s all both frustratingly meaningless, and meaningful. It’s knowing of how to be better than I am, but to act upon it is still beyond reach. Does that make any sense at all?   

What if there was no such thing as prestige? What if we were all blind? What if respect and high regard stemmed from somewhere other than status and station? What if gold coins were replaced with genuine benevolence? I can only imagine a world where relationships arose from the deepest kind of love, the kind that wouldn’t dare make you trip and fall flat on your face in a nasty gutter. Instead I lay here amid red nail-polish soaked sheets, with a black heart trapped inside one helluva mess of a cage that has called itself a body. I only had one New Years Resolution and now it seems I was asking for too much. I’m one hundred and a million percent ready for this year to be over. I want to start try again. That’s all you can ever do, it seems. I only hope there was some kind of silver lining in this motherfucking bitch of a summerautumnwinterspring, and I pray that peace still exists. Bel anniversaire, petit oiseau. It's a new year. 

XOXO

ps. "Let me stand by you, the honour is mine."

# 60 || "When is a monster not a monster? Oh ... when you love it."

"If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world." 

-- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

( photo by emma matsuda )

It was just a fantasy, I have to remind myself of that every single morning. It seems I’ve been lucky enough to have been introduced to a kind of love that I have never known before. Perhaps it is a kind of love you only ever experience when the weather is warm enough to not need a sweater first thing in the morning, when you don’t want the night to end even if you know you get to wake up and do it all over again. If sleepy kittens and soy lattes aren’t enough to convince me out from under the covers, then perhaps the notion that summer even exists at all, maybe that is supposed to be enough. Maybe even a taste of paradise is supposed to satiate you until the end of days. Maybe it's wicked to want anything more than a morsel of something that felt like heaven.   

We dream about things, we conjure visions from the deepest and darkest hollows of our imagination. We dare to hope, we dare to desire, and we dare to lust — all of these seeming indulgences take more courage than you could ever imagine. It is easier to lose ourselves in the delusion that maybe nothing is transient. Especially not love. You don’t realise how the human mind attaches itself towards the comfort of what is familiar, and what is simple, and what is to be expected. It’s scary to be scared, it’s scary to not know what comes next, and it’s scary to even think of losing who or what seems to hold everything together.

I promise you’ll be okay. None of this is fair, and none of this makes sense, but I promise you’ll be okay. Here comes the sun and everything is gonna be alright. George Harrison said so, Bob Marley said so, Alicia Keys said so and I can only pinky swear with my right hand, and cross my fingers on the left, that what they and millions of others say is true. At some point tonight I realised that everything is bigger and better than anything I’ll ever be, and that isn’t something to be sad about, but instead I’m reminded that the capacity of every human emotion is so very powerful, and that power holds the answer to every action and inaction. But if that emotion just so happens to be love, don't ever feel like you need to defend your decisions. 

Question: Why?

Answer: "Because I loved _ _ _," --- that's more than enough. x

( i solemnly swear to be there, especially exclusively when you need it most )

# 59 || Þerney (One Thing)

I once-upon-a-time believed that absolutely everything is a choice, that nobody can make you do anything if you don’t really want to. But as I get older and the days blur into one-in-a-million, I can’t help but notice the norms that exist within society and all that keeps us united as citizens of the insanity that is the world we live in. Sometimes I think it is easier to love than to be loved, it is easier to give than to receive, and it’s all very well to offer advice and an opinion we don’t really believe. Or maybe that’s just me. 

What is self-love? I have never craved an escape like this before. I’ve never wanted to disappear so much. Sometimes whilst trying to stay present, I remain a split-second behind and mistake it for being stagnant. I indulge in the luxury of written illustration of the present moment, which is often misinterpreted as daydreaming. This habit is more of a tendency than a habit, and somewhere in the last decade maybe I’ve lost track of what’s really real.

Dear sparkle, where are you? I think I lost you somewhere in six or seven months ago. Please come back. I miss you. Love, Afifa x 

PS. What a mess !

