Author: 7ala Abdullah

Hala Abdullah is a poet and a feminist from Saudi Arabia. She has founded and is currently the co-president of the Writing Club in Riyadh - a project that aims to help young men and women find their voice through writing.

War

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 1 Comment

To my former lovers I want to say:

I take it back.

From the
love letters and
the notes scribbled on napkins to
every syllable I have ever uttered,
from the
stolen glances and
the hands held under tables,
to the kisses raw with lust,

this is me officially dissolving

            everything.

Even when my hands
were held to my beating
heart and every
word I spoke dripped with
honesty – know that I
might have thought I
meant it then

but I know
now that my tongue has
been dabbling in dying
dialects of love and has
only tasted its true origin
sixty-six days ago.

So I take it all back.

And to you I will say:

Lover,

I am a warrior.
The natural state of my fists
has always been clenched
and ready. My skin has always
been black and blue with
disenchantment. I am the
soldier and the battleground,

but for sixty-six days now,
there has been no war inside
my chest, no bickering
of the organs –
no head against heart;

I belong
peacefully
to you.

And my hands,

Lover,

my hands are no longer discouraged
hearts held up before my eyes
ready to throw the first punch,

you have grown Sunflower fields
on my lifelines so my arms are
always outstretched and my palms

are always open
searching
for your Light.

Speak

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 1 Comment

Lover,

the first time we spoke I held my hand to
my heart and promised it I wouldn’t fall
for you, swore I would avoid too much
eye contact, vowed to never lose
myself in the spaces between
your fingers.

But

you

hold me like I am whole enough to
be loved and you love me like I am
a better person than I know, and see,
I am losing my sadness to the way your
chest rises and falls when you breathe and

I understand now why
when I first said
“hello”
what echoed in my mouth was

“welcome home”.

On Falling For Your Second Love

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 3 Comments

i. I am no more than a walking almost and I am almost beyond repair.

ii. The first time I saw you, I told you you were the most fascinating human being I’ve ever encountered.

“Poets,” you’d said, “you poets always know the best lies to say.”

iii. I am sorry I am broken in unforgivable ways,
and I am sorry I’m breaking everything around me too.

iv. I am a mess of destructive desires and infinite apathy. (But then you tell me you’re hurt and the only thing I want is to care for you.)

v. What happens when someone who
always gets what they want
wants to stop wanting?

(I don’t deserve to want you.)

vi. “We are dangerous together,” you said.

vii. I’d pick you over safety any day.

viii. I told you to stop loving silently
in hopes that you’d speak up.
(Please speak up,
I have a lot to say too.)

ix. I want to nestle myself in the folds
of your neocortex and bask in all the
art it has to offer me. I want to swim
through the rivers in your veins and
drench myself in all your intricacies.
There are worlds in your fingertips
that I’ve yet to see – but I digress.

x. You’ve only been gone a day
but still I cannot stop wording
your absence.

xi. I believed only in ghosts before you and I was haunted, but with you I believe in angels – wings worn out and tired but still ever so holy.

You don’t know it, but you are saving me.

xii. When you tell me that I am good,
I go against my every instinct and I
believe you.

xiii. You render whole universes obsolete.

xiv. I must have met you centuries ago.

(You fit so well into me,
I probably fell for you
just as quickly back then.)

xv. You keep me writing and every single word I spell out is drenched in your name.

You are a language I am yearning to perfect.

xvi. I am starting to understand why it never worked out with anyone before you.

xvii. You are helping me make peace with years’ worth of mistakes.

xviii. Every time you say you want me, I shatter into a thousand different pieces so I’d have more of me to offer you.

xix. You say you love me but I will not say I love you back.

xx. I do not love you back.
To love back is to love ingenuinely, and
I
love
you
independently, egolessly,
pridelessly, and vulnerably.

xxi. I am an absolute.

All yours, all yours,
all yours.

Wanderlust

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 1 Comment

 

(This is a collaboration piece we worked on for The Writing Club. Parts in regular font are by Mimi, parts in italics are by me.)

 

When you left I painted all my walls black, because you took the colour out of my life.

I find all these shades of grey soothing, but they all remind me that I am alone.

I stand here, empty. I lay here with an ache in my heart and I am constantly trying to keep these porcelain bones from falling apart. I find my arms are always tightly gripping at my rib cage because I am afraid I’d one day let go and collapse.

Without you, I am tied up in knots; I cannot be untangled. Lover, I miss your warm hands on this currently unwelcoming body of mine. I loathe this thirst I cannot relieve. I still remember the time you undressed me with your eyes and how I truly felt naked. And how that spark in your gaze dulled with time, till I could no longer see into your thoughts. I understood my heart wasn’t considered home any more.

You are gone now, my dear, and I still cannot fathom a life without you. I refuse to build an existence around this black hole that is myself, I seem to reek of depression and suck up all the sadness these walls have to offer, and you should know that there is much despair in the blackness of it all.

