A Poem To My Nihilist. {prose poetry}
{source}
My nihilist asks me, “What is the point to all this, if any?”
I stall. “I don’t like the word ‘point’ it suggests there is a point. That triggers me.”
She doesn’t laugh. I level with her.
And though I would not presume to know, and though I know better than to dare console, still… I felt obliged to convey all that I can bestow:
“You see beyond the illusion. That’s a most unfortunate role. Illusions can serve us.
Until they don’t.
Sometimes we need illusions intact to defend us while we are too weak to defend ourselves. We can’t reconcile everything all at once. Not everything can be digested at the same time. Illusions chip away when we are ready to shed them.
When we don’t allow an illusion whose time has come to shed its skin, it’s really no longer serving us. Now the medicine has run its course, and it’s turned toxic.
Or if we were to be free from all illusions, how would we be able to experience? We are hallucinations given a veil of logic, are we not? Could be worse.
The point is to learn about ourselves. To know you are loved — and then forget it and act broken, so you can discover it all for yourself. And then to let it go.
To rabble and babble, until you find something out there worth holding on to, and then… to let it go.
To learn how to not harm each other, to learn how to not harm ourselves.
To see what we are made out of, out of all the things we can choose to be made out of.
To exchange, to connect. To be heard and to hear. To be seen and be shown. To experience being unwanted without our godhood getting in the way. To learn how to cherish ourselves as mortal flesh and bone.
Could I learn to love myself now that I’m not all-knowing and omnipotent? Or is sitting this life out and loving someone else the closest I can come to bridging the gap?
To be afraid of death. To be afraid of life — as life views life as death.
To know evil. To say ‘I’ve been there’, to say ‘I’ve experienced that’.
To say ‘I am a victim’, to say ‘I am not a victim’.
To find peace, to have substance, to take form, and then… to let it go.
And if you believe in the stars, then follow them. You’ll either be pleasantly surprised to find they hold as much truth as you, or deeply devastated to learn they’re just as lost.”
“The important thing is to let go.” I say this last part in my best British accent only to make her laugh, but she doesn’t laugh of course.
I knew that.
And that’s okay; I love her anyway.
My intention was not to ease the beast, nor strike the suffering from its leave.
It was merely to sympathize with the part of me that has yet to see the larger things.
***
Sarah Elkhaldy is the author of How to Set Yourself on Fire, her debut poetry book that acts as a hand-guide to the oldest pastime known to our kind: existing. In addition to her poetry, Sarah is a spoken word performing artist and a Certified Quantum Sphere healer. She likes to refer to herself simply as an existential detective.
***
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