The Mundane

I pick at the pieces of my skin, little by little.
Scraping through the parchedness.
Till bits of me float around,
flying towards the sunlit window.
Rushing to escape the mundane.

I pick at the pieces of my skin.
Till my nails touch, the stickier flesh beneath.
Pink, like an onion layer after layer. I keep digging.
Picking out the delicate membrane.
The fiery liquid, gushing out the manholes,
on a stormy monsoon evening.
Red, my fingers turn bright red.
Yet I keep poking and prodding and picking at the pieces of my flesh
till I see chunks of me, lying on the floor, merging with the mosaic.

And suddenly I am the room.
A ceiling.
A floor.
A splotch of blood on the door.
I am the space I live in.
I am the space I cannot live in.
The chunks of my flesh splash onto the walls sticking out like red blobs of decoration.
I am the decoration.
A prosaic frill. A mass of gory monstrosity.

I keep picking at the pieces of my flesh.
Been tugging on a vein for the past minute.
Dribbling out onto the floor. Red.
The searing pain. Red.
The lighter shreds escape the banality, moving with the cold wind onto the streets.
The heavier chunks lie on the floor in a pool of sticky, shimmery; red.
Static, in its knowledge.
It is the mundane, it cannot escape.
I am the mundane I cannot escape.

Elia Jameel is lover of cats, freedom and democracy. History buff, wannabe poet, future inhabitant of detention camp. Not.

Featured image: Khara Woods / Unsplash