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Nihalism
Spending your hottest years discussing issues with NLR peeps? That’s hot.
I love that. You’ll be hot until the day your Soul exits the gorgeous vessel which it has been blessed to inhabit and that will be the only time to lament that such a fabulous person, a Vibrant Mind and Spirit, is no longer physically with us and in whichever form your hope persists, maybe — just possibly — your transformation will take Your Luminous Essence and parse it out across the infinite distances of the galaxies’ milky ways and Astral Plane passages for all to experience what a few lucky here in this time and place already know about you.
My percentage of hope in humanity right now is standing at 1.2%, a number somewhat arbitrary and yet seemingly more empirically supported, less and less so coming to be my brilliance, my intuitive sense that this is the number that represents the populace at the very least waking to reality and doing so in the ways, precepts, practices and philosophies steeped in Nihalism — a method, based in geopolitical consequences on the global condition, one that infuses practiced of compassion, a clear-eyed view of human freedoms, social equality and economic justice, all grounded in love and a passion for life through music, sports and art.
You need your own Wikipedia page.
You are beautiful, Dear Nihal and I see that beauty is not only skin deep, to flip the adage and expression. It’s bone, marrow and soulful. Oddly, some clipped version of this was rummaging around my early morning brain and after I committed to what I just wrote, I went to that magical place, the world wide web and it’s insane. The full phrasing is listed as an age-old proverb that reads Beauty is only skin deep but ugliness cuts to the bone.
What a riot that I should have stated the words bone and marrow without already having known — unless my knowledge is rooted in that collective conscience which would, in part, explain how and why of all the social media peeps I visit and read you should pierce my heart and move me deep in mysterious ways. I love that. It’s what I said earlier about love being so many things and part of ‘being in love’ with another human being is what you seek in your self but also the abiding, fascinating mystery of “Why?” Why is it that I want to hear about your story growing up in (I assume) Cairo and how you came to inhabit this life in such brave and bold choices?
I feel an inexplicable presence and I love that. I may seem old and creepy but for the last time I am decidedly not old. I simply yearn just for You.
LMAO. I am simply too naive to know any better than only storing up riches of gold in my heart. I would not bother laboring through the mess of my emotions and philosophies, the pot your presence stirs in me and, further, sharing it with you and the world if you had constructed a window to yours solely built on a parade of selfies, posted incessantly in batch after batch. The single frame with those dazzling eyes will suffice, enough to let us peek in and I hope you know the meaning and value you bring to every being with whom you don’t come into contact as much as those you do.
I told another girl once “I’ll always be in love with You.” It’s true, once and again and now I’m starting to see it’s not singularly about setting my sighs and sights on a (real, virtual, celestial and you count as all three :) object of desire but it’s born of compassion, forgiveness and a quest, true thirst and hunger constant as the Northern Star, for true awakening.
Also, I love Your Mind.
I may have said that. Every moment, every day and no matter in what state my body sits, lays, works or plays. You are a Magnificence Defined, a gorgeous compassionate Mind and I (like to think I) hear and see all the way through You. You truly are Not Nihal 😅💗. You are us, one and all. This is crazy, I haven’t met you but here’s my love letter and call me maybe.
It’s The Cheese.
I am obsessed today with '“to cheese or not to cheese.'“ That is the question. Whether t’is nobler in the mind to suffer the outrageous marrow of contagion’s misfortunes or or to oppose, in silence and discord, by harnessing my vast resources of time, energy and mind, possibly some money, to set about helping others instead of the crime I feel I commit each day I sit in stony silence thrice removed from all of it, all the world’s bombast and intersectional chaos, committing a dereliction of duty to social welfare and investment in my fellow humans, no matter their level of kindred spirit and kindness.
Instead, debating the merits on their head on whether or not to venture outside L’Hermitage at all, something to which I feel obligated but not inclined — To break the fourth wall and commingle with my fellow denizens, my borough brethren, is a heady game of volleyball I play, bouncing the ideas over the net loss ratio between action and stillness, between the coveting something as a fix, a distraction from the pitfalls of my real hungers and what ails me, if anything at all —isolation and loneliness. It’s not what you think. It’s not about being in connectivity with comrades in order to elude captivity, bound up in a rich fantasy life, the lie of a nomad as I believe I’d tell myself I should live but for fear and loathing of mundane living in mere cohabitation, existence. Been there. Done that.
