Dear Relative

Dear relative,

I regret to tell you that it is just too late. The emptiness you created with your absence in my past, cannot be coloured in with what you call ‘love’ now. Your hands, when they touch my skin, is like a thorn scratching itself into me. Your eyes, wherein I have only ever witnessed anger, is as if I am staring into the sun – unbearable. Your voice, like a roar it plays in my mind, day and night, night … and day, chasing away all sanity. All sanity.

And so I hold my ears and shut my eyes, I shut it with hopes that I would forget, but every time I do, there you stand before me, as if engraved into the back of my eyelids to haunt. You haunt.

It’s late, it is just too late. You were no man you were a coward. You were no father you were a stranger. You were no friend, you were a bully. And what hurts most, is that to this day, where I can now place my hand on my heart after all these years and say that I understand the world, I realise, that I had understood it too soon … because I was forced to lie for you, smile for you, surrender to you, and hide my sorrows for you. I was forced to grow up. Those moments where I held my ears under a dim light not trying to hear the noise, did not work, I was forced to face your roars, I was forced to be strong, although whilst I watch the rain fall down at times and swear to the sky that I’ve shed much more, I realise how weak I really am.

And as I recollect my memories with the pieces of my heart that you shattered, I see a little girl standing at the other end of Memory Lane; she whispers her thoughts to me. She tells me how she wants to go back, but she cannot. She cannot go back to those times you would hurt her, hurt me, where I would forget everything at receiving a petty gift from you, those moments where it was easy to forgive; but it’s been too long since then, you’ve slaughtered the child in me.
So why will you not understand that:

You are everything I need
To forget,

To heal.

So do not look at me in this way, do not speak to me in this way, do not try to win the heart you had lost ages ago. Do not attach me to your strings to play me like a puppet, it hurts. It hurts because, as much as I am familiar with your shallow love, I feel a sense of warmth when you may say a nice word or two. Shamefully, like a child craves for milk, I feel as if I’ve been nourished. I guess, it’s what I needed to grow, to grow sane … but then one snaps back into the realms of realism … when satan places his eyes is your eyes, and his heart in your soul.

That is reality, but I welcome myself into the door of pain by being forever suspended in a dream:

And when the Sun looks black to me,
I pretend to feel its warmth,
And when the rose looks black to me,
I pretend to smell its fragrance.

Don’t wake me up, don’t wake me up.

Feet in the clouds from Nour

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