Dear friends,
I’m sitting at my desk, staring out over the houses, backyards and trees that creep their way toward the horizon, a domestic clutter pricked by a few solitary lights. The sun is a fading gradient of mango smeared across the blue, the hot humid stink of day finally giving way to a coolness. I love this view; it is perhaps the only thing I love about this house, the vantage it offers from its perch atop this hill. I am not playing any music, nor reading anything, and until a few moments ago, I wasn’t writing anything either. I just sat here enjoying the breeze, the diminishing gold light, my own plunging temperature, the silence finally allowing me to think.
Ah, I should stop stalling and just state the obvious: I’ve neglected this blog these past few weeks, and for that I apologise. My life has ruptured in this brief span of time, in too many ways to stop the gushing–worse, it did so in a horrifyingly public way. A way I could not hide or spin, for many reasons, not least of which is that I simply had no capacity to do so. As a writer, I’m used to controlling the narrative, see. Not being able to do so in a satisfactory manner made me realise how insecure we writers are, where the need to tell stories (at least in part) really stems from. It is an ugly place, and I am only just now emerging from it, battered and bandaged and leaking, but still here.
This–my recovery from the upending–is the main reason I have stopped updating the blog regularly. Aside from that, however, it’s also true that I am becoming increasingly critical, increasingly harder to please and so finding poems I love unreservedly is rarer and rarer every day. I can’t let that deter me, however, I think I’ll just to have to be brave enough to share work that I enjoy despite the flaws, as well as those in which I can find none. All of which is to say, quite simply, that I haven’t forgotten this tiny little corner of the internet, or you, the regular readers, and I hope you’ll stick around for the next post.
With love,
Omar
