December '22 Edition: Where are you Hiding?

Where are you hiding?

It’s an involuntary game of hide and seek, and we are all players in this game. Tell me, my dearest reader, are you the seeker or the sought? Perhaps you are neither - not all who hide are sought, and not all who seek, search for the hidden. Indeed, it’s the twelve days of Christmas. The game has commenced. If you’re a seeker, turn around — you don’t need a head-start. But for the rest of you, what are you hiding from? Do you wish to be found? O inglorious league! Shall we, upon the footing of our land, send fair-play orders, and make compromise, insinuation, parley, and base truce to arms invasive? Intriguing foul play. There’s a twist to this game. Hiding spots are limited. Where are you hiding? Or rather, are you hiding at all? Safely hidden is not all bad, but barely hidden would be miserable. Where do the lonely hide at Christmas? Or are they forced in medias res?

Fair is foul, foul is fair. There might be a hider in us all. Maybe the seekers who are still reading are secretly hiding — imposters, are you? But who am I to judge? It’s a very modernist trope - you’d drink to forget and dance your sorrows away. Maybe I shouldn’t have called you out - did I reveal your hiding spot? But perhaps you shouldn’t hide there. Christmas parties are brutal.

November '22 Edition: Death Pt. 2

The other day, I was lying in bed

hunched over to the side

and something funny happened.

The door was open

it was dead silent,

and I was dead still.

It’d be plausible to think I were dead.

I thought I was dead.

But then it happened.

It was beating

pounding

thumping on every wall.

Then for the first time in a while,

I was hearing the sound of my own heart beat

and feeling the weight of each pulse

I realised how much I was living in my mind

and how little I was in my body.

November '22 Edition: 'Death' Pt. 1

Death is on my mind.

Anywhere else, it is waiting, hiding, listening. It lurks in the corner of the lips,

at the tip of a kitchen knife, and hangs on the edge of the window sill.

I contemplated for a few nights - what shall I write for this monthly post?

Death seemed too grim. But then again, how fragile must we be that we cannot handle such susceptibility? How vulnerable are we that mendacity soothes us, yet reality haunts us?

It frightens you. You bleed in chilling terror, gasping for air, hoping, praying, begging.

For what? That he spares you?

You believe, now, in anguish, in a god who will save you?

You are so caught up in fear - in your screams and sighs, that you do not see that real beauty is terror.

What you love, you must also be afraid of.

These violent delights have violent ends and, in their triumph, die like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, consume.

What is beauty if not terror?

What, that is beautiful is not also powerful and destructive?

How tragic for you to think that death is terror, yet beauty is peace; that you see beauty in peace but not beauty in terror

How tragic that you do not realise that love is not remembering

But the fear of forgetting.

What you love, you are afraid of.