No Place

Elissar Mustapha

i was looking at a stranger in the mirror. it wasn’t me.

i was looking at a stranger in the mirror. it wasn’t me.

My favourite flower is Baby’s Breath. White; beaded; fragile looking; yet surprisingly durable. The Baby’s Breath can go days in a vase without light, water or attention and still maintain a façade of beauty. I only just learnt that these flowers symbolise lasting love. Metaphorically, they represent that even the most subtle expressions of love or kindness can have a profound impact on a relationship; but more commonly, the flower is known to signify love that is pure and enduring. Love is not what these flowers mean to me, rather, strength. Being in my head can feel like living in a bubble as an onlooker to life, separated by this wall between myself and the world.

My dreams and my reality blur into one another so fiercely that there are days I cannot tell the two apart. Then there are days where my reality is so much colder and further than my dreams that it leaves a seismic ache in its place.

8:59 pm, 06 Aug. 2019

i want to make a change. i want to do something big, something great. i want the world to know me, but i am trapped in this place, forced to carry out a sentence called life. i have big ambitions but i am caged.

Stepping into the artwork Sleepwalker by Aaron Christopher Rees at first felt uncanny, and it wasn’t until a few minutes in that I understood the reason why. Being inside this artwork, looking out past the red glass at the rest of the gallery and the people visiting the art, the colours of the world contorted. It felt like a physical representation of how it felt to live in a mind and body that always felt so disconnected from the world around it. Black, white and red. I think of the passer-by as an onlooker, watching me and not seeing. I think of myself standing within, thick red glass in between. The world looks red to me now, but do I look red to the world too? I wonder … Outside these walls, beyond the colours reflected in my eyes and the red that separates me from them, the world moves in ways I do not understand.

I never thought I would be into people watching, but I think I am. I don't know if it makes me feel more or less ordinary. Some people are alone like me, some are together. Everyone has something different going on. But these are just repeated words from many mouths, and I for one do not feel any more unique than the next person.

I still enjoy Baby’s Breath, but I no longer think white is my colour—rather the colour of everything that has slipped between my fingers; everything I wanted and walked by as I sleepwalked.

I have not worn white in years.

11:30 pm, 11 Nov. 2019

i’m on the edge. i’m slipping, breaking, cracking. i can’t grasp my world. we’re all dying slowly, but are we all dying so painfully?

A scream has been building up inside of me for years, and there is no place to let it go. I think I am going to implode. The person I wear on the outside does not match the person I am on the inside. Sometimes, I think I am a fraud to my own skin. I think I may burst, but I have nowhere to burst from.

When I was fourteen, I believed this to be a fact so much that I decided my skin needed its very own seams. I don’t remember whether or not I understood the concept, the timelessness of the seams, but it could be argued that that is where the veil of red entered my perspective.

I feel a bit like a feather in a breeze, floating along wherever the world takes me, never finding an anchor. Or maybe it's that I've lost my anchor, because a feather did have a fixed point of origin once, and as did I, I suppose. But it’s hard to track down where it all went wrong. It feels like I'm looking at my life through a kaleidoscope. Dreams and relationships are all shards, pieces of my life tangled in ways and places they should not be.

Sometimes, I am sent hurtling down memory lane, images of the past assaulting my senses and I cannot help but reminisce over the old days. Yet I find myself rooted in the same place I was five years ago; just drowning in nostalgia and watching the people of my past move on to do great things.

8:55pm, 15 Feb, 2021

i was looking at a stranger in the mirror. it wasn’t me.

What does red mean? Some people see it as hot anger and pain; others see it as passion and love. Perhaps it is both. Love and anger are the two emotions that are the most dangerous. Combined, they are like a beautiful snake, enrapturing people with the beauty of love and power and biting back with venom made up of pain, shame, and vulnerability.

Some people see it as a warning. Maybe that’s what I should have seen it as, but when you are born in the middle of a room made of red glass, your entire world is red.

Does that mean that this life is fated to the curse of the beautiful snake? After a certain amount of time, the snake’s poison leaves you with a feeling of rot, like a decaying tooth.

2:40 pm, 26 Jun, 2021

the void is me imploding from the inside. nobody can see it.

can you tell your friends,

you've gained the feeling of rot?

tell them, what is the feeling of rot?

it is when you do the same thing everyday;

you start doing it first just to get by,

then to keep your sanity,

now it’s to stay alive,

or survive,

after you’ve killed your mind.

Amidst the chaos of survival, there is a person that comes seldom. This is the person that transforms survival into living. Such a simple sounding difference on paper. Comparison cannot capture the cathartic feeling of finding solace in a human being.

2:40 pm, 26 Jun, 2021

when i’m with you, it’s like the screaming void inside finally quiets, even for just a few minutes; but it is everything to me. you make the prospect of being human less miserable. i hope we don’t fall apart too, but that’s far-fetched.

When the world was burning around me, I found my reprieve in almost touches and longing looks. When I felt hardly human, I was given back the feeling of breathing again. I do not know if I was also loved, but to love with the want of nothing in return can be all consuming.

All consuming, and yet still lonely. The lonely part is the feeling in your core—the one you try so desperately to ignore—telling you that this may be all inside your heart, and nowhere else. I knew it, but I didn’t want to admit it. I wished I could be blissful enough to think that it would all turn out okay in the end, and I think at one point I believed my dreams were real.

However, just like dreams, the reality of you was fleeting. You were gone as quickly as you came, even though it felt like you lasted longer than you did; soon enough, even recalling the memory of you became almost impossible to do. To do so would be akin to walking across broken glass, and the red that releases from beneath my feet to tell our story is not worth the story I have to tell.

But know this: had you wanted me, I would be the blood to your veins; I would be the beat of your heart; I would be there in the silences between your sound; I would have been the one to stay—if you let me.

You didn’t.

2:59 pm, 27 Jun, 2021

everything i do becomes undone.

I suppose I am meant to move on, yet I can’t help but sit here and wonder what it is about me that has people itching to get away. Is it my destiny to be used and then forsaken?

I am a girl. I discover life and all it has to offer to everyone who is not me. I learn that I love the world more than I could ever hope to be loved in return—for a while I still hope love for me exists. I do not love myself.

I find a sliver of peace in trinkets and things; books with faraway lands. I wish for a cat who might love me back, and I go through friends like the seasons.

I am a girl, and that is my curse.

I am older now, and I am tired of people watching. Even the birds are in pairs, and it is a reminder of what I don’t have, what I have lost. I pretend to feel more secure in who I am, but my charade feels more alien as my time passes. I give bits and pieces of myself to everyone I love (I think maybe this will help them remember me).

I have a cat now, and she behaves as if she carries all the anger of my girlhood within her. I do not mistake her anger as the absence of love; I know she loves me, in her own way.

Her harshness does not bother me. Just as I have grown accustomed to the world’s cruelty as I have grown older, I have accepted, and learned to love, the parts of my cat that hurt me.

I am a woman and that is my destiny.

I have always been there. If I have no other purpose, then at the very least I have this. My purpose is to have no purpose, if only to be the support for everyone else—so they can keep pushing forward and getting back up, reaching their full potential while I cheer on from the sidelines.

That’s what I am here for. To make sure everyone will be okay, everyone will make it but me.

Perhaps it’s time I make my peace with that.