Madiha Khan
(I)
The God of time entered through my window.
The night stood still and soft. My eyes leaked blood that night and I could not sleep because of the rain.
In my warm bed on Sunset Street, I dreamt I was being transported back to pakiland in a boat made of sand. My only companion was the Prophet Mohammed.
But what right do I have to complain? (shhh your aura needs a good cleansing).
Nothing makes sense right now, just like it never used to. I have almost figured out the meaning of life and I am leaking words like molasses from the corners of my mouth.
Joyce comes to me in dreams the next night and kisses my lips before jumping off the Ambassador bridge into the Detroit River. Again, I wake up with up with an ocean in mouth and a haunting in my eyes (I am not sure but I think there is something under my bed).
(II)
My father chewed through my brothers’ flesh with unrestrained ecstasy, that much I am sure of. There is a heaviness in his bones that makes the entire universe feel like it is dragging at the bottom of my damp feet. The air grows thicker and the smoke feels tarrier when he is orbiting around the block.
He is a cruel beast, a filthy wolf in disguise.
One night I stayed up until the moon bled dry and yellow and I read the secret memories from the lemurian crystals that I found buried in the soil under the sycamore tree. The crystal made me realize that time’s repeating patterns and violent rhythms were the only way to evolve human consciousness into a more enlightened version. In order to achieve a mass enlightenment of all societies, there needed to be billions of deaths and millions of wars and millions of rapes committed on the earth’s surface before a species evolved that would finally bow down to the earth and weep in sincere and collective humility at its green feet.
And this story was so long and took so many long slices and clusters and timelines to progress that its relativistic inertia made me nauseous with rage.
(and now you’re perspective needs recalibrating, darling).
(III)
When my father was eleven years old, he castrated my grandfather. The taste of power was ripe like lush pomegranate in his mouth and he was afraid that the taste of nothingness would dissolve him into a sobbing black hole. That day, the sky hung heavy and pregnant with rain from the next galaxy over and a even a thousand year long flood could not erase the blood from our family’s marbled foyer.
Even after a million cycles of almost-there-but-not-quite-present spiritual enlightenment, I could not forgive him [them].
There are time gaps occurring here. I cannot just leave the horror behind. Why is it so cavalierly expected of me? I guess the lesson is always there still. My karmic debt must be in the millions. I am trying so hard everyday but still there are bubbles of space where I cannot manage a kind word even when the Mars sahara moves into my womb. The future is rusted and the past is dust. My father killed his sons so he could spend the rest of his life high on relativity.
He is the ghost in the back of my spine. He is the water behind my fury.
On the day that the earth finally collapses, not even all the guitar solos in the world will be able to bring a smile to his face.
(IV)
Capitalism hung heavy in our corner of the galaxy for the next three cycles of time-space spiral. Money money money I watch my brothers all lose themselves to the ecstasy of money and the blood spilled out of their mouth like wine on a moonlit night.
But I am no saint. I sat in my corner of the marbled balcony and drank the wine and swallowed the plump dates that they fed to me with their thickly veined fingers. I let myself forget that a paradise is not a paradise as long as there is somebody somewhere is falling to the earth with no life beating inside their hearts.
Listen: it was only in the midst of an infinitely long and bitter winter overflowing with coffers of gold and rubies and energetically charged papers that I came to realize the cosmic purpose of perpetual existence.
It took my father a billion years just to realize that his son’s smile could wipe the dust way from his eyes (that same dust that had been coating his eyelashes since the day his mother birthed him into a family curse as thick and pungent as attar).
If it can take a billion years to know the love of your child, imagine all the time you will need to know love of the self and the divine.
It takes aeons to pierce the veil and glimpse a sight (and it is a blinding sight!) of the other side. All that passes in the blink of an eye to the divine takes millennia to manifest on your plane of existence and on my space of being.
Rumi was right.
Mashallah.
(V)
When I fell into the black hole in the corner of my bedroom ceiling, Allah spoke to me in my dreams and told me that forgiveness was my only option. The gravitational field was so intense that not even my logic could escape its pull (and all the quantum mechanics of my childhood could not stop me from noticing the truthfulness of this feeling).
Yes, it is true that my father was a murderer and a blood-suckler and an magnet of for dark vibrations all across the universe. But his darkness was inherited from his father’s darkness who inherited the ancestral darkness that has clung to our family tree since the involution of time.
It is true that some parts of my childhood were gray and blue tinged, sad caribou sitars playing in the background on repeat. But it is also true that sometimes the light from the Titan and Dione next door would filter over through my window and my soul would feel lighter and higher and a torrent of sympathy would rush through me like the streams that Kahlil Gibran spoke about through the voice of Almustafa. To break a karmic cycle, a balance must be maintained. The light must also be remembered along with the darkness.
And so I forgive my father.
(oh oh oh it still hurts but now the pain is sweet like a 500 year old wine).
I balance the light with the darkness.
(can you hear the sigh of relief echoing upward and onward through the cosmos?)
I shatter the circle and transmute it into a spiral.
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Madiha Khan is a first-time contributor to Coffin Bell. She did not provide a bio, even though we asked nicely.