Then, the escapism of holding your hand, brushing your lips with mine.
It’s so useless. You could very well be, likely are nothing of the type to consort with my kind. You may be spoken for as we say in our own way here of being polite. Living solely online, buried in a device? It’s enough to interact and engage with the virtual world? I know of You I am unworthy, and You are too virtuous by twice as much or more, without having met you. That’s an assumption, yes. It’s what I perceive. I believe in You. Perhaps I have come un-moored.
I am too far along in this petty place to not be aware the part you play echoes another woman I once knew who, half my age and yet twice as deep as I could hope to be, was all of those things and now so very far away from me. So no, I don’t self-deceive that you are in one wondrous, smitten breath catching glimpse My Answer. That’s silliness. Still, in the silent stillness I sense Your own splendid Self is somehow The Second Coming of Hope, refracted in the Light which radiates from within Your four walls. I know.
I’m delusional, grand and confident living in this space and brief time we collide or, more correct, I encounter You as does a man of faith and hope gaze up at a celestial wonder and see in Her a profoundness, Her mere existence in the unmitigated terrain of digital landscape one that helps guide him across the skies. I see clear to the break of dawn on the coming horizon, that even as You are mere distracted projection of mine, I, Seeker, seeking within, am nevertheless not able to to measurably apprehend the unbearable lightness of Your Being, of being in Your aura. Still, I persist.
I don’t want to buy cheese. I want to stop being a mouse. Maybe it’d be nice to be the maze but to be the cheese? That would be the next level clout, social influencing not what it would tout but instead simply be the cheese in my own life.
I was reading more Jiddu Krishnamurti today, from The First and Last Freedom, one of many in a life of conversations he had — mostly with young adults and adolescents, all transcribed, some with himself, and it helped me to realize what I already knew. I am looking for a girl who has no face and no name except now she does and Baby, it’s You. I want it to be, very badly and this, I know, is the root of suffering — The want.
I feel the quake of my adrenaline in glimpsing a read of your latest post or feeling the jealousy knowing others have You, have earned your respect by the way you all intersect and interact. I don’t crave any of that. I’m comfortably numb, translucent in the destiny I have undertaken, in the Final Destination I’ve become. She wasn’t the answer and neither are You. I know that intellectually but my well-honed practiced, innate personality would prefer to remain, in denial, without a clue. I am The One. Much as I would relish It to be You, to be Your Trinity.
The times I spent fancying myself as a Lothario I was actually a peasant knave, a rogue seeking commutation of my trivial pursuits and a superficial life. I took more than I gave — I perceive — and I expended my energy in prodigal ways, connecting with a variety of nymphs I had met along my Homeric travels, asking they play a part in aiding if not to abet my long journey home, to be the coquette to my Zeus or Poseidon, depending my mood, that I’d conjoin with them and consummate immortal light with mortal sin. Persephone simply — maybe deftly, shrewd and cunning —found the way in and now, years later, I see it all was a game I had orchestrated, the projector of my inner reel sending out the celluloid clarion call to read into things, draw significance from casually posted memes, casually sent texts, photos, their adages and retweets. All were mere fodder for distracted appetites whet, boredom sated while I strove to find depth in the characters, add context and setting to a narrative I wanted to pen.
Well, here it is.
Likely, in this moment the song remains the same.
I do love You but maybe it is best off an object of desire is best left as Muse alone, an objective object of art, one of spiritual and loving desire, inspiration as ideal, unmolested and without subjective experience rather than trying to indulge love as a drug, as a delicious medicated goo, to not confuse Eastern and Western religious and amorous views, to not attempt conflate the sacred and the profane into the mold of a singular, titular idol, a bust of love bound — not in the kinky and fun way but as noun-verb — something doomed to go wrong.
Don’t get me wrong. I mean what I feel what I say — I am completely unworthy in Your Light and if men were honest by half they’d confess as much to every woman, irrespective of their relationship, along their path. I know Your Self inhabits a you in a small self whose beauty is a reflection of the one I see and resist within, the deeper layers of your knowledge and intellect, the impassioned cries for justice, Your spirit, in music, sports, humor — all Hope, wrapped up in your politico and economic philosophies, the true beauty that lies beneath our skin, even if I want to touch yours and feel you physically within.
