Category: Writing Club Projects

Turning Point

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 1 Comment

Blue was your
least favorite color,
but you wore it on
your skin like a trophy,
like it was something
you were born in,
like it was a gift
you were asked
to never take off.
Empty smiles served
as your silver and gold,
as your diamonds
and pearls,
you thought them
very well befitting the
scarves strung
around your neck:
those knitted little
must-not-speaks
that threatened to pull
at both sides if you were
ever to utter those words
that churned the very
insides of your stomach.

Here you are, facing
the mirror that never
quite gave you clarity.
You are anything
but true to yourself.

You spend your days
in a violent haze,
drowning in
your merciless thoughts. In your
head, they’re
boundless as the sea
but they end up condensed
to a single insignificant drop
that lingers unspoken
at the tip of your tongue
until you find yourself
swallowing,
defeated.
If this feeling were a
part of human anatomy,
you think
it would definitely be
a rib cage, for it holds you
hostage;
quietly asphyxiated,
effectively suffocated,
promising eternal safety
to the seemingly undying
ache it harbors – to
the inhales and exhales
of a hopeless entity,
to a Stockholm Syndrome
victim who never
knew any better.
If this feeling were a
part of human anatomy,
you think
it would never be a hand,
for hands always give,
and hands always caress,
and hands always comfort,
and all it does is take
away more and more
of your livelihood,
as it robs you
of your will to breathe.
These can’t be fingers,
you think,
because fingers
are graceful,
and fingers
hold,
and all you ever
seem to be doing is
falling
ever so gracelessly.

Here you are,
chalking your pain
up to destiny.
You are anything
but safe in your skin.

You lie in an
unfathomable mess
of adult urges
and childish fears.
You think your future’s
all written out
for you like a script
you can’t ever change:
Act one;
you are forever
defined
by the shifting of
your eyes, by the
hesitation of your
lips, by the worrisome
longing of your skin.
Act two;
you will always be
waiting for the chaos
in your head
to settle, for the
whispering in your
ears to speak
in a different
language,
a language you know
you’re allowed
to listen to.
The final act;
you will spend
the rest of your
mortality
wishing for a time
and place where
these words
could slide right off
your taste buds without
a life sentence.
And then you will die.

And yet, here you are,
entrapping yourself
in your own version of
black and white stripes.

You are anything,
but you are nothing
until
you admit
that this is who you are,
until you hold your head
up high –     not in pride,
but in recognition,
and appreciation of the
parts of you
that refuse to wilt
away, of the side of you
that refuses to
break at the bending
of your surroundings.
You are anything,
but you are nothing
because you keep
yourself imprisoned
in this shameful prism.
You’ve gone and
confined your own light
inside these hateful walls,
unaware that
all you ever had to do
to feel alive is to
just let it flow right out of you,
so it could pass through
and seep to the other side;
so your rainbows
could set the universe
into color, could set
their depressing grey
into an understanding
shade of
everything
between red and violet.
You are anything,
but you are nothing
until you tear off the skin
sewn forcefully onto your body
for the skin you were born in.

This is who you are.

And better aeons late
than never,
make peace with it.

Glass by 7ala Abdullah

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 3 Comments

You say you’d like to buy
a time machine and replay
that year all over again.
You say you’d do it all
over and over, until it’s over,
until it’s really, really over;
until you no longer get the urge
to lay your head on grassy
landscapes just to look for my face
in the stars. You say it’s gone
and we’re different, you say the only
thing that’s still the same is the way
that music in our chest
still plays that old tune when
we’re not thinking; still plays that
song that ruptures us when
no one’s looking.

But you’ve got that look in your eye;
the one that says you’re not
telling the truth. You’ve got that
look that’s telling me not to trust
what you’re saying, that same
damn look that intoxicated me
that day you told me
nothing would go wrong
and I was just a little “maybe”,
rolled in flesh and bones, so
unsure of whether you
would kill me or save me. And you
sang me serenades of “sure”
and “absolutely”
and you stood beautifully on my
world with your flag in hand,
and that was the day I became
your absolute Indian.
You stormed in on me,
and I loved the rain, loved the way
your hurricane spun me around because
I was a dancer and you knew exactly how
to hold me; arms up and feet off the
ground – you turned me over and over until I
forgot
how stability felt like.

