Dear Gender,
Recently, our arguments should have disentangled us from each other’s gripping embrace. We should have, by now, been part of the trend and movement of breaking free from nature’s secret code.
We don’t, however, beat around the bush, nor call ourselves brave by staying outside of our designated homes. We remain inside, blocking the cracks of our windows with folded tissues that smell like oud. All of our doubts in each other are wiped off of our surfaces before the next sandstorm cakes our countertops with the dust of distrust.
I tried reasoning with you. Why do I keep forgetting that logic is the worst thing to look for in the perplexed mind of a female?
The last time we were this close was freshman year of college when I stopped walking to school. I fumbled to look for you in a boy’s fancy car just to keep you company, I found you sitting in the passenger’s seat each morning, stuck to the smell of leather. I found you in the most generic of places.
For a few months, you and I missed out on the growth of tiny speedwells and buttercups on the grass in spring. And now, here we are. Will you blindfold me again from the growth around me?
I ignore you each time I realize that, with you, I lack. You disempower me as much as you empower me. There were strange rifts between us that felt like a lump of dough in the digestive system of a celiac patient. Or like a gulp of thick melted chocolate to a diabetic… so desirable – satisfying at first, later on bloated, full of iron and other indigestible nutrients.
Dear Gender, despite all your waxing and waning, the swell in my womb now gushes your lushness out of my intestines, through my esophagus. There is no ignoring you now, not for years to come.
I feel like if I open my mouth, pink numbers shaped like irises and lilies will spiral out to the floor. Each petal in their sequence is the sum of the two petals that precede it. Father, Mother, Child.
There is no hiding of our oneness. It’s caked like dried sugar on the corners of my mouth. I leave it encrusted there; each time I forget, I shall slither my tongue out of my lips to remember the sweetness of motherhood.
You and I must adjust the heat to stop the butter from sputtering out of the pan. We must dream each other in our sleep: onion-infused hair, rosemary garlic pores, the scent of cloves and starch behind our ears. Baked rolls of love.
We can easily be nourished if we are gathered into a pot of fertile soil rather than be scattered like unrestrained dust. Still, a self-sustaining ecosystem is the necessary inclination of our days, and so we shall always pray for rain rather than wait to be watered.
In the pot of our soil all our components are measured: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, Molybdenum and such. 45% Mineral matter. 25% Air. 25% Water. 5% Organic matter. Meandering, wave-like, foaming, parallel, striped, symmetrical, spiraling: mathematical patterns of repetitious nature. A Fibonacci sequence.
Dear Gender, sit still! Here, on the stool in front of the mirror… Or maybe on that chipped bench where birds’ droppings will christen our next chapter. Please take your vitamins. Please brush your hair. Please put some makeup on and pencil in the patches of your falling eyebrows. Look at the story in your face and tell me, what happens then?
A mountain, then, snow-capped with coconut shreds.
Snow White behind the scenes gathering her skirt between her legs to squat on a blob of mud and take a big bite out of a good apple.
The vibration of two legs marching, the muscular calves of a red-headed air hostess approaching three airplane seats, serving the parents two glasses of crisp champagne as the child watered with apple juice is growing with each guzzle.
A spray of lemongrass in the morning and a whiff of lavender at night.
Blue… sky blue… ocean blue, violet blue, indigo blue… everywhere.
A boy with sticky skin and matted hair, napping in the triangular space beneath his father’s armpit.
A prayer in the chapel, a prayer in the mosque, a prayer before bed.
Ski slopes perpendicular to where dreams are lodged into the ground like flag poles.
Butter and canned Schwartau bitter orange marmalade spread on pumpernickel bread.
Boards on wheels. Boards on snow. Boards on water.
Bicycles roll over wet branches that smell like blue corn tortillas.
The crunch of gravel under small sweaty pudgy sandaled feet.
Dear Gender, after someone else beautiful blossoms well under both of our care, the sweet tenor of our silent temporal parting will only then possibly resound. We will then, perhaps, have a choice to break free from each other. Will we do it? Will we dare be an anomaly in nature’s fractals? Will we break the conspicuous repetition of the Fibonacci sequence? I look forward to find out where we’ll go with, or where we won’t without, each other.
Beisan A. Alshafei
March 29th, 2021
Beisan's Burble 