# 58 || THE SEA IN CALM

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# 57 || “Last night … I dreamt of colours, lots of bright and happy colours and swans kissing and maybe I think they were singing.”

Sometimes I find the grandeur of everything near impossible to understand and truly identify with. Life, love, death, heartache and heartbreak — I guess the impermanence of everything that I’ve chosen to believe, leaves me jade green with envy at those foolish enough to drown in the transience that my ego is too stubborn to fall for. But what if I’m right? What if nothing, nothing, qualifies a rehearsed emotion unlike those that transpire without any sort of cue. I dream of inconvenient truths, of an honesty more raw than the sparkling scarlet of an open wound, of a world governed by passion and intensity and a love beyond your wildest dreams. I don’t know how anybody has time for the practicality that accompanies playing it safe and settling for company far less than what you deserve. 

Open up my head and my heart and let the fireworks break free, glitter and ash will spill out to make an opalescent mess  all over the earth. It is because I refuse to accept anything less than idyllic, that sometimes I think I will settle for nothing. The perfection I crave is clean and white, much like the minimalism I will have by compromising nothing for something sub-par. The goal was always to live within an everlasting dream, forever and always. 

What is the golden mean of a dream? If the polar opposite is a nightmare, then perhaps the median is limbo. I’ll never figure out if you could call my dissatisfaction with living a life filled with half-hearted (e)motions ingratitude towards the stroke of luck that is life. Am I a realist? Am I an existentialist? Am I selfish and opportunistic to wish with my whole heart that if your heart isn’t there, then who or what are you supposed to believe? 

Wishes made on stars with fingers crossed and gold coins will fuel enough hope for a little while, but I want fireworks and racing hearts and infinity moments every other minute. You know, where the wind is in your hair and there isn’t anywhere else you’d rather be. You know, when you can’t remember how you got there but you can’t imagine it ever ending. You know, where deep down you know the rest of your life will be spent striving to recreate how you feel right this very instant. That’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I want. Am I dreamer or am I dreamer?

xo,

A  

post-script: oh, don't forget that "It is a both a blessing and a curse, 

to feel everything so very deeply."

# 56 || Petrichor (n.) the smell of the earth after rain.

I.

Hypocrisy has forever been one of my biggest fears. The idea that I could potentially pass judgement onto another soul for a sin that I too am guilty of committing — that terrifies me. Which is why, unless my emotions get the better of me, I contemplate just about everything, I turn every thought and notion inside out until there is no way it couldn’t possibly not make no sense (triple negative???!!!). But within those twisted thoughts, there hides the devil in the details. And now something that was completely coherent at the beginning, through over-rumination, is now complete lunacy. There is my second worst nightmare — misinterpretation and feeling wholly misunderstood. I think psychological solitude is one of the most terrible sensations I have ever experienced. When I was a very little girl, I realised I had the tendency (albeit infrequent) to become moronically obsessed with certain possessions, places and / or persons. This habit would only ever delicately reveal its madness, and being a child, people would often think it darling that I would beg to see the same film at the cinema several times, bringing a different doll with me every time. Her name would often convert to whoever my favourite heroine was at the time. Between make-believe friends and infinite stories about a petite fille with long hair, ten brothers and sisters, three cats, two dogs, a bird and a rose garden, I never had a lot of time for reality and the untimely blow that is real life and the inconvenient truths that accompany growing up and figuring out the world that we live in.

II.

I’ve now come to realise that it’s not so darling to convolute one’s dreams to the point of self-destruction. Growing up only refined my imagination to a somewhat gluttonous manner of fantasising which fed my faith that everything really would be okay in the end. Which is why I’m left so desolately confused at why lately my heart feels so heavy I can hardly retrieve the bravery I need to remember why it is we wake up every morning with the courage to love and learn and locate the light that is supposed to make everything worthwhile. Maybe this is just another one of my existential crises but I just can’t find the light. The strangest thing is that I remember where I left it but when I went back to find it, it was no longer there. When the void seems infinite and insatiable, I don’t know what else to do, or where-else to turn. There is no band-aid, there is no kiss-it-better. Because when all the tender emotions melt away, all that’s left is an indescribable hollow ache of not feeling so distressed anymore but in its place is some kind of sinister sea filled with something dark and forbidding. Every morning, I wish the monster would swallow me whole.

