Remain my burning bush
You are not a casual affair

January 24, 2007
iranian.com

Remain my burning bush
I want to wear you like a pair of earrings so that your touch leaves me short breathed, so that when I brush my hair aside and look at myself in the mirror, you smile back at me, with your lips upon my ears. I am not your jealous lover. I am not your keeper. I am not your fragments, fractions, your feelings; I am not your relentless answer to be alive. I am not your other half. You are complete without me. Your hands are kind without holding mine. Your eyes are bright without the need to absorb the light in mine. You don't need to read my letters to see my reflection. You make my blood simmer without undressing me.

Hundreds of thousands of people have crossed my path, hundreds of thousands of texts have been read by my eyes, hundreds of thousands of times, rain has washed my body, yet I want your smell to drop me on my feet. I want you to read me, your words, to pick me up Christ like, or be my Jabal al-Nour, and to remain my burning bush. I don't apologize for loving you. You are not just a life time search to have me pour you the wine. You are not a casual affair. You are not just me catering you, my tongue slaving its way down your body, and you awaiting the strokes, preparing for an eruption. I am not your courtesan like the time I felt when walking in Anarkali (pomegranate blossom) market in Lahore, Pakistan. The eyes of men were making out with my body that was transparent to them from underneath the salwar kameez and dupatta. You are more than a convulsion to me.

We don't say hello. We don't say goodbye. We are. We don't kiss, don't struggle, don't hate, don't pain the other, don't revenge, and don't bring despair. We don't question. We don't answer. We don't meet. We don't bring expectations. You are not opium. I am not in need of a narcotic property. I don't smoke. I don't drink alcohol. I don't need substances to enjoy me, to enjoy you. I drink you. You don't consume me. You come natural, and I want to reclaim you on top. You run through my veins. You are profound.

Even as of today
I can't forget. I can't let go. Working doesn't comfort me; reading doesn't comfort me, jogging, and taekwondo don't release the energy. Characteristically you are, I am, turning into an idea, and a drowsy hope. Maybe I am premenstrual. Maybe I am just fading. Maybe I have too many responsibilities or maybe losing mother to breast cancer has left me a lot more sensitive to the matter of loss. I don't know the answer. I don't even know why I write to you: "I have no expectations," yet, I want you to write to me, and to know me.  Maybe it is because I love you. I love you even as of today, even after all these years. I love you because there is a need in me to love you, to write to you that I love you, to say to you that I love you. I perceive this. I want to take away the cruelty, the crimes, the brutality, and the bitterness out of life. I want to hold you forever, to ease you, the enigma.

I remember it like it was yesterday. The day when you sat on a chair in the room with a view to the little nature trail swaddling itself around the lake near the house, and told me your story. You talked about Bang Kwang prison where you had the terrifying experience of being an inmate on charges of not having legal documents, a passport. Even as I write your story a chill moves up my spine. Seldom had you wanted to remember and it was the first time you spoke of it to me. The place with its poor health circumstances, the everyday nutrient-low calorie-dense diet, non-existing intellectual stimulation, drug offenders, armed guards, and electrified fences were a frightening reminiscence.Your imprisonment by the Thai police was particularly ironic considering the circumstances you had fled Iran in the first place. After months of sharing one cell with hundreds of men from different nationalities, you no longer were the same person. Hearing a man fornicating another inmate in the corner of the cell, drinking unsanitary water, toilets that piled up with shit when water went out, infections, illnesses and risk factors among prisoners and knowing that the people working in the United Nations could take up to three years before browsing through your case, had made you understand the true meaning of struggle. Once the inmates learned your status as a political refugee, there was an explosion of respect for you. Unlike the Cambodian and Burmese ethnic and economical refugees, you were an intellectual. You even had got the permission to sleep by the wall without having to claim seniority or fight for the spot. Your popularity had grown overnight. Needless to say, you no longer were an easy target for the incensed men who were arrested on drug smuggling charges. It had taken you a year before the night of the national holiday arrived and you walked out to fly to Malaysia and from there to the West, to freedom.

You told me your story and we became the green gate to the inner self. Time passed and eventually dreaming next to you turned into an episode for me. Every now and then you would wake up screaming in your sleep. Your nightmares turned into mine. I did want to hold you, to put you together regardless of the broken or the lost pieces. It was just that you needed to form your own surrounding. Ultimately you brought me nothing but down. My wings were clipped off. I needed to fly, to keep me alive, to breathe. I wasn't perfect. The flight, I was forgetting the flight. I couldn't remain a dry sticker on your fingers. We couldn't find pleasure in the moments. You had turned into a far off dream. I had to seek out a new you. It didn't matter then, it doesn't matter now. Render me. I searched for you, a different you to secure my moments of longing. Now I trust in all of you and you, come to me in all shapes, come to me in all men, come to me in all humanity, come to me in all lands, and come to me in all feelings, belongings, possessions and positions of soul, body and mind. Come to me before the spirit leaves the body, before the mind dies away. Beloved, let me be your lover for now and forever, regally? Comment

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