Waiting For Nothing
I am afraid of the dark
no longer, not afraid of the black void which falls every evening. I know
because every morning the sun cuts through and redeems my soul again.
I am not afraid anymore,
because in the silence and emptiness of the darkness, I found you again.
I had thought I had found you before, in the bright lights and shattered mirror shards. Or perhaps in the bloodstained hilt of the sword. Or in the terrible cries of pain and fury resounding in the battlefields, of either man or other. Or in the silence of a lover’s kiss. Or in the hidden desire that took so long to manifest itself, only to fail miserably and come out as a sick joke.
But I had not found you there.
I was searching for millennia and millennia, all in one second of the Earth’s living breath, but long enough for me, a mere soul, lost in the vortex we call time.
It took me a long time to realize that you were the darkness, not part of it, as I was rain and not a merely a part of it. You are the darkness in all its unknown parts and hidden surprises. You are the darkness in all its unperturbed silence. You are the darkness in all its strange echoes and silent tears. But it was worth all my time and my tears.
I have found you.
But I haven’t fully realized how long ago we had been together.
A few centuries have passed, a mere gasp in the Earth’s living breath, as I have said. But it was long enough for your soul to have forgotten me.
How do I know?
You no longer know who I am. I know you far better than you know yourself. You had known me far better than I. Yet now.
I have been standing in front of you, waiting, patient with the patience of eons of searching for you.
You never ever saw me. You never see me. And I further doubt if you will ever see me.
It took so long until you did notice me, but not See me. How could you not?
I felt the icy tendrils creeping along the insides of my veins, threatening to freeze my heart and my soul once again, a soul’s forever sleep. I had doubted and felt my heart harden and soften in an attempt to reorder my soul to forget to hope that it was you.
Perhaps you had merely forgotten? It wasn’t impossible, though highly unlikely. There must be something I had forgotten to do? Something that happened to you, something so critical that your own blood had forgotten that it once was intermixed with mine in the middle of the battlefield far, far away from this reality we live in now? So monumental that your own soul had forgotten that it was entwined with mine forever?
Perhaps you are not the one? Could I have been mistaken? I don’t know. But all I know is that when I finally heard your voice, it was as if it was a mere overlay, something else lay beneath the hymn your words had created. A hymn that you and I sang together in the midst of singing arrows and clashing blades. I had joined in it for a while and I grew to know how to talk to you. I got you to do what I told you to do, most of the time. A miracle someone had told me that was very difficult to achieve. It wasn’t difficult. Just as telling your arm to lift itself or your lungs to breathe wasn’t difficult. It was simply part of me. I knew how to talk to you because I know how to talk to myself.
Perhaps you do not want to be part of me anymore? This question silenced me. For a long time it silenced me and those were the days that the rain fell silently as well, bereft of its happy bubbling speech.
Had I betrayed you in anyway?
Had I stopped loving you in anyway?
And then I realized it. You didn’t want to be a part of me anymore because you were part someone else now. A child of the moon I believe, one of the silver strands that fell across the land every night.
Why be redundant? You felt more complete in his embrace than you ever felt when you held my hand.
You couldn’t have struck me harder.
At this time, I had thought, you would be the one to fill the gaping hole left there by love’s tragic laughter. But you were dwelling in the love light of your moonchild, and had never seen my pain.
You have seen my pain about her, yes. You have seen the numerous other pains that have molded me into the small, small person that I am. But not the pain you gave me.
You have offered to take my pain. I refused. This pain made me who I am and who I will be. As it would seem, I am no longer in the path of the physical pain brought upon by a war we never understood.
I have been with pain for so long once you take it away from me, there would be nothing left. So here I am, falling, toppling over, hurtling of windows, cliffs and mountains, always getting healed. Scarred but healed, laughing at my own temerity and the absolute uselessness of fighting against a reality I know can give me nothing more than what is due to me, my pain.
So now, I will leave you with your moonchild, and I know you will leave me to my pain. He fills your nights with dreams that never seem to end and my pain refuses to let me go to sleep until I cry myself senseless.
But I take courage in the dark now. It is where I have found you. And though you dance amidst the silver strands of the night, I will rest in the cold silence of the darkness. Waiting still.
It is all that is left to me, to wait. I have been doing it for eons now and I fine solace in the unknown. I no longer run. It is not because of the hope for a better future or a person who will be there and hold me once again. It is because of my absolute temerity. It is in my stubborn will that will not bend; that will not ask for help; that will not cry in front of others.
It is in my stupidity that I cannot accept.
That I am waiting for nothing.
