Thoughts From 'Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season’
Selected Poems by Forough Farrokhzad—winter is necessary [a season of rebirth]
DEC 17, 2024
Despite all of my movements
I was silting, like stagnant water
Slowly, slowly
I was
Becoming sediment in my pit
I listened
I listened to my whole life
A disgusting mouse in its hole
shamelessly singing
a stupid meaningless song
A cricket’s relentless and incomprehensible chirp
turned across the fleeting moment
and drifted across the face of oblivion
Ah, I was full of lust—lust for death
[a quote from Realizing]
I suppose no one is good enough for me. Not good enough for the person who rarely makes her bed, who keeps pens everywhere. Pens that get stuck in her hair. Who keeps dirty dishes in the sink for days and who spends good money on piles of books. The girl who gets tongue tied in simple dialogue. The woman who will never bear children. Not good enough for the scars she keeps or the memories that are fleeting. For the art she pretends that she still has love for. Not good enough to the past display of erratic mania and emotion, not good enough for her slaughtering devotion. Not good enough for her seasons of depression or the weights of her dreams she sleeps within, upon her saddened mattress. No one will ever be good enough to dive in deep enough to save her from the tears that she pooled up to drown in. Oh, one brave enough to look into her soul as deeply as she looks into yours.
There is no one to save me. That I must do on my own, I must save myself I know. I do not beg or wish or seek to be saved. That is the little girl inside of me crying for a mother who never listened and a father who was always gone. She is mine to take care of. I wish it were that easy. I wish it were easier to love my mother and to love my father too, and I realize it has grown that way, to be easier. But nothing will erase the memories of a dreadful youth, a starving child and a wallowing innocent mind.
I am hungry, but I do not care to eat. I am thirsty, but I do not care to drink. This smoke was never enough to satisfy me. I crave deeply for the warmth of a lover, but I feel sodden in my own pain, so much so that I realize I had lied to myself before, thinking I deserved anything more than a glance from another. For if there is no one to satisfy my desires, then why should I give reason to anything or anyone who seeks interest in lustful memoirs? I was always more of a giver. A healer. A caretaker. And this world loves our kind, because we give so freely, forgetting that this world consumes and eats and devours the purity that still survives within it.
Still, I long to be in the arms of warmth and comfort. The arms that hold so carefully, with a strength that feels so sure and secure that you know for certain than you’d never fall, never stumble. Even if the heel of your shoe broke or the sole fell from it whole. Even if the world was shaking and the crusts of her surface began to crack. Even if we were to die, in that moment, falling through the layers of the earth. I wish for that, to know that even in death, we would still be strong. Even if we were falling into the layers of the earth, we would not stumble, nor would we fall. We would fly.
And if the cities were to fall through with us, I suppose we would just rebuild. As we always do. Maybe this time it would be different. Maybe this time, this winter, this season, these darkest of days. Maybe it would bring something out of it all. The darkness. Maybe it would be enough. Dark enough to need the fire. But it has always been dark enough. In the secrets, the lies. The temptation, damnation. Deceit, fever dreams, streamlined dopamine. The roots of my dyed hair, the faces I see, plain, empty. Dead. Just like me. This is where we die. This is where we are born again.
My skin craws at me, begging for warmth. Begging to be reborn. Through the night, into darkness, out of light, I always am. I am done. Lying to myself.
But I’ve moved my wardrobe, away from my bed, and I only ever sleep on the left. Still, I rip away all the blankets and keep them on my side, just for me. I think I am doing something good, that I am welcoming, but actually I am cold. I have grown cold from the sourness that has predeceased the now. Maybe I should get a new blanket?
What I think is that I worry too much, I fear too much and I am selfish. Because I still seek to find a soulmate when the world is on fire, when the waves are crashing down, when the wind howls for rebellion, when the earth deprives us of the winter days and snow that we desperately need. We desperately need. We desperately need each other.
I am descended from the trees
Breathing stale air exhausts me
A dead bird advised me to remember flight
[a quote from Only the Sound Remains]
