Systir

I heard some say that you are what happens to you. You are what happens to you. They carve these words like a mantra in their bones until they diminish into nothing but these six words, these twentytwo letters, a conglomeration of sounds and guttural noises. You are what happens to you. 

And how wrong, how painful. Not only you are not what happens to you, you are not even close to it. You are not an emotion, not a contraction and expansion of the mouth into different shapes, not a spasm of a vocal chord or some dumb thought that crosses your mind like a fallen leaf. You are so much more than that. 

And yet you limit yourself to an experience, to something produced in-between the soft walls of your head, to something that was gone so fast and yet you clung to it like some sort of revelation. You limit yourself to muscle and veins. You make your life a rock and drag it along like a dead corpse. Your past clung to it, a dry fish.

You drink God down, and swallow the tongues of strangers to hamper your mother’s scoldings and your father’s shrieks that pierce your chest, and you cover your ears with the mouths of men to blanket the daily silence of the house. 

By never forgiving, you forgot how to love. 

It is exhausting to watch you turn from white to black day by day. It is exhausting to watch you, the child whose hands I never let go of in crumbly parks of our childhood, whose feet I cleaned to make sure your walk is straight and the path is unhindered, whose head I pressed between my palms to console when youthful ghosts arose with midnights, exhausting to watch as you expand into bitterness. 

You were the child who always saw. 

I dig my knees into rough earth and pray pray, and cry out the pain with hope that perhaps you will hear one day. 

I pray to God to bring back the child whose laughter was always baked into our mother’s bread, and whose tears were always stitched back into our hearts. The child that I know is still there under layers of happenings that made you stone-like, under refusals and abandons, under weighty thrown words that clasped to your soul. 

The ancient bond is intact and strong. 

Like a snake, I beg you to shed the spurious skins you sown onto yourself. 

I beg you to come back, if only for one more day.