The history of letting go in order to get in books started with Moses, they don’t mention it, but if you set foot close to his grave you’ll see the crowds of all the words God couldn’t sing into his left ear which he cut off, you’ll see the other half of the truth that wasn’t handed to us. A man’s desire to stay a king, to stay in between the walls that held his mother’s perfume, and just as I am trying, to stay a storyteller.
Sometimes, we need to shed parts of us to stay faithful to the stories we’re telling, Van Gogh and Moses cut off their ears, the modern storyteller misses a step on the staircase, forgets how much sugar to take with their tea, not pack books when travelling, fall in love more often than they should or claim that they don’t believe in love in the first place, publicly, in our papers or in cafés where atmospheres and people with better stories than us come to get their coffee are sold. In the romantic era, John Keats decided to leave Fanny Brawne for his body to ache for her so that his poems would swell. Milena and Kafka never touched, and that turned him to an insect, something so ugly and gruesome that the norm of crushing a bug was created.
I stayed in bed for so long the other day staring at a wall the furniture pieces started making noises afraid that my silence will eat me up and turn me into a sibling of theirs, or that’s how heavy my heart felt anyway. I couldn’t reply to the messages confirming the ride to my mother, it’s been over a year since I last saw her but I tell the nightstand with a short hand that it’s because of all that I put into the paper the night before, the paint chips on my eyelids and I refuse to not write again. This is how far one would go. If you’re not a Majnun howling with the animals, if your pain isn’t as big as the world the words will come out dull, the vocabulary will be home-work good enough only.