Image by Isabel del Rio, taken at the Chelsea Flower Show; May 2024
Synopsis
This is the countdown of a life, beginning at 10 and ending at zero, from experiencing the fullness of being alive to being reduced to nothing at all. And yet despite the ending in store for all of us, we will have left behind a trail of words, experiences and affirmations, and hopefully also moments of joy, exhilaration and kind-heartedness.
Ten – Before my birth, they pinned all their hopes on someone who, like everyone else, came from nothing and would one day return there, unwillingly maybe. Yet what I brought was disappointment, born late at night to avoid revealing the truth too blatantly. You see, I was the undesired gender. How hard they worked to create a baby boy next.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Material should not be published in another periodical before at least one year has elapsed since publication in Whispering Dialogue. *أن لا يكون النص قد تم نشره في أي صحيفة أو موقع أليكتروني على الأقل (لمدة سنة) من تاريخ النشر. *All content © 2021 Whispering Dialogue or respective authors and publishers, and may not be used elsewhere without written permission. جميع الحقوق محفوظة للناشر الرسمي لدورية (هَمْس الحِوار) Whispering Dialogue ولا يجوز إعادة النشر في أيّة دورية أخرى دون أخذ الإذن من الناشر مع الشكر الجزيل
Nine – I responded well to stimuli. So many demands were placed on me
that I was forced to produce immediate results, and good ones for that matter. I mean,
I so much wanted them to stop loathing the fact that their first-born was a girl.
Eight – I abided by the rules. Too many rules, most against what I stood for. Would
I have a non-speaking part? Should I obey orders at all costs in order to survive?
Would being a good girl make them happy?
Seven – I learnt fast, too fast for my taste, and I became convinced that if I did what everyone else did, I would fulfil the role demanded of me and I might even feel content. What I did not fully comprehend was that what others commonly liked made me so very uneasy, even sad. Somehow, deep down, I knew that the issue would only be resolved by putting my thoughts on paper.
Six – Did I end up doing it all my way? Well, before following my own path I had to
pave it first with words. To say the least, this required strength, courage, passion, and more than a little acidity.
Five – I learnt, confronted, fought. Will I write from darkness or from light,
I would ask. Sometimes the more I wrote, the darker it got.
Four – At all times I hoped that, at any moment, I would suddenly know. Know what?
Oh, several things. Verbs such as observe, perceive, empathise were the closest to what I felt. But then I was taunted without fail for describing things as they truly were.
Three – Will my story be worth retelling? What about yours? What about life’s excesses
and errors, its desires and miseries, its purpose or lack of purpose?
Two – My vocabulary swelled, and by then I had grown familiar with adjectives that I would have preferred to avoid, like circulatory, osteoarthritic, hypertense, cardiopathic. And some of those were appended to ‘chronic’.
One – What other things have I learnt? Well, with each step from ten to zero I have strangely moved forward and not backward.
Zero – What is there after the absence of quantity? Will I then return to the place meant for the immaterial, the inconsequential, the insubstantial? Anything multiplied or even
tinged by zero is nothing but zero. Yet zero is also a number...