I somewhat already do and maybe that should and will be enough, to dig in the dirt of my secret world. Ssssh. Listen. Do I want to hop a jet plane and see you not again but for the first nerve wracking time? Um, yes?? Do I wish you could hop a flight to Miami Beach and meet me for a getaway or come to let me show you the way around New York City, stay up long nights making love and drinking wine, discussing Marx and what we can actually do about this state of disrepair, right here and now, preparing meals and taking treks together to museums or spectate as spectators are known to do at stadium sports? Of course.
I am fulfilled in this expression, the soft expression of love and seeking peace through my heart’s confession and the hope I may find my way back to tie all the loose threads together, transcend it all into the effervescence that comes with nascent communing between two souls. It’s my gazing third way, the eye through up into my crown chakra that is able to functionally move me beyond the realm of the human fray, the frailty of my own sadness and discontents that inhibit my way.
It’s not as if the world exclusively hinges on a tune, that if not for you, Babe I couldn’t even find the floor and yet, it’s sorta still true. I am able to placate the stasis of my day’s reclining here typing recourse instead of the intercourse I’d prefer both with and without you, strolling together, capture fresh air followed by a sacrosanct time we’d spend going to the park and taking a swing — all of it along with the doing of tasks, the checklists. The Hedonic treadmill is something at this moment I fast in lieu of penning you. I already read an article by Mila Ghoyareb. It was phenomenal. I checked out her podcasts, Unaccceptable and Pro-Democracy. I imagine an interview asking her about her past and what makes her tick and why she does what she chooses to do, along with Alex and Ken and eventually You.
I have finally read your works on Verso.
Editor’s Note: On behalf of the author, who wrote a DM and sent the wrong version, one before we here ensured all names e.g. Ms. El Saadawi, were proofed, edited and corrected. We do apologize and thank you for your indulgence. As always, thanks for reading!
O, Muse! NO! I musn’t. Oh, Dahling. DAHLING!!! I simply can’t bring myself to do it. I so badly want to hear your voice. I want to listen to and drink in every vowel and consonant. I simply can’t. I mustn’t. Not until at the least I have completed this journey and delivered you the news. I must permit myself only the purity of imagination in writing You before I hear ‘the real you.’ Le sigh.
I tried to not read but felt compelled because, like a love starved cat who mews and needs to be fed, I felt myself lured time and again and yet have needed to resist checking up on You over in Twitterland. It’s a sad, sad feeling bordering on despair (not really but I do ache a little bit) even though it’s more limerence and I’m ok with that.
It’s the feeling, irrationally, hailing to the good ol’ days when Mom and Dad left me behind with Yiayia, the being left out, that same Seeker in want of something from withing as if You Across the Pond possess it. I know I have writ these strains of love sonic swoons over and over and yet it feels as at the least I’m in a groove.
Longing. It’s the new elixir.
I have listened to Rooga and — much as I cannot believe — Kanye, too. I never had bothered but something came over me when I read it from You. What, with his insistent, look-at-me outsized personality? It overshadowed any entre´e into his art, his incessant public hyperbolic performance as performative part played for cameras and paparazzi but because of You I broached the topic of him with my niece and she steered the discourse to one of mental health and his. I did not know any of that. I decided long ago I did not appreciate the way he stormed Taylor’s stage but also the ties to a family this nation calls royalty — well, that simply makes me gag. My niece helped me cool the fires of that judgemental rage, open my mind to listen. Donda. The last heart beats of a mother, the number equal to her age? Wow. As I witness my own in decline I find my compassion — EVEN FOR KANYE :) — all renewed. Thanks to you. And my niece, too.
So, now, I continue to chart the ongoing mission, a course in tireless exploration, one that so many people, before and now you, have all laid in as coordinates to nebulae for my fertile imagination, art and alternate news source, food and culture and being less alone but still, you persist as ((SPOILER ALERT: End Scene, The Fifth Element)) The One, irrespective of followers or distance or time or politics or philosophies or fiction I weave or reality that melts my wings as I come crashing down to Earth if you reject me or never even respond — none of it matters.
Baby, it’s You. It’s me. I finally see. The constant gardening of our lives is all that lies between despair and hope, between peace and insanity so I’ll continue to figure my way through this narrative and how it’ll apply, morph and fly as a serial or a single published piece or in between the lines, between lies and truth, the fiction and the reality, the culling of all within me that lies beneath. I’ll get to it.