III.

x

# 55 || IL Y A UNE LIMITE À TON AMOUR

~~~

Dear _ _ _ _,

Retrospect won’t help you here.

Once upon a time I thought that there were so many billions of people on this earth that there was no way the emotions vibrating through my head and my heart could possibly be unique. For all the books that I’ve read and the songs I’ve listened to and the films I’ve watched that illustrate love and loss and tears and joy — they all spoke of that void ( and the infinite pursuit to fill it ) so eloquently, I really believed that I wasn’t riding alone in this carriage on board this train of thought. The limits of just about everything will never cease to impress me. I always believed anything and everything magical would trump all things scary, sad and solitary. The notion that happiness isn’t infinite, has been the most acute wake-up-this-is-reality call that I have ever experienced. In what world is there a limit to love and time and nights that made you so happy you thought you could fly? I don’t believe you can lose that kind of perspective - for every broken heart, for every winter night, for every nightmare, they would never have to re-occur for me to take the indescribable love, the summer days and the jogging gorgeous daydreams for granted. 

All the wisdom and well-wishes in the world couldn’t possibly take this ache away. If anything, the copious distraction leaves a trembling sensation of apprehension in the pit of my stomach. Diversion is unsustainable, but when even the truth can’t save you - what will? Maybe it’s the fleeting kindness of strangers, your to-do lists and all their neutral purpose, the sunshine peaking in between the clouds and thoughts from across the sea. If it’s not enough to convince you that life is worth falling in love with, perhaps it can help you keep even one thread of faith that it isn’t all as bad as it seems.

Isn’t it bizarre that at the centre of the world, emotions are more powerful than the truth, than reality, than the tangible sensation of the sun, the air and the skin of somebody brave enough to conquer your made-up-mind? Indeed there are things that you’ll never be able to let go of, and perhaps the memories of what was will always make you cry. But if what you crave doesn’t even exist anymore, then what? If you ache for a memory, then even when the nostalgia becomes too much to bear, there isn’t much else to do other than write about it and make yourself a cup of steaming hot tea. Isolate yourself, listen to some lullabies and make-believe that who you were before this happened is worth becoming once more. And like always, it’s easier said than done.

( “ i know you’re tired of loving, of loving, with nobody to love,

nobody, nobody !” )

Love,

A.

PS. There are no words of gratitude powerful enough for me to articulate my thank-you to the priceless company and the ceaseless surprise that despite not deserving the time of day, I’ve been given hours of love that I hope one day I am powerful enough to reciprocate. Merci, merci, merci.

PPS. "'The real hell of this,' he told her, 'is that you're going to get through it.'" -- G. Caldwell.       

~~~

XOXO

# 54 || serva me, servabo te

( For Taylah, Forever Ago )

Reciprocity and the golden rule is far easier said than done -  the volume of unrequited everything these days is absolutely devastating. I don’t know what comes of any desire derived and designed solely for selfish incentives. Often though, you can get so caught up in the self-satisfaction of gladdening the world that everything else falls apart. Suddenly you’re standing amid a mass of debris that was once everything you ever wanted but it was all too magnificent, you became overwhelmed and you couldn’t sustain it. Or maybe that is the way it is supposed to be, maybe that’s existence, maybe the highs must have their complement of lows but I can’t let myself believe that. No, no, non, I cannot accept that the meaning of life is to pick yourself up and dust yourself off every other day, that the wind of one door closing opens another, that letting go of something or somebody or somewhere you love beyond description could possibly be an option.

