The blue apple at five
They planted me, watered me, and yet I came out blue

January 22, 2007
iranian.com

Do you read my story, the story of my love, a love so deep that it is needless of your physical presence? Has there ever been a lover who has traced your essence in the air and kissed your lettering every chance she gets. Have you ever had a lover who sits patiently for you to take her in your dreams if not in reality, who wears you like a bangle, and to whom she is like a devotee to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar?

Today is not as quiet as yesterday. It is five in the morning. The lights reflect the loss of energy. The city has written its dreams, wake up and reveal to me what items form your place of peace but before that, do know I don't tremble from the pain of not having you. I tremble from the thought of having you and losing. I don't want to be just another woman you direct your days next to. No, I don't want to add Sheema to your days. I need this constant presence, your presence, learning you. I have always been curious to know what the happening was; now I realize I am the happening, and you are the inspiration. Come to me. Play your Persian Tar; go from sorrow to joy, from low notes to high, and from one end to another. I want you as the self persuades my days, days that life to them is a journey not a destination. A destination as I now know poetry was to me, a companion. It held me by my wrists so that I wouldn't arch or drift.

You know being Najib is essential to a woman's survival in the recent history of the Middle East. Perhaps that is why I have taken up this journey into a writing exercise of my rights to express myself. I am a Najib. Married, a mother, a respectful figure, if I am talked to I sound like I have left Iran yesterday and not nineteen years ago. I am familiar with all the principles expected of a Najib woman. I had great training in my first fifteen years of living in a totalitarian state. To hold back, not to answer, to act proper and in a certain way, to walk so that the movements of my breasts wouldn't break the bricks on the walls. Thus I was a bad apple. They planted me, watered me, and yet I came out blue.

I felt the pain, heard the screams that couldn't leave the walls of Evin prison when I passed them to go climbing the mountains in northern Tehran. I knew the walls' real color isn't gray, isn't made of cement, but blood, torture, and I learned heaven is reserved for the raped virgins. I wanted you to hold me, to sooth me, to love me in the mornings and afternoons but you weren't. The poetry became my refuge. I was unsure if it was part of my fortune or doomsday. I was in a warlike state of mind, trying to survive a contagious ailment, to survive my fate, find the right path, the right taste. I couldn't attain peace in the practice of eating in a plate set of leftovers in my life time, on a dining table, because it was modern poetry, post modern poetry, because it had names like Wad, Nasr, Yauuq and Swaa. I started experimenting. I started to amaze myself, amuse myself, and humble myself but then you came along and I knew it wasn't working for me at all. Poetry is the truth, not a process to heal, not a laughter, not lemon and lime, and not fellowships.

Now I want you to be happy. I want you to find your way to the ark, to rediscover a land with me. I am not your advisor or the guide. I am not a database or an illusion or replicating books to a better self. What I write is invaluable because it comes from the depth of my soul, the oneness with the universe of my body and mind, and exercising to accept the humiliating truth that I was unaware of the truth, your existence.

Not every one is destined to discover, and revive. They can try as I am trying but then not everyone is lucky to have you, like I want to have you, when we find the land. A land as majestic as Carmel by the sea where we can walk bare feet, where the sky is one with the sea, and the sea dances next to the beach where the rocks like mediators stand between the light and the rest, where the recital of convention comes to the realization of the fact that a wave has the sound, the color, and the movement, trinity like.

Do you read my story? The story of my love. A love so deep that it is needless of your physical presence. Has there ever been a lover who has traced your essence in the air and kissed your lettering every chance she gets? Have you ever had a lover who sits patiently for you to take her in your dreams if not in reality, who wears you like a bangle, to whom she is like a devotee to Lal Shahbaz Qalandar? Comment

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