Cold. Like glimmering icicles. Those freezing daggers which love to maim you with shivers just through catching their sight.
Heart full of frostbite. Is there any respite in this dark lacuna or just medication for the temporary relief of loneliness? Even the strawberries are inedible or rather you can eat them at your peril for their taste is no longer sweet like the ripe old days. They taste like tears mixed with sea salt because he hailed from the sea, like most fish. The strawberry field is normally hypnotic and magnetic and magical but not of late. Not today. Can your earbud hear his heartbeat echo and bounce off the rocky walls with a thud louder than a sizzling comet? Rocky walls which nature erected for her to feel protected and cared for. He’d somehow selected this frozen-water cocoon to be his space of remedy but why does he insist on freezing when her heart shows no sign of thawing? Why did he come here?
Mending a heart was never recommended. The cave is known to cave in, for it is still reeling from its past; a history of bygone ancestors entering and exiting and stomping and clomping their way– their way. Muddying her surface, corrupting the pristine waters of this beautiful God-like structure. Heedless.
The fossils they left behind no longer do evil but the damage is already done. The images they scrubbed and scratched and scattered and splattered on the walls are not art but in fact scars. Etched so deep an eternity would pass before she could heal and even if she did heal, it’d be more like a patch sewed on a pair of ripped jeans, nothing will ever be the same.
He had prepared a lilac & lily coloured kite to pilot because their connection was at a pilot stage. It hadn’t been lit just yet although they’d used the word lit enough times to suggest they were more than a bit knit but that was then and now, is now… his lilac and lily painted kite was ready to take flight… Sure, there would naturally be stage fright because a cave is meant to be grounded, roots deep past the crust and mantle and beyond the inner core.
He, well, he was like helium because he had the lowest melting point of anyone close to her and his heart had long ago melted and some say wilted but he didn’t care for all he cared about was for her to wake up from the darkness and feel a gentle tickle inside the left side of her chest. But she was like mercury, you could never catch her. She wasn’t anyone’s to trap.
All he wanted was to hold her tight, like a stalactite holds a cavern’s ceiling… to hold one another right at all different angles, and then just let go, slow, and fast and slow and fast and repeat again till the distance between the sky and earth mellows to a soft glow-like measurement and even if that didn’t exist in science or maths or chemistry, they’d just feel it.
Alas, his man-made kite was an aircraft deemed unfriendly, and deadly. Not in the way deadly was commonly used in her neck of the woods either because that deadly was deadly and you felt alive saying it to her.
In reply to his kite, she was armed with nothing but sweetness: chocolates, decanters filled with lolly-flavoured wine and caramel flavoured Turkish delight.
The confectionary in her hand showed up during Easter, then vanished. Some cried, “miracle!” He wasn’t like those before him. He wasn’t going to sully the cave. But no-one heard his case. The cave was like a COW not as in bovine but the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin. She was, yes, deadly.
Had the sweets been presented to him the ravenous kite-runner would have clumped over and chomped at them and at her delicate body. She kept quiet nonetheless, even when some said he froze in the cave… time wasn’t ripe for him to be saved… apparently…
Apparently some fisherman rowing his boat through the confusion found a note; in it, the lover wrote (apparently these were the lover’s words but we can’t accept the chirp of the birds as infallible and this fisherman might have just been chirping a good yarn)… So, what did the lover write? He wrote that his love was true but maybe she was a mirage. Always in sight. But never there. Or anywhere, really. Shapeless. Only form was the promise of quenching a thirst. Was she real? Was she real? Should he chase the rainbow and find out for himself?
No one knows what happened to them. Legend has it that the fisherman took the chocolates back to his village with the knowledge that out there somewhere remained a boy stuck in a cave, listening to the hymn of winter. Kite in hand. Ready to fly. Destination: mirage.
If you close your eyes, you can see the kite swooshing and sashaying inside the cave’s belly for it knows no other way but to play.
Osamah Sami أسامه سامي 