Though at some point, maybe you do need to get off that merry-go-round of tears, trouble and trials that you stand no chance at winning because safety and security will always worth settling for. It makes sense because the only sort of love I know, is the kind that rips your heart apart at the seams before standing back and daring you to stitch all the pieces together and make you As Good As New! Or better, even. Maybe mediocrity must be my new normal, before all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t possibly put me back together again.

Dear Yellow-Brick-Road, why would you ever intertwine my path with some things so incredible, but so momentary? Incredible might be an understatement, or it might be the wrong word completely. Because this sensation inside my soul is both inexpressive and intangible - I feel so shamefully naive to think that I might have been worthy of a fragment of fairytale. Even now, I still haven’t figured it out — but maybe it is better to have never loved at all, than to have loved and lost. Tous les jours je me réveille dans un cauchemar. And it’s not a mindset, it’s more real than I ever thought possible.

In a moment, something stole the magic and put it somewhere secret. 

 In a moment, I am everything I swore I would never ever be. 

  In a moment, down went Alice after it . . .

    never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

PS. I'll tell you a secret. It might not keep you sane but it will keep you alive. You're better than this. You're better than expectations and entitlements and disappointment and despair. It's okay to want it all to go away as long as you don't. x

# 53 || PUTFLOWERSINMYMOUTH

Metaphorical loss is a hard thing to write about, because at some point rationality makes even less sense than irrationality and the sane part of your mind can’t figure out why the ache has settled somewhere so deep in your heart you can’t even find it, much less save it. How do you make it stop? Why did everything start sinking in the first place? I can realise, acknowledge and interpret most things, but it doesn’t mean I’ll ever understand it. Much less come to terms with anything. There are too many steps to acquiescence, I don’t know if I have the motive to figure out how and when and why, or the most important —- where now? Love, in its purest and most platonic form, might be the essence of this damned sensation. Who do I seek to blame or beg : to insist that I am too small, too afraid and too delicate to try to figure this one out?   

There must be some way to invert it all, replace reality with a dream and maintain that these daily motions don’t matter and the real world begins when you lay your head down to sleep. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to take, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. His Love to guard me through the night, and wake me in the morning’s light. It’s all topsy-turvy now, and I can’t seem to find my collection of clichés to reassure me that this is all happening because it’s supposed to. When I was a little girl, my mama told me that if you make a wish and it doesn’t come true, then it’s either because that wish might have hurt you or because something even more magical is on its way. Je te crois Maman, I believe you but only because I see it all around me but that magic keeps a safe distance from my soul. Winter seems to have stolen the light, I can’t find it, it’s hiding, where are you? 

 

Ready or not, here I come.

PS. ( God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. )

PPS. And the spirit and tenacity in locating the effort to do so.
PPPS. And the desire to pick myself up, again and again and again.

PPPPS."You think relationships are difficult? Try friendships. Try courting someone in order to convince them to join you in some nameless, shapeless Platonic complication — forever. Convince an adult stranger that you are worth a healthy slice of their limited time and energy without the prize of sex or romance." — Laura Jayne Martin

# 52 || " all secrets sleep in winter clothes "

Nostalgia, for me, lies in a hereafter that might never come out to play. Do you ever ache for the things we thought we would have time to do and the places we thought we would be able to see? But then the present moment slips between our fingers and suddenly the opportunity is forever lost. In fewer seconds than I have fingers on one hand : there stands a past, a present, and a future. The truth is inconvenient, temperaments transform and emotions you once thought were eternal suddenly don’t even exist and you can’t remember how you thought they ever did. I’m not the only one who is transient, we all have potential to be something we weren’t ever, somebody beyond our wildest dreams —— for better, and for worse.

I remember instances that never actually occurred, they were the daydreams I indulged when my eyes are gazing out somewhere far far away, and my head is even further off, somewhere among the stars. There we were ( toi et moi ), in my daydreams, where we all have wings and I can feel your hand in mine. There are meadows that stretch for days and it’s only nighttime when the clouds miss the stars and the sun howls for the moon. I remember sand between my toes and the wind tangled in my hair along with the sentimental secrets I didn’t think I had to say because I thought we had forever. 