“Fly me up into your seventh heaven
and promise me
I’ll never learn how it feels to fall”,

until I fall for you.
Until I fall for forever.
Until every step I take is another shard
stuck in the soles of my feet.

This is not about you.

This is about me
all parts of me
burnt-out and broken,
perfect and tainted as I am. This is
about the blood
on our hands and the heaviness
in our chests, about the the scars on
our eyes and the stains on
our flesh. This is about
the past that’s been on repeat,
this is about being stuck in a
fantasy. This is about that
broken record
you and I are sick of listening to,
of feeling to, this is about
the desperate need for an unattainable
fix. You say sorry,
but sorry is just another word
I can no longer hear from all the
goodbyes echoing
in my ears; give me sorries in
rays of light because
my eyes have adjusted to darkness
and I’m terrified of how
they don’t miss the sunshine. But you’re
fading and we’re hopeless, and
my fingers are tired of clutching on to things
that are no longer theirs.
We’re fucking beautiful,
but we’re doomed,
and you say
we were meant
to be, but I think
you’ve misunderstood.
You and I were meant to break
one another, meant
to shatter each other’s souls
until there was nothing left
of us that was fragile,
until we were both loose powder roaming
high above the seven seas and the
wild universes.

“It’ll be because
it’s meant to be”,

and I would have agreed
with you before. But you were my sun
and now
it’s night-time, and it’s no longer
you
I long for; it’s the tips of
my fingers
I left buried in your skin.
You say we can get past it,
you say
it’s water under the bridge,
but I can see you sinking
from miles away;
can see your arms
helplessly
trying
to fight the current, can see
your lungs filling up
with water, can still see
that flicker of hope
in your drowning eyes.

Take a second to listen to the words I’m saying,
that’s all I ask.
If you’d just hear me out,
if you’d just please concentrate for once,
you’d hear that ticking begin to slow, and
you’d see that last speck of sand
rushing into the other half of the hourglass
to find its final resting place.

This, dropping unguarded
and uninhibited,
falling with only maybe-nots in mind
this is the hope I had for us.

This, my love,
my lost love,
this is the end of our time.

John by 7ala Abdullah

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 1 Comment

(In order to understand this piece, you should first read this explanation and this prelude.)

She was a magnet, and the whole world was made of metal.

So, him standing there in front of her was simple physics. As were the items of clothing hitting the floor, but he doesn’t even know that they are. He’s so hypnotized by the grey in her eyes that he can only tell she’s moved when her fingers begin to tickle his shoulder. Goosebumps like mountains dress his limbs in pure desire. He wants to drop to the floor and beg for forgiveness for things he never felt apologetic about. He wants to cry rivers of repentance; he wants to confess all his wrongdoings. He wants to declare his undying belief in her holiness.

A cold breeze enters through the cracks in his windows and hisses softly onto his back, but he’s too fixated on her to notice the change in temperature. She glows in this kind of darkness, he thinks. No, she glows all the time, he decides, but fabric interferes. Her pupils are microscopes picking apart and harshly inspecting every inch of his mundane skin. He stands erect, unable to move without superior command.

He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that when her tongue meets her lips; she tastes Eden. He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that when she arches her back; the heavens balance themselves on the curve of her spine, and he knows that when she curls her toes; angels kiss her feet. He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that the most expensive silk sheets will never compare to the softness of her skin, and that the sound of her voice is comparable only to the most moving musical notes. But he doesn’t know enough.

Even after all those months, he doesn’t know enough.

He’s spent a hundred and thirty-three days watching her, and he still doesn’t know enough. He knows her favorite brand of milk (Flora), her preferred type of cheese (Gouda), her favorite chocolate bar (Snickers), her favorite place to shop (Gucci), her favorite perfume (Armani Code), and her bra size (32 D). He knows she has five clients a week and that she spends her weekends in bed. He knows she has no family. He knows her favorite color is red and her nails never stay unpainted in a bloody shade for too long. He knows she’s got a standing order of ten garter belts and fishnets from La Perla per month. He knows she gets more and more friendly with the delivery man each time and he knows she’d pleased him pro-bono in September then kicked him out at three in the morning because he snored.