You should also know I piled all the letters you wrote me into my fireplace,

but I still don’t have the courage to burn them down to ash. I doubt I’ll ever be able to muster it up, you were always the brave one, I long for your shadow in the face of this glaring sun.

I can’t find my way home in this city any more.

You left me here to wander.

***

Lust taints my after-midnights and keeps trying to feed the ghosts that reside in the shallow holes I’ve dug inside myself. (It fails drastically, but I keep telling myself that maybe the next time’s the charm.)

Every time I inhale, I exhale a thought of you. In my efforts to forget, I have tried to suppress my breathing, but I have confirmed what science says about the body always being able to resist that – I wish it would resist your memory just as strongly.

I find you in the ellipsis at the end of my every broken thought, dot-dot-dotting my vision like a light that has shocked my pupils with its divine brightness.

I find you in my four a.m. cigarettes, threatening to end me faster than the devious clouds of carbon monoxide.

I find you sleeping on the collarbones of every lover I have undressed after you, assuring me that no one else will ever measure up. (And no one ever, ever does.)

I find you in every night sky I look up at, reminding me that every shooting star – every flicker of light is more a death than a chance at redemption.

I broke all my rules the moment your lips met mine, and I broke myself in the process. How I wished to be able to wash all those loveless love affairs off my pores and present myself new and pure for you, but I knew that I could never be what you deserved.

You kissed me so full of faith and you made a home out of my bones even when I told you they were fragile enough to shatter at any given moment.

So even though I left, Lover, I never chose to leave; leaving picked me out of the 490,000 other babies that took their first breath on the same day I did and branded me with a fire beneath my feet that always had me running. For you, I have tried to withstand the flames that ate at my soles but it wasn’t long before I grew weak again.

(I would have asked you to chainsaw right through both my ankles if I knew you’d have had the guts to, but I knew all too well of your aversion to blood, so instead I amputated your waist from my arms and was left to deal with the blood myself. No matter how many times I wash my hands, it never leaves my skin.)

So even though I left, and even though you don’t belong with me, I want you to know that you belong within me – you are the phantom limb every cell of my skin aches for. My vagabond heart had settled for you, even though I couldn’t get my hands to do the same, and still in every corner of the world I run to, even the phantasms take your shape.

I am forever haunted by all the hope I saw fading off your face.

So if every pair of lips I’ve ever kissed is a country, I am backpacking my way through state lines to forget you.

 

A love letter from those of us who keep leaving.

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 2 Comments

1) Every morning for one hundred and eighty-six days, you wrote the word breathe on my inner thigh so that the most tender part of me will remind both you and I to stay alive.

2) When we first met, I told you that my foot was tired of always holding the door half-open in case I needed to flee. You told me you were a runner – you’d catch up.

3) Of all the things I didn’t believe in, you said my lack of faith in love was the only thing that made me blasphemous. You kissed my hands and said you’d help me repent.

4) I have called your hips a temple and fallen to my knees in prayer three times a day for one hundred and eighty-six days. I have named your lips confessional booths and whispered into them all the sins I intended to commit in your name. I was born-again.

5) Your eyes committed massacres on every inch of my skin they fell on.

I accepted martyrdom with a smile.

6) Last week, I told you that I had blisters all over my feet from searching for feeling in these hollowed out streets. I told you that I had given myself wholly to roads that led me nowhere, but I ended up at your doorstep and fuck if that wasn’t the heaven at the end of my hell of a tunnel. You told me you would never let me go.

7) I told you that wasn’t what I was afraid of.

8) You always knew that my hands were too unstable to hold you, but still I have called you sticky sweet – said you stuck me back together with the sugar on your tongue, said you licked the fucked up right off of me the moment your lips met my skin.

You didn’t always believe what I told you.

So I tell you over and over; I mean everything I say.

9) Please don’t let me let you go.

10) My mother told me that I was diagnosed with insomnia at six years old. Fifteen years later, when I cannot sleep: I call your body my scripture and run my fingers through the braille of your skin; count the holy cells of your body until I can finally rest.

11) In your skin cells lie answers to every question I have ever asked myself.

12) One night, I whispered that I bet you’ve never seen a full moon, and that I bet that every time you’ve looked at a night sky, you were greeted by a crescent.

I’ve never told you why.

13) Forgive me;

I have always been lost and wandering.

14) Forgive me;

I can not get myself to sit still.

15) Please forgive me; I really thought naming your neck home would mean I’d always come back.

16) One hundred and eighty-six days ago, when you told me you were a runner, my feet started training every night when we were asleep to make sure you’d never catch up to me.

17) But I was still heartbroken when I looked behind me and saw you were so far back, it looked like the sunset had swallowed you.

18) I’m sorry I had to go. I’m sorry all the work you’ve put into me hasn’t paid off.

19) Forgive me, Lover, for I have sinned because:

20) Even though I meant everything I ever said,

21) I still couldn’t get myself to stay.

22) But I don’t want you to forget me. (Please, please, never forget me.)

23) So, my former darling, when you look up,

24) And you find another crescent,

25) (It’s because even God can’t stop smiling at your face.)