I have both dreams and nightmares of normalcy.
A nice husband who isn’t around for most of the life we’ve shared together, four kids whose ages he isn’t familiar with, but says he just can’t care to remember. A first-floor apartment overlooking a side street. Kids are playing and I make lunch on a quiet Friday afternoon. In my dreams, I am not half the bad cook I am.
I snap out of it at 3 in the morning, I’ve always been wondering why we insist on calling it “morning” when the sun hasn’t even risen yet. And when Momma asks me what’s wrong, I tell her tales of an international space station where strawberries have gone extinct a couple of years after the apocalypse.
I don’t know anything at all, and perhaps that is one of the two things that I know for sure. The other, is the fact that I was doomed to a life of consistent contradictions. No—not the head over heart kind of contradiction, but what if I was to rise with the notion that I’ve caved in to the monotone I used to despise a little bit too much? What if our parents too spoke with such urgency that it was hard for their friends to keep up? What if we found out that the spark in our eyes is genetic, only to discover later that every fire eventually dies out, no matter how persistent and frantic?
I spend my days hiding behind a mellow nothingness that drapes like curtains my mind, and my nights tiring the glaring sun screaming bloody murder in my resting ears till it swears not to rise any more.
One morning, I wake from some dreamless sleep, easy on the mind and heavy on the soul; ordinary in every way the lives we lead are. My mother does not bear to ask what the hell is wrong with me. Instead, she cradles my head in her lap. She prays for me as I nap for what feels like a minute but actually lasts a few hours. She thinks me someone whose idea of forever has been the temporary tattoo of the word “believe” fading on my arm. And God knows how she pities me. Only I know how I pity myself, and I hate that.

I burn my lungs for fun. I tell myself there is nothing for me in rebirth, only in decay. When I was a kid, I would build airplanes out of Lego bricks, I would stand up on top of a chair, a thud and a clatter later, my plane's shattered and pieces are flowing on the floor. I knew it wouldn’t fly, I could calculate the gravity force on any mass when I was five, but still I hoped physics would make just this one exception, just for me. We all lie to ourselves, but only a truly desperate person starts to believe those lies.
I wake up the following morning and I’m no longer five; suddenly I’m seventeen. I’ve somehow been able to convince myself that time was something I could take, borrow and give. I tell you I’ll give you all the time that I have, like that’s actually mine. You politely decline, telling me that yes, we are two good people, but yes, we only ever manage to bring the bad out of each other. The look on your face, it is as if space-time exists only in a universe we declared our own and now it is doomsday but nobody cares because nobody’s alive to tell.
When the person that keeps you grounded decides to let go or alternatively loses anything resembling balance, you don’t launch like a rocket ship into space, instead you freefall into a destiny we all know, an end we’re all familiar with: the sequel for life—or so I’d hope, the stillness and the solitude that grace death. So what if you lose your breath and no one’s there to catch it? You recollect yourself, rearrange untruths until they become facts that boom and bloom sanctity in sanctuary for a livelihood or a few.
The only two feelings that can possess a being are loneliness and hope. I’m helpless and I'm plagued by them both. I pray that either one is strong enough to end the other. Prayer can’t help the infidel. So I stand on my tiptoes, on the padded seat of a chair; my glare to the loneliness, my back to the hope, thinking to myself, this is no way to go live. There is no way I’m living what’s left of my life like this: lost and losing it, and losing big chunks of myself with every step I take, with every mistake I make. I’m hiding when I just want to be found, be it by you or by my own. I have stopped caring a long time ago, back when I learned that it was too late for me to find a flaw in Newton’s law of universal gravitation.

IV.

I love the fresh rush of rebirth in my veins when I pour water down my throat and it rains into the open sea that is my stomach. Maybe the butterflies can swim, but I’ve learnt that they also migrate to the brain and give migraines that spread and pulse and barely touch the insides of the ribcage, that spread and throb and eventually clot all within the flutter of a butterfly’s wings.

And I’ve learnt that the most violent of thoughts is that that starts in the head like a cell and descends slowly and smoothly to the heart. Lethally cancerously and quietly, a thought reaches way farther than its destination.

Sometimes I am so disconnected from the world. It feels like life is a boring movie I’m only watching out of curiosity of what is going to happen next. Some other times I am one with Earth: air, ground, trees. I can hear the roots digging through soil. And I coil into myself and swear to God I love it so much. Even if always faltering between two opposite emotions leaves me exhausted and begging for silence and the mere bliss of rest.

And I love my body. I love how in control I am of my body even if my fingers linger to move to their own accord when I’m nervous and I can’t afford to be nervous above the surface of my clothes.

I control my body the way I would want to command my thoughts to retreat to their base in the back of my mind. This war isn’t theirs to fight. This war is mine. And it won’t stop until a truce is conducted to lay down the tension between the head and the heart. It won’t stop until my head and my heart decide to condense the area of condescension between them to null.

I have waited for (almost) everyone to share their opinion/rage/joke over the Leila situation, and now, because I like to imagine that 1/7,000,000,000 is not that close to zero, I would like to share my thoughts:
1. A couple of weeks ago I found one of my old poems. The poem was written on September 15th 2013, the day after Leila’s concert, but just like a great portion of what I write about—what I am all about, it was about this city. I love and care about my country and my city way more than they do about me.
2. In my life, I have purchased three tickets for three different concerts of Leila's, and I have been counting my teenage years in respect to the only one that I used.
3. One of my favorite things about my generation is how hopefully angry it is. But there exists a deep ideological gap within my generation. There are the internet slacktivists and the still ones; only moving a little backwards thinking they’re swimming against the tide. The problem is that we have never learnt to think for ourselves.
4. The thing is, the entire deal only managed to make Leila more (in)famous. And while I don’t know whether that’s a bad thing or good, the band has now gained martyr status: congratulations.
5. It was never about the concert, but rather about what is going to come next. I can only wait with cautious anticipation.
6. There is a conspiracy theory that basically states that when something major is about to hit the news, a less significant event happens to avert the public’s attention.
7. Thank you, Leila, for being the soundtrack for some of my existential crises.
8. I pray that my generation gets its own voice some time soon.