the orphan talks to the universe.

*

*

‘Are you happy?’ The universe asked.

*

You looked up and the universe
was staring back. You were both children, dreaming
of the moment you were brought into the world,
crying and kicking blood red, boundless
explosions the space-time was ripped to shreds
with an infinite amount of black holes.
You were dreaming of the moment you were born;
you had a body so massive and sublime
and almost too divine to behold.
But it was fleeting. Thirteen point eight
billion years were way too long a journey
back in time, and maybe that was for the better.
You had heard how resounding
a grandiosity the Big Bang was. You had heard
about its greatness, how it expanded,
and expanded endlessly. It was almost a myth,
the first day of your creation, a disembodiment
so clean-cut that if you were to come back,
you wondered if you would even recognise
yourself: screaming so loud so piercing
as if life had greeted you with open arms
and you refused. It was better staying a dead,
inanimate, bright but distant foreign scene
in the past only, wasn’t it: beautiful and absolutely
harmless. If you had stood witness,
you wondered if the explosion would ever happen,
you wondered if you would ever let yourself
be born.

You looked up and you were still
dreaming. The universe was gazing,
almost expecting. I will not be a mother.
So you told the universe. I will not give you
another motherless orphan. Another kid
screaming ‘please, why did you bring me
into the world?’ Another child who will mother
another child who will mother another child
who will pass the aggression and the rage 
and the devastation down like a heritage.
And the universe answered, Oh, darling, 
are you still having nightmares 
that you would be your mother?
Are you still seeing her in yourself?
You were stripped. Your fear, so deep
rooted, so tremendous and conspicuous,
so alive, laying like an open casket, where
you gave birth to your first child: an eulogy
for the day your mother made you motherless.
It sored like a healing wound you were too afraid
to let heal. You cradled it
like a mistake. You put it in a crib and flinched
whenever it wailed. You will not be a mother,
you thought, because you never learn,
just like the path your grandma had walked
before, and your mother had walked after.

The universe crouched down and folded you
into its embrace. The universe was the child
and the mother. The universe had loved you, had died
for you, had only wanted to make you
happy. why aren’t you happy? It asked,
in the small little space it boxed you in.
In your dreams the universe was smiling softly,
eyes crinkled, blurry at the edges. In your dreams
it had a shape, a silhouette, the flow erupting
with hands. In your dreams it looked like mother,

and you realised love was always a blade,
but you were never
the wielder.

*

Tue, 15/11/2022.
Ant.