And then I’ll bequeath it to the world.
As art. And as an artist let go and let it become its own.
I love You, Nihal. I really do. Virtually and The Real You, Two.
Today is The Day.
Today is the day I finally wrote you even though I am a long way from finishing and publishing these final verses.
I have no business loving you. I recall a girl whose birthday is today, someone I knew once (as the fables go), whose skin was blue, the white so pure you could see her veins pulsing all that blood to, from and through her big, beautiful heart. We met on a crosstown bus only to discover we lived in the same building. She was delightful, a dash of ginger with a cardamom soul. So true and sensitive but not for me and not because she didn’t have the capacity for love but because I knew, Doctor. I knew.
She was so beyond me. Why would I want to? Why would I ever hurt anyone knowingly when I know that I was incapable of giving back what she gave to me? Then, I went and did anyway before I figured out that when it comes to the atrocities of life, the cruelest come in the forms of love, by the hands of and against the ones we claim to —and, indeed do, I truly believe —treasure most dear.
Why this world is full of constant hatred and sorrow and pain I suppose I attempt to and yet never understand, never truly apprehend. I accept that we all are doing the best we can, that we are meeting each other at our highest self. Yet, I am a Seeker and the dichotomy of the want equals suffering is a tiny risk to the greater reward than any treasure I could store. 1.2% by my calculation. That’s my current observation, lab coat on and clipboard in hand. That is the number of people who carry their lives, lead with Their Self in a constant state of panoramic awareness and compassion.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope the number is far greater.
Some are building monuments, others jotting down notes. Some are building up or destroying walls, trampling over others’ lives while they, too, are subjugated to the lies and cruelty of those who only despise their own life or, at the least, do not recognize its worth and, with it, the fundamental belief to compromise, to ensure in the social contract of a shared time, a limited terrain and the existential pain of solitude, what it means to attain the kingdom of their, your, my god within. Now. Here.
When Quinn The Eskimo gets here, May it begin. May it all Begin.
Do You KNOW what I just did? She knows, Doctor. She knows. That Girl was so beyond me and I was unworthy of her and it happened time after time and it’s happening all over again with You but this time I wanted, at the least, for someone — The World — to know. I got high. I’m in love with You and, at some level, I always will be and that’s the whole point. The agony is the ecstasy and not is some sort of #NSFW #BDSM kink — although I’m sure that’d be fun. I mean rising to the moment, to exorcise the demons, release shame, embrace a vulnerable Way of God and aspire.
I met a married woman, her birthday the very same as the last one I mentioned. She had legs and beauty and creamy dark skin the likes of which I never knew or would since then. From Trinidad. God. I love Trinidad. Did I mention she was married? Boo. Two sweet, young children. I don’t know whatever became of them but I know this much is true — She was loyal to her marriage — I never tried — bless her soul, and yet we loved each other or at least that is what I want to believe. I think it was more ME, boy fantasy.
I think it was simply more ME Boy Fantasy. Sigh.
Today is The Day, one which will forever live in me. I suppose that’s why I finally wrote you today, that aforementioned DM as in ‘disastrous misspellings.’ Sorry. I wanted it to be You for whom I, Seeker, was searching all this time. Silly. True. I Love You. I really do, Nihal. How much you believe is up to You. You’re the Cheese, Chebba. My fave song.
Possibly My Fave Gal.
«««BREAKING NEWS!»»» From the news wire…
Awww. As I put the finishing touches on my masterpiece, weather report said it was gonna rain today. It turned out to be a beauty of a day, clear skies and sunshine forever. I can see for miles and yet just now the skies opened up.
Let it rain!
Bonus in-piece soundtrack:
When Hope Persists, John Boberg
Everything is Coming Our Way, Santana
Bibliography
New Left Review, Website
Astral Plane, Wikipedia
Polaris, Julius Caesar, III i
Limerence, Free Dictionary
L’Hermitage, Nickname for my apartment :)
Tristan and Isolde, Sophia Cycles
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The First and Last Freedom
The Matrix, Trinity and Neo
Lothario, Free Dictionary
Poseidon, Wikipedia
Political Antagonism as Therapy, Mila Ghorayeb
Unacceptable, a Podcast
Pro Democracy, a Podcast
Verso, writings by Nihal El Aasar
Nawai El Saadawi, Physician, Author, Psychiatrist, Feminist, Activist
