Hibah Shabkhez
Transfixed
YOU. You are a stout full-stop, planted squarely in the middle of my life. Time is turning you into an ellipsis, as it lugs me onward like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Outside, the sun is toasting dust with a wind-spatula, roasting invisible peanuts for the whole wide world. Stirred particles flee upon shafts flooding through window-bars, but are caught, suspended in the sunbeams they had thought their saviours. We stare each at the other, sick sick sick to the soul to be transfixed so, and I find myself thinking, I have arms, I have legs, I have free will. I am no mote of dust. I shall rise, seeking not sanctuary, but freedom. Thus do I pump courage into my slackening limbs. Does it help? No. I crash like an elephant riddled with tranquilliser darts. Those who love me best, laugh. You are only a speck of ink to them, something to jump blithely over and start a new sentence, not a bane and a blight capable of paralysing a whole existence. I cannot explain. Indeed, I will not. Because: if they do not understand, they will but laugh the louder; if they do, they will never laugh again.
