For the Days that Mustn’t Arrive

Islam Nashrif

The air is slick with the stench of tomorrow,

and I can no longer find the remnants of today.

As of now, the “What if’s” feed me.

I am overfed.

 

Before the great fall, I could sing at rowdy parties,

Teeming with strangers, plucking at rusty guitars.

I could bellow into the storm,

with no care in the world

paint with skillful hands,

and strum on made-up chords

Make birds out of batter and faces out of splatter.

Today, the brush lies still, the canvas blank,

My throat amiss and

the words have fled my pen.

 

Paranoia gnaws at the edges of my thoughts,

murmuring in the gaps between sleep and waking—

I do not live in the moment;

I do not smile for the flash.

I only survive the minutes, the hours, and the planks

racing flecks that run away from me.

 

The future hangs like a noose over my chest,

its knots too tight to shake off,

and the hatred in the world suffocates my voice

As I drown in angst for the people I fought for.

I wonder, will I ever write again?

Or color the canvases from the Market

That I haggled so relentlessly for?

Will I ever sing

without the choke of shame in my throat?

 

I shall tell you why I feel the need to regurgitate so often:

I think of my parents; their bodies growing frail,

hollow eyes looking toward an uncertain skyline,

Hopeless and muffled.

I think of my husband, and the love that once bloomed so easily,

now burdened with the stillness of worry.

What if one fine morning, that love simply wilts away?

 

I worry for my skin and blister,

for the cracks I see forming in her smiles,

for the brittle happiness she clings to

in her newborn marriage.

I worry for my other set of parents,

their health, a yarn stretched too thin.

And for my father, who stands on unsteady ground,

fighting shadows of his own blood,

as the specter of my Darwinian grandfather

looms over him—

a man whose cruelty outlasts kindness.

 

I am hysterical about the future—

my unfinished degree,

the ‘noble’ professors who may never see me,

the light inside me dwindling, threatening to go

poof.

 

As the new year arrives, with resolutions unattainable,

I dread that I will walk through it again,

soulless, unseen, unappreciated.

Not breathing in the air of faraway seas,

As the doors to greatness close up, eternally

And money chains my feet to this earth…

What if I never rise? Never grow?

What if I die with my hands empty,

and the world forgets my name?

I am utterly terrified.

Fearful of a life unlived,

of days that slip through my fingers like dust.

Petrified that my dreams will die

and leave me here—

half alive, half forgotten,

without ever having created anything that mattered.