Poetic Revelations for When You Realize the Irritating Inner-child inside you Needs Kicking in the Butt for Making You think you Gave up Your Superpowers.

Someone’s watching. There’s a presence. Like something blowing softly at the back of my neck on a sweltering hot day but I can’t sense it yet. I don’t ask who it is because it’s that little girl in my head, again. I know her but I don’t know it yet. I watch her watch me react to the stares of my partner, my mother, my in-laws and the neighbors. They point fingers. I am sick, unappealing, inhuman. I pick up a rock and SMASH the heads of bullies but I actually don’t, because I can’t because I’m powerless. She watches, indignant, silent and sad.

“I don’t want to live without my mommy!” My child of eight says between sobs when I try to slash my wrists.

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1,2,3,4.

Shhhhh…

You are now in the center of the cyclone.

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It’s quite something. All the yings and yangs and chi and chakras running like mad chicken fleeing a coup when the doctors tell me I can’t live. You see of course I can go on living, but what they’re telling me is that I can’t really be ALIVE.

My steps are of no direction in this dimension. I crave bread. I crave my breath. I want to let out a screeching, scorching Agh! I want it extreme. I want it to leave a ringing in the ears.

She---the girl in my head, again--- watches. I’m wearing yellow the color of bile and puke, and all things wretched. All the roses I used to believe in are ugly now. Thorns protect no one.

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5,6,7,8

The mind goes on running like an undercurrent,

You go mad,

Slowly, slowly,slowly,

͠͠

We sit together and watch the patch of burned earth. She sees the monster that grew forth from the soil and had to be hacked to bits. His big, black, bloody, pus-filled hands sit helpless. We mourn. She feels disappointed. I feel… guilt.

The garden must look dim and grim. I can’t really see it from the new house’s windows. It was supposed to be a fresh start in the eyes of the partner, the mother, the in-laws and the ex-neighbors. A new place, hence a new behavior, one of gratitude preferably, but things don’t turn out the way they should. When we mourn we mourn and no words, no deeds reach us. She looks at me like she can’t believe what I’ve become. It seems the blaming game’s in season now, but a different kind of blame. I try to imitate the garden’s big, old tree and be. I am silent, immensely silent, impossibly silent.

͠

Aloneness is a lotus not a rose,

that neither blooms,

nor withers.

And here we go again,

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9…..

͠

Shutting down is hard. I want things to end but things don’t just happen because I want them to, or do they?

There’s a taste, a fragrance, a kind of light that is elusive like a butterfly.

Eyelids flutter in the time it takes for days, years, ages to come and pass.

I don’t miss the love born out of my mind, for I have loved many a feeling, a lost father, a faithless lover. Sadness is deep and we mature thanks to it. The aloneness is deep it needs guts.

͠

“Please, please. Don’t let go, mommy.”

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Ahh! My little one pleads. Her noise penetrates the profound silence, sticking its head into the darkness of my mind’s dreams and stupidities. I just couldn’t be that women, the strong-willed, independent, wanting-for-nothing, woman. Too selfish? Is that why the Angels click their tongue and roll their eyes?

The little girl in my head watches me watch her and we are both watchful and it’s becoming quite exhausting, this whole thing, and somehow I find it in me to kick her butt and tell her in a loud and clear voice to just let me be, and when it’s done, I sit on the green grass near the scorched spot and start to giggle enjoying the brief interlude without masks, personas, clouds of thought, a bitching inner child, world expectations, traditions, or any other piece of shit.

Riham Adly

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Riham Adly’s fiction has appeared in over fifty online journals such as Litro Magazine, Lost Balloon, The Flash Flood, Bending Genres, The Citron Review, The Sunlight Press, Flash Frontier, Flash Back, Ellipsis Zine, Okay Donkey, and New Flash Fiction Review among others. Riham is a Best of the NET and a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work is included in the“Best Micro-fiction 2020” anthology. Riham lives with her family in Giza, Egypt.