Incapable
The permanent damage that you've done.
They call it survival,
But, I named it silence.
A disease called- incapable of love.
No physician can give prescription on it,
No laboratory can discover the reason beneath it.
The diagnosis report arrives late after the predator leaves the marks,
Only after the heart forgets the weather of warmth.
Not because love doesn’t knock on the door,
But, because the door is permanently locked.
All callings go in vain,
Doorbell keeps ringing, but no one answers.
Until the hands of lover bleeds.
But, is there anyone who is ready to wait and bleed?!
The symptoms are quite subtle:
Eyes that avoids affection and mistakes softness as danger,
Hands that retract from gentleness as if affection is a burning fire.
Pulses intensifies only at the footsteps of departure.
Then?!
A quiet grief spirals back from head to toe,
A relief follows.
I dodged a bullet again.
As if marked safe from another earthquake.
The body survives but the mind becomes rigid.
The heart learns restriction and the soul memorizes the stitches.
The amputation that causes fractures,
The limbs cries for autonomy.
The heart for an explosive epiphany.
It yearns for the missed rhythms, the beats that were once unbeaten.
Strangely, those who were infected becomes the finest listeners.
The healers on the way.
Other's grief becomes their mantra to solve,
Let's them drown their own echoes.
Surprisingly, they don't want to feel themselves or their sufferings, so they immerse themselves into another's grief.
Momentarily, what could smother them finds an outlet to release,
A stranger's tragedy loosens the tight knots around their rib, they now learn to breathe.
What I have learnt that healing is not a one way process, but it comes most naturally to those who knows the most about the deepest aches.
Not because they know too much,
Or, they have absorbed much of the pain,
But, because healing another's wound refrains them from counting their own scars and stitches.
Sometimes they get drained from listening too much and carrying the grief for too long, both of them and others.
Sometimes their throat becomes all dry in thirst,
As if their soul is so drained of essentials.
So they become the home for the homeless,
The guiding light for the reckless,
The collectors of brokenness,
The caretakers of the abandoned hearts,
The lanterns for the bygones,
They no longer believe in permanence.
They know whatever good comes is momentary soon to be lost in the momentum of life.
Sometimes they think they have recovered,
Yet to find the burials coming out and they have to start it from all over.....
Sometimes they think they have won against subconscious,
But, unconsciously they return to their soul trimmers.
The wounds haunts them in broad day light.
The trauma resurfaces when it's time to rejoice.
Perhaps every healer is someone who is trying hard to forget the trajectory of their pain.
They are trying to pain their scars in red,
Perhaps, hide it beneath the tattoos with the ink of wisdom and materialistic gains.
But, can the achievements fill the hollowness found in the gap of the soul that has once been tormented in love and agony and pain?
Now, flowers bloom faraway from the eyesight like strangers in another's yard.
The sea keeps it’s distance from the shore,
Without inviting me in.
Even the moon hides behind a veil,
It's scared. What if the moon reminds me of his face.
As if the entire stallion refuses intimacy in mourning for my bereavement.
I have become a museum of unapproachable things-
Every heartbeat preserved behind a velvet robe,
Every nuisances concealed under the heavy weight of the shadows of past actions.
As if reflections retract itself from reflecting too much.
Tell me, when did this condition become incurable?
Was it the first betrayal or leaving home?
Losing every beloved whom you adored?
Now you know the cost of the permanent damage that you have done.
You have killed the sparrow that wanted to chirp. That wanted to live for a while a bit longer.
You did not simply break a heart,
You taught it how to preserve from further deterioration.
You have taught me the syllabus of loss and demise.
That every new promise is another door for exit and exhibition.
If I cannot love again,
Do not mistake it for brutality.
Some diseases do not kill,
It affects slowly like a slow poison.
They merely persuade us how to live with the unforgettable.
That, hope is like an extinct species,
Sometimes being hopeless convinces us to stay full of oneself and not feel the terrible hunger.
And, the heart?!
It feels like a beautiful organ that forgot how to function.
What about love?!
It no longer feels like home but danger to escape from.
It no more feels like safety but a loss of identity.
The incapable person no longer remembers how to use it’s own heart, they forgot to surrender.
It has become a solitary journey where love feels like invasion,
A territory nobody dares to deter.
A trajectory not to be crossed unarmed.
Like a worm you avoid love now,
As if a disease to be prevented from.
Not to fall again in the fever of love,
Yet, sometimes you yearn for it.
You avoid the only thing that you deely want.
As if a tug of war in your head,
Repercussions and repression.
A loop of suppression continues until vague....
©® Farheen Akter Bhuian
Timestamp: 6.06 pm, Home, Chittagong.
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