Shadow of my feelings

'We made our eyes our enemy, built a world of flashes. Our organs are epileptic now. They say the surface area of the brain is what gifts us higher thinking: sulci and gyri, the folds and creases. We stopped exploring those grooves, stopped unfolding the mysteries of ourselves. It's easy, you know, to become engrossed in someone else's drama than to explore how deeply inadequate you, yourself, are. And I don't blame you. I can hardly look at myself without a curdle in my gut, for all the promises failed to myself. Even of the things I have done: I cannot look at the past, what it has accumulated to, and not feel the heat of embarrassment, the trickle of moisture down a cold spine. But the day comes that we tire of the sickness, tire of living the same trauma by hiding from it, and face how weak we truly are. It wasn't the past self that couldn't manage, they were busy surviving. It's the now self that refuses to acknowledge that today is our last chance. The future cannot change, it can only forgive.

I know all this, and know especially that my efforts today will not be forgiven. I am forsaken, by next me. I persist in cataloguing the masochism, and I will never know why.'

Hazif snaps through the scenery. He does not know what he is looking for. He doesn't feel drawn to faces or limbs, nature, the sky. His camera churns and chops, anonymous fingers guide the levers. The salute smooths his blood. He lowers the frame, back to reality.

'A picture is an infection, a pretend life. Candid: our deception that we were a moment. Remember your life, in silent perspiration. How many failures make one success?'

The park feels like a snow-globe. It is fenced by the limits of perception and the clogging of advancement on the perimeter. It feels safe, by biology. Genetic remnants remind him green means peace, winding pathways mean wander, open spaces are friendly, to watch the clouds and between: release the skin to believe in the sun. The shapes could mean shade, or light rain; to be cooled on a sunny day as this, as long as the darkness doesn’t accumulate and flood the world in a towering grey. Hafiz’s vision drifts peripheral with intention, as a test of the roundness science speaks of. His world is flat, narrow, bordered: fitting on floppy parchment. It’s stained and disconnected. It tells him of nothing but the mirrors in his hand. His chin lifts, as if a taller woman is pulling him in. He’s waiting for the globe to rise and tumble in the hands of an ignorant deity. He’s waiting, collecting, to believe it is as real as they say. Inside, acquiescence, he wears the ice in his shoulders. His face is a permanent stern, by the furrow, the protuberant concentration between his eyes. Looking beyond, one could see the history streaking in the iris of man: the cracks and weaves of desperation, radiant.

Hafiz averts his eyes from meeting another. The look of humanity is damning. He’s saving his soul to be crushed by an unworthy love.

He retreats to the clangor, testing his other senses. At once he could entrance in the replay of a past, or in fanatic manipulations of impossibility. The indeterminate bashes of metallurgy and tweets of expressionless things blends into expectation. The humdrum infects all who walk the streets, and drowns the ringing in your ears. There is no noise to appreciate while commuting. Hafiz listens anyways. He is on his way to a below-ground alcove apartment, one segmented for developing his world.

He thinks of nothing during his journey, and feels less than that. Arriving, he finds an apparition recirculating from weeks before. They call these spirits neighbors, but he will never know if they have names. He assumes they have lives like his: where time creeps on and they make invisible tracks in their movement to the same place everyday.

Inside he has only smell, and a dimness to adjust to, to prepare to disturb the past he was compelled to bring home. The alcove is tart, acidulous from the chemicals. It’s repulsive in the way a crime scene piques your desire to see the remnants of someone’s last breath. Everything is shadows inside, so much that there are no shadows. Hafiz dips and clips and moves the flimsy recordings in an order fate demands. He sees shadows in the shadows, believing in the absence. A thought appears for him, a similar day in a similar park, one where two immigrants unleashed a child on freedom. They, having something to compare to, felt the bliss of a hunger-less world, an ever expanding world, where they saw their son to be something they never could. Parents building a purpose upon the expectation that suffering lived on the other side of broad oceans.

In consideration of his hatred, of growing into the object of purpose, not of it himself; his eyes drifting apart with the feeling. Drooping, swinging, a fluttered rectangle re-submerges in the ooze. A memory, tainting. Hafiz swoops it half away from the chemicals, readjusting. The print, taunting him, returns him to the present. He completes the process, premature, to inspect. The shadows feel taunting too, as if they, jumping from the line, were sending him a message. Her hair, dripping into its own shadow on the distorted backdrop. Her face, out of frame. Hafiz racks his mind for the carrier of the message, to remember who she could be. All he knows is how quickly he re-aimed, careless, in those moments, how they take him from scene to scene without a chance to honor the significance.

She resurfaces, a picture show from a night last, one where sleep felt as far as home.

'I dreamt of you again, this time your face was different, like an abstract painting. Something was wrong. I pretended it was still you, and made all your actions a shadow of my feelings. I guess it's true, you can kill love. You must have killed your love for me, or it was never really there. I buried mine alive, and it grew. But when I unearthed it this time, it wasn't sweet and reminiscent. It was melted version, the growth didn't add beauty, not how I remember. And it feels dead, like our last kiss, the reason you don't wish to talk to me. The only reason I can think of. I never really knew you. You were a shadow of my feelings.

It's groundhog day, and I'm not sure if this is processing, or if I'm embalming you. Preservation leaves a sour scent, reminds me that it can't be you. But, I probably don't want you anymore. The mind likes to swallow things so it can feel full. Maybe it's time to have a funeral, I think you'd like the fire.

It makes the shadows dance.

I haven’t slept. I rest between dreams. They say dreaming is a form of mindlessness. The brain is active, but we–the ego–is not. The part of us that believes it is in control.

Dreaming wakes me. I spasm to memories of incomplete consolidation. I am fragmented. It is never finished. I don’t think I am supposed to remember all these fantasies, few of them give me pleasure. I’ve always been a nightmare, keeping my eyes open so they don’t have to look inside.

Did you see all the atoms clinging to my flesh as me, more reasons, things, attributes, a chance to escape your past. Or could you really see the eternity that hides, as space, vibrates. Were we both similarly blind? Did I fall for the chance to have… the details that made losing you even more sad.

Is my love an ego hypocrisy, like all of me…

My humility is insecurity, my perfectionism is lazy, my minimalism won’t let go of the smallest things, I value nothing while clinging to the image of a future I didn't make.'

He will have to see her again, tonight, ever more disfigured by his bitterness.