Sana Travels

I prefer the fonts with filigree. Ones filled with wide-open spaces but not too much space to become bloated with their own flight. There is a balance between cliché and trendy and oh so very classic.
I am but the in between. The taste of something a little more bitter- merlot, resting on the tongue like a black pepper aftertaste in the back of the mouth.
Yes, that spot that reeks of wanting so much sophistication but caught in a glass much too small and mouth that truly has no palate. I could be the wasted flavor, the unsavory elegance of a note unheard.

The played out tune of my own aria, a dulled crescendo, I am.

Shriveled and lost, there are no great vines of glory left and not one single dollar more to spend.
I prefer these fonts with filigree, for they arrest my attention for a moment. In appreciation, there is a visual cue from my heart to brain that just says, “Yes, I am what you strive to be.” And so I take it on. I challenge it with my own burning tenacity- accuse of it belittling me and try to become it.

It’s silly, of course.
One cannot simply become a font.

With this door ajar, the wind whips through. Grasping at the tentrils of my open sores, I wince with pain.
The perched cigarette casting shadows against the door, fingertips lingering on the edges of white paper, curling and burning. A delicate paper, like wings of an insect- a wasp or a bee or maybe even a fly.

Annoying in essence, true, but in the heat of the day where the wind is a wisp and the cigarette a small conflagration, it is an unnoticed thing.
The sweet scent of tobacco mingling with ginger and lemon tea. Yes, the languid lapping at the tea cup’s shore. The frayed edges catching lip and swiping away red lipstick, reminding me of my grandmother who would think I’m a whore.

And speaking of sores, there was a drunken mistake at the corner store just the other night. Where I, with shadowed friends malingered deeply and spoke of pain and other such things. She burned me with her cigarette as I watched laughing at the absence.
The pain would come the next morning- today- and the scar would last forever.
Perhaps I could just blame it on my parents if anyone were to ever ask.

Their scars have been left on the inside, no such luck on external scarification. This drunken woman and wanton shadows grabbing and laughing and leering over lascivious jokes and crude language, the catalyst for a delayed pain. Absolute perfection in the middle of oblivion.
A foreign cell. A tiny place.
There was no English here. No spoken language that made any sense. I could laugh at anything and no would understand.

This was the mark of perfection.
Not the loneliness of waking up at ten a.m. with cigarettes strewn about the flat or the front door slightly ajar and me, in my haze chugging the tea I’d made a couple days before.

This window overlooking city streets and ants below, a windy godsend. A relief to the face and a pain to the sores.

The night is a silent desperation only felt in the shudders of its coldness.
A shroud to the sun, there is much secrecy of its nature.
As if the cloak and dagger belonged solely to the moon;
I am but the observer in this midnight scene tonight.

There is no reality at the strike of midnight.
No fountain can illuminate the ghosts of my past
still trying desperately to have their way with my soul.
Clawing and hissing and pressing their ashen faces against the windows
like minnows caught in the darkness undertow.

The stars could weave their way through the sky
and ease the pain of what lies in the shadows by its soft light.
Even the night sky cannot touch dark’s shadows with its deathglow
and maritime love of the lost, searching the tide.

But in its silence, the defense of itself,
The lingering fear tingles on the neck and sends tendrils of spirit
from my body like ink from the well, seeping its way out.
And the ink upon paper becomes the answer to its call-
it’s illumination that shuns the ghosts from the windows.

For my eyes, glazed to miss, and the minnows with their mouths
cannot contort and change the shapes of shadows.
The corners of my eyes turn to stars and the death shroud
of eyelids closing like a soft sigh and eases the pain of its deep sea.

In the windows, with their milky faces pressed against the panes, I avert my eyes to avoid theirs. Could their fish mouths form words without causing alarm or is their very presence cause for alarm?
Without their hoods, I cannot tell if they are echoes of death scratching at my door or if they are the constant reminders that I, too, can see the world or spirits. (Who would doubt their existence?)

Soul to soul, we traverse through time merging closer and closer to the source. To spirit or god or whatever name you choose. This evolution, this divine spark is the creation and pulled from this reverie, is their ashen faces screaming something at me.

Mute. I cannot see the words and I close my eyes to try to wash away their pain but in the closing, their visage is more clear- there are more colors to their emotions. Carved out of reality, I cannot escape them but I wish I could.

This quiet caused by refusal means there are no more messages. There are no resolutions, just a polite cue of help me, help me please. With pleading eyes, frantic and panicked and lost; I wish they could go away and I could stay up in the middle of the night without feeling them boring their eyes over my shoulder to gather me.

Sometimes, in my dreams, I grow scared seeing them as who I am going to become and wonder and fear that soon, soon they will pull me under and the veil will lift for a moment and then I shall hang out by the old yew tree in the graveyard. Where my granite headstone will erode and fade and grow lichen until my name all but disappears and I become the legend that haunts, scaring away young women with gifts because the graveyard is just too creepy.

I know her. I am her and I don’t want to become them.

So, my little fishes. My little white-faced spirits caught in the mist, I wish and pray for your safety and eventual merge into the oneness with all but nonetheless, ask that your passing be brief and you find your way down the road. You presence, lingering like cobwebs, creates such dis-ease that I cannot feel comfortable in my home.