End

By Shaikh Aafreen

It is so, so hard to suppress my longing, to stop these hands from getting charred—black and blue—by the blazing heat of two lonely eyes. My hands are wild for burns and stings, for the cold press of ice and warm caress of medicine on its bleeding layer. 

Give me circus, I'm ready to be ravished by the people and this black, cold well of a world, simmering in its ever consuming plight-spares no one. Its ravenous beak is susceptible to traps that can only accommodate a single soul and I ask, “who has been hungrier? Whose soul has never been satiated. Who has loathed the cumbersome hope?”

The game played in the ‘well of death’ can be won by tolerance; the one with a stitched face will flee the barbed fence and the trap; and I will lose, for my mouth has always remained open for scraps, nothing can shut it, not even screws.

What do I do?

How do I stop my mouth from barking so much, how do I break this curse, how do I carry this inheritance and not let it consume me? I should have been this animal with the the stitched up mouth and no mouth to scream, even when I want to, even when I must (there is not, and nor will be any moment in my life where a scream will be something necessary, so no possibility of “where I should scream”).

My life, ends with my helplessness.

By Shaikh Aafreen