Opus

The question

My favourite poet writes of Hell,
and for once, I do not resent him for it.
I cannot bear the weight, of how much I
love him.

Hell, he says, is an empty space,
indefinite and infinite. A place
where there is no time or space.
But what is space and what is time?
Time is a construct, it exists only in
imagination. I should believe that, my
time blinks like the light from a
solitary firefly. I have no sense of space,
or who I am, or what it is to be.
What is it to be?
What is it to be? Is a question
I must constantly ask myself to be
a being at all. That's what my professor
says. When he is introduced as a
post-colonial theorist, he wonders whether
that is all there is to him.
He recounts a brinjal tree from long ago,
with a woman climbing up it. Brinjals don't
even grow on trees, so even his child-mind
knew it to be a lie.
The tree was a lie. And yet, when I will think
of him, years later, when I am an old woman
and he is dead, I will think of him as a tree
with a woman climbing up on it. I will think of him
as a lie, for lies endure longer than truths.

My words are not my own. Everytime
I speak, I limit what I meant to say, for them
to understand, and I end up saying something
quite different, something I had not meant to
say at all. I try to define myself, to draw a
pattern to existence, how to be happy,
how do I manifest sadness?
Who am I?
They say I only need to ask that question, that
I don't need an answer. Perhaps not. We are
trained to question, answers aren't essential
to be a being. In a world where everything is given,
what have I left to give?