( i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again )

Nothing lasts forever —— for better, and for worse.     

The past is irrelevant if the present can conquer what has happened, and what is yet to come will trump the present. It's never ever too late for redemption and recovery. From the bottom of my heart I believe that time is all we have on our side. I believe that fear and patience and space and settling for something short of what you deserve is incredibly unnecessary when you never ever know what kinds of things will come out to play tomorrow. Love now, love now! Before it's too late.

Lately for me it seems so imperative that I fashion the environment I reside in to reflect everything I’m thinking, it’s necessary that the happiness is present regardless of the set of circumstances. Expect nothing from your circle of comrades, and that includes your lovers, for the transience is beyond our control sometimes. Let solitude become the constant and company become a complement. 

There are nights where it feels like there is a full moon but there isn’t. I’m learning now that winter nights can be just as romantic as laying in a bed with sandy sheets, beach hair and saltwater dreams. Mulled-wine induced blurry conversations with profound fragments that will never ever leave you — — trust is a two way street, don’t ever bargain with secrets and stories that sting to say … I think people become a little selfish when the sun takes a little longer to wake up in the morning.

( image taken by emma matsuda )

I don’t think I have ever been so simultaneously disappointed yet enlightened and inspired by human behaviour as I have this past autumn. But it’s winter now and every day is still so full of surprises. Dear Society, you’re a crazy breed. Love, Afifa x   

# 51 || F L E U R B O N H E U R

“I’m erased. I’m gone. I’m nothing. And then the world is free to flow into me like water into an empty bowl…  And… I see. I hear. 

But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. 

The thing is, there’s no difference between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. 

I am a stone, a cactus thorn. 

I am rain. 

I like that most of all, being rain.” 

-- Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli

( this spontaneous jumble of words is for my dear friend melia, one of my muses )

Seven or eight days ago I realised ( or decided, maybe ) that the things that others say to you, might be more of a reflection of themselves than of who you are. Perhaps it is because the things we feel we are missing, we look for in other people. Maybe everything you say is what you wish might one day be said to you. ( Hello _____, you’re beautiful, I love you, I need you so much closer. ) There is something so comforting about a grey sky and the rain glittering on a silver surface. 

Winter makes me that much more nostalgic - every year when it becomes sweater weather every other day. I can’t stop thinking about all of those once-upon-a-times, when I figured out everything I wanted to be. And then there’s now, when I can see that I’m more than // almost // or just about halfway there. I don’t remember when exactly I decided I wanted to be remembered for how I was, not who or where or what I was, but lately I have been feeling some kind of yearning to reach this equilibrium where even emotional, physical and spiritual hurdles become a neutral. 

Yet, it goes against everything I believe in, as a result of everything I have seen. Perhaps it’s only en hiver when I wish start craving consistency over the only sometimes pleasant whimsicalities of life. While neutrality would erase the deepest feelings of despair when night falls early and you can’t even breathe and you’re too tired to sleep ( and what is a silver lining anyway? ), it would also rob your heart of those days and nights where it seems unquestionably necessary to tell the world you’re over-the-moon happy, where you love everybody and everything makes sense for a minute. The polarities of emotions are essential to empathy and love and life and the endless war of questions and answers and figuring things out at night only to forget them in the morning.

Be content but infinitely curious. There’s never any shame in caring or loving or wishing or dreaming for or about anything more than what everybody else thinks it’s worth. Passion is alluring, and a reason to be thankful is knowing that every single moment in your life has made you everything you are, at this moment. I don’t know how or why, but it all seems pretty magical. !!! “Forever is composed of nows”, so keep only the unspeakable secrets but share your golden thoughts with the ones you love.  

oh, and

PS. dear _______, I forgot to tell you today, but you were in every single one of my dreams this morning and you kept me company all night long. Love, A. #dreamhoppingdames #thankyoudarling 

 ( images by sarah hermans, october 2009 )