Creative Voices

By Muhammad Sufiyan Salman | Edited by Matthew Staff

The tip tapping of rain against the fogged-up window pane just above my bed; a mirror through which I trace my lunar lunacies within the constellating midnight blues. The shapes of my initials that adorn a pattern of splinters on the wooden floor. The echo of footsteps against the ceiling; tell-tale signs of mundanity around me. The porcelain sunlight bejeweling sapphires over the covers of my bed from the afternoon sun.  

  I have everything I could ever want. I have everything I have ever wanted. I have everything I imagined I would ever have. But I am still here. Walking the dimly-lit void of my darkest conundrums; pathways of blackened embers that question my every step, persuade my every desire to pause and finally rest, bellow until all noise becomes one. And I hear nothing in everything. 

  I look at my friends; family that I have found within the mania of these city lights. My friends, the most random assortment of nationalities, love me dearly. A promise and a fact they corroborate, insist, and vow time and time again. And a ridiculous cynical joke that I deny time and time again. I might say I believe it. But deep down, within the cicatrices that bleed my belief every night, I don’t believe it. I will never. No matter the hard coated absolute evidence that is presented before the jury of my heart. It seems impossible to believe. How could they? Why would they? Why would they want to like, much less love, a shell of a soul who is a vindictive liar faking his whole personality before them?  

  At lunch, against the background clutter of cutlery and the music of shallow chatter and gossip, I look at my friends and I remove myself. I sit quietly, resting my back against the chair, and I become still until all dimensions merge into one. Noise dies down, vision drapes up, and all sensations pacify my stillness. 

  Mona’s evil-eye rings adorning her fingers. Luca’s long hair shielding his eyes as he looks down at his phone. Victoria’s pupils enlightened with glints of kaleidoscopic life and joy. Klaudia’s soundless lyrical laughter absolving all pandemonium. Francesco’s earrings catching the shimmer of lovelorn sunlight as he turns to me and whispers me something. But his voice never reaches. The laughter never falls on my ears. The muti-colored spectral mirages of memories and existence before me never registers. Instead a blindness paralyzes me. My auditory canals are deafened and my ears fail to hear the blindness of eyes that lips fail to say. In that moment I become nothing. And in that moment, I find peace. I find serenity. I find the freedom of choice. And I choose to dissipate. I choose to lose all feeling just to feel the semblance of life I yearn to bury. They can’t possibly love a person like this, could they? They can’t possibly want to experience life with a person who can’t wait to crack under the weight of his own? They can’t possibly. Therefore, they don’t. Therefore, I was right. And that realization is comforting because it’s familiar. 

 I am there. In that silent pandemonium. In that cataclysmic cascade of carnal resentment. New cities and new possibilities haven’t changed me. New loving and new hoping hasn’t broken a slit in the façade of the same old losing that I have now learn to crave. Because this losing is comfortable, it’s familiar, it’s predictable. Now, I sit within the tomb of these four walls in an apartment that smells freshly of paint; a set of white table and chairs that I do not own. I look toward the window and out into the night beyond and fill my cup full of water to down the morgue of pills that rest before me. Waiting to claim me. Waiting to drown me. Waiting to tame me. But I would never tell you that. I would never say it to your face. You’d look at me and I will look back and that will be all you see.  

  Perhaps I am being melodramatic. Perhaps these words that spill onto crumpled papers strewn across bedroom floors are an exaggeration; a call for attention. Perhaps I am feeling too much. Perhaps it will all go away with time. And sometimes, when I lie awake at night, enlivening the deadness that gnaws, I think about this too. And I manage to delude myself just for a few seconds so I can laugh at my teenage mania, but then when every delusion washes away and the soot that drips over my body buries me in an air-locked coffin, I kneel and suffocate to the rhythm of my collapsing heart. 

  Perhaps I string together decorated words to beguile bystanders into believing my melodramatic melancholia. Perhaps I use my blood as ink so it stains bylines and the imprints are bold and raw; unmistakable and ferocious in their disposition. But as the inevitability of time passes, the stains will dry and the scarlet residue will dust off, leaving behind a yellowish memory of what once was, what could have been, and what is now long gone. And the pages can be filled in again. And I will lose a little bit more of myself again. And perhaps, I can find solace in that. Because, I have learned to surmise that for me my peace is my tragedy.  

  And so as I sink into the lilac sheets of my bed, through the mattress soaked with salt, and into the cemented certainty of the floor, I will learn to let go. Let go of the answers that I can’t and won’t be able to have. Let go of the person I won’t be able to become. Let go of the happiness that will remain fleeting; like grains of rice strewn on the ground to promise good fortune, like the decaying petals I pick each year to vow my survival to the next age, like reflections in rain drops that mirror a captured moment just before kissing the ground. I will learn to let go.  

  I will love my friends. I will give them everything I have to ensure they never hate my destitute fakeness. I will shape shift into millions of masquerade deceivers and be whoever they want me to be. I will be a lie for them to believe. A present with no past; a mannequin with no memory. I will still call my family back home and lie to them as well. Lie about the joy of becoming everything I hoped I would ever become. And as I cross out years on a page, surprised as each one goes by but adamant on not having to cross out a thirtieth one (honestly, I don’t think I would even have to try at all). And as I do this, I will also lie to myself. Lies that will morph into truths; a paradoxical paradigm of pessimistic paranoia. I will lie to people when they ask me about the antebellum artifacts and souvenirs I have gathered on the skin of my arms over the years. I will lie and lie and lie and that will be peace. That will be stillness. And that will be my quiet.