One Thousand and One by Hadiya Rudolfo

I feel as though I have died a thousand times in this one life that I am living.
Inner segregation is a hell of a thing when the mind wants nothing more than to be a single unit of unity.
Because ‘Psychologist Me’ would not play nice with ‘Tomboy Hadiya’ who kissed the neighbor’s daughter, 
Let’s kill them both off to give rise to the bookworm who found her world in pages that were not meant for her. 
She is reclusive, shy, smart, and dying.
Dying to see beyond the way paper turns to ash when burned,
She sets her world on fire with ideas that rock her to her core or at least to the hardest part of her.
She dies in giving birth to a story-teller who can paint pretty pictures in her blood.
Words are allowed to have meaning for once as the enchantment of ideas find love in her voice, and they can only hope to outlive their readers. 
Unfortunately, a self-imposed silence steals their thunder, leaving their world in the shadow of possibilities that are hers alone.
For years, they traveled through this desolate land, searching for the escape route that seems innate but all exits are barred.
None shall pass into anything else, but what they are and I know not who I am.
Life is fair, is it not?
With bundles of mimic tongues, words take refuge in the crooks of fingers that have to learn now how to contort themselves around pens for the sole purpose of letting someone else’s blood spill.
So, instead of taking her own life over and over, she invades her own mind with images of faraway places and people whom she will never meet. 
Say hello to her angry she-devils who grace blank pages in her name to ease the ache of giving meaning to her lifeless name. 
Let us embrace the idea that if she writes for long enough, one can see her eyebrows in the arcs of A’s and her possible smile in sinking Y’s.
Fighting the good fight still, our heroine finds herself in a poetic bind, ready involuntarily to expose these scenes hidden from her audience.
Taken in hand, she slips silent truths away into the nothingness stare of one thousand stares.
And because she has not been found as yet, possibly that is one thousand and one.




Copyright Hadiya Rudolfo