But he doesn’t snore. And if he did, he’d happily cut off his own nose so as to not displease her. Matter of fact, he’d brought a knife just in case.

But right now, her velvet hands are whispering profanities into the contours of his largest organ. Like an earthquake; her touch rattles him from the inside out and he’s shuddering with the realization that he’s finally where he knows he’s been heading his whole existence.

Here, the pieces of the puzzle called his life are falling into place. Here, the windows of hope are allowing him a peak into paradise. Herein lies the answer to every question he’s ever asked himself in the twenty-four years he’s walked this sorry Earth.

Her. This. Here. Now. Please.

Please, he finds himself saying. Take me, just take me. And he’s on his back, eyes full of tears and hands and feet immobilized. She places her ruby lips on his and he breathes immortality for the first time. Her tongue tastes of sin, and he’d gladly burn in hell for eternity for just another taste.

Now it’s just them and the moon that serves as the only cover to his cloth-forsaken body. She’s taunting him with miscalculated touches and misguiding glances. She’s mocking him with irregular patterns of kissing. Her hands are on his neck and he finds himself throwing his head back in submission.

You’re mine, she sings and his abundant hair looks up towards the heavens to declare it as the truth.

All yours, he pleads, and she presses harder against his neck in approval.

She’s looking down at him and he feels so small – so imperfect; so petty and human, so damn inglorious. He’s swallowed by the greedy lips of her lust and his life is flashing before his eyes.

He swears he can almost see divinity emanating from every pore in her body.

He’s out of breath, but she’d sucked it out of him the first time he saw her, so it was nothing new.

A little tighter around the neck and he’s giving in. A little tighter and he’s fading.

He doesn’t know enough, but he knows that she believes she is a Goddess; and so she is.

He doesn’t know enough so he doesn’t know where he’s going.

But he knows he’s leaving with a smile on his face.

The World by 7ala Abdullah

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 2 Comments

Look.

Don’t leave an inch unpondered.

Stare at it all; stare at your bumps and bruises. Stare at your flaws and imperfections; your scars and your voids. Stare at your worn-out hands; those hands you used to build and break – to hold and to push. Look at your cuts, look at how they bleed bright blue with indifference – and your back; all straight and proud and defying humanity.

Look at yourself, look at where the world filled syringes of poisonous hate and injected them into your skin. Look at your body; covered in needle-marks from where apathy, distrust, and jealousy were forced into your blood.

Here you stand; remnants of yourself.

You typical human, you peaked at 6 years old and ever since then, your life’s gone downhill. You were then taught that love has a name. You were told that there’s right and there’s wrong and there’s us and there’s them. You were taught about shame and you hid in dark corners to protect yourself from it.

You were fed war and racism; you drank religion and you spat out the parts of it you disliked. You were told it made you better; so you believed it and you looked down upon anything that was different. Anything that brought along any kind of change with it.

You never learned self-satisfaction; instead you were taught how to rob others of it. You suffered and cried for an award only you can give yourself. You wept when you faced the mirror; the possibility that you might have been beautiful was seemingly galaxies away.

You were like a gluttonous Eve with an appetite for apples; you picked the ripest ones despite the forewarnings you received. And they were delicious and fulfilling, but you fell from your heaven into pain each time.

And the thing about pain is that it falls hard on us like rain in a storm, covers us in damages for as long as it can and eventually; it dries off and we’re left with the aftermath. For you, the damage was to your soul; your spirit. You were killed by your own kind, told you’d never amount to anything – told that you were less of a human because of a chromosome and told you were more of a chosen one because of a belief.

You died a little every time you were robbed a human right in the name of holiness.

How did you get here? How did you end up this way?

Pain is no longer your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is that you’ve learned to enjoy the solace and the beauty of the pain thrust upon you. You no longer try to extirpate it from under your skin.

But get yourself off the ground. Let go of the hurt. Find satisfaction from within yourself. Make a change.

Eve by 7ala Abdullah

~ 7ala Abdullah ~ 10 Comments

(In order to understand this piece, you should first read this explanation. Otherwise it’d be hard to comprehend the meaning behind it. )

Darkness used to terrify me; now I’m drawn to it like a shark to fresh blood.

