----Written By: Ammara Khan
‘Look at me’, he said, and I wheeled my face around in a futile effort to conceal my tears. Upon my shoulder, I felt that empathetic touch for which I have been hungering for last two years. It was alien and yet familiar, reminding me of the yearnings that crawled at my heart in the past and telling me at the same time that it cannot be true. I was devastated…
‘Don’t do this Eshmal. Don’t do this.’ The empathy was shambling from the outside of my shoulder to the lineament of my hands reflecting in the shadow under my feet. I kept on gazing at my own deformed contour on the ground.
‘Who am I and who is this creeping shape under my feet?’ I asked myself, ‘Am I the performer or the beholder?’ I could not know.
The empathy took hold of my hands and I knew I cannot be the spectator anymore.
‘Eshmal… Come back.’
The empathy brought with it a plea and the pores on my hands were moistened all of a sudden and the plea crept into my womb.
‘I’m sorry Eshmal.’
Mortification crawled slowly into my palms and reached for the plea in my womb and plucked at my throat. I knew I cannot breathe…
‘I love you baby, you know that. Please forgive me and come back.’
The plea in my womb gave a nauseating kick and the belly of the deformed shape started to grow outwards. An uncanny sensation moved from my shoulders to my hands and the next moment my hands were free and I was looking at the face that first I worshiped and then prayed to never see again.
‘I’m sorry I can’t help you in this matter’, I heard myself echoing the words that once came out of the mouth of the person standing in front of me.
He motioned to come close to me, to hold me in his arms and tell me that grief has affected my brain but he will sort everything out and there is need for me to worry because he is here with me, my protector, my appropriated god.
‘Don’t move’, I told him and he was benumbed.
‘What I have in my womb is not a plea but a piece of my soul to which you happened to donate a seed and then discard me away.’
‘Eshmal, don’t say this baby’, he pleaded.
And I knew its time for me to turn away and become a beholder again.