The petrifying serenity of it calms me. I’ll never be able to articulately describe the moment I first felt joy at the absence of light – the moment I felt the fear climbing up to the surface of my skin. It shot out like the screams of a woman in labor, only to give birth to the quiet fearlessness that was budding out and taking its place from within me. I cradled it against my chest and fed it my own skin; stayed up long nights to keep it calm and content. I watched it grow out of its bibs and pacifiers and into tall glasses and cheap shots. I watched it grow out of its onesies and slip into skin-tight dresses and expensive garters.

The unforeseen. The inexplicable. The extraordinary. The inhuman; the way-too-human. I loved it so. I loved its unpredictability. I loved the Godly power it brought with it; I loved the tender feel of the life beneath my fingers. I adored the fleeting sense of ecstasy, I adored the control; the shamelessness. I cherished those sleepless nights and the mess I was almost always left to clean alone.

I fell in love with the solidarity, the independence. The nonchalance.

I never cared about anything or anyone else. I never needed anything else to keep me sane. And I know what they all think of me; I know they think I’m a slut with legs so far apart; the sun never sees both at the same time. Well, that’s for me to know and for them to pretend they do with their empty heads held high above their shoulders. They look at me, eyes full of judgment and pity. They search for answers in my eyes, look for solutions in their tiny minds. They think they’ve got me all figured out;

“Oh, that poor little girl with no one to save her.”

But there’s always a little more to everyone than people would first presume.

There’s a lot more to me than he thinks.

He with his eyes full of fire and his hands full of recklessness. He with his silencing lips and hungry fingers. They sear into my skin and leave traces of the sin I’ve gladly called my life sentence. He calls me beautiful – he says so without looking at my face. His greedy tongue looks for comfort in the salt of my body, my limbs are his lullaby – my body; his prize. But is a prize really a prize when you’re paying to get it? His thinking never really reaches that far. I’ve always been thankful for the disgustingly limited thinking process of men.

It’s served me well.

Darkness.

I’ve never seen anything more beautiful than the sight of his bare body being hugged by moonlight. His features melting away with the furniture; the only things sharp and vivid are his eyes. His dilated pupils are glowing with sincerity, yet his intentions are anything but sincere. He stares at me full of want. His hands and feet are cuffed to the bedposts – he smiles wickedly; makes sure to let me know he approves.

Darkness.

It used to mortify me. I’d always look for ways to make it go; I’d always find a light to scare it away with. I’d always figure out a way to make it slither away from my body like a snake and leave me unpoisoned.

But oh, how I cherish its venom now. It swims through my veins and takes over my blood; runs through my lungs and leaves me gasping.

Darkness.

The kind from within. The kind unaffected by the sun. The kind that blots out all logic and leaves me free as an eagle.

It’s beautifully dangerous, this kind of desire. It’s endless, unsatisfied; always wanting, never settling. It’s greedy and stubborn, it’s illogical and it leaves no room for negotiation.

Darkness.

We’re in the drowning darkness. His breath is singing along with the wind, his body counting on my mercy. My hands find their way to his trachea. He’s excited, tilts his neck towards me; gives it away like toys to a child. The familiar tenderness thrills me.

“You’re mine.” I hiss into his ear. I feel the hairs all over his body responding to the friction of my lips.

“All yours.”

He has no idea. He’s bound to me for the rest of his sorry life. He doesn’t know he’s going to spend it all under my perfect body trying to grab onto my flawless skin.

I give a tantalizing squeeze to his neck. “Oh, God”, he whispers. I’ve been dubbed God before, but its truth only strikes me in the split second it takes for their faces to change from red to blue. The moment their demanding eyes change from lustful to terrified. The moment I know they know I’m the one in control. The moment they realize they’ve handed their lives to me without thinking twice.

The moment he realizes I’ve got his last breath in the palm of my hand.

17 seconds is all it takes. His tainted light creeps out of his wasted body and leaks into my superior soul. I hang on to his neck for a little more than that. The state I’m in can only be described as euphoric – his limp body is the cloud I choose to rest on.

I touch his lifeless face. Despite the struggle he just put on, it looks calm – expressionless.

He’s given in to his fate – the one I set for him.

Any whore with ovaries could give a life.

It takes a Goddess to take one away.

Holy is in the eye of the beholder.

© Copyright 7ala Abdullah