Strangers Occur To Me

“I'm all these words, all these strangers" - Samuel Beckett

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I'm all these words, all these strangers: who are like fathers to me who have thrown me out onto the street, and into the unpredictable world of my creation, my unimaginable freedoms and unquenchable desires. All they ask of me is not to come back, but bury images further and further beyond reach of the self I am growing into.

I'm all these words and strangers who touch me in the naked streets of my childhood, who tower above me, I, who have fallen beyond reach of the self I have been waiting to grow into for years. For the sake of times we have forgotten. Since the times we have forgotten harbour parts of ourselves who are the departed remnants of a selflessness we still cling to in the night, in the barren and naked streets of our childhood.

All these words that call at me and the 100,000 strangers who answer back with their unrecognisable voices and unquenchable desires, some with dreams barely intact, carrying them to unnamed destinies.

I'm all these words carrying me, now naming me, here touching me like a blind stranger might touch a face as he weeps that it could be a missing loved one in the street after the house fire. Weeps that I could be his own son whom only his hands recognise. But he is not these words not these strangers.

And I am lost in the dark unforgiving pool of a stranger's needs that I so desperately try to fill by colliding within myself night and day, night and day over and over - so that the bell of my fears floats beyond me like twilight, like a lantern each time a word escapes my mouth. Because these words draw on a destiny that, in it's hands holds fragments of a scream that rose and broke as it escaped my own unrecognisable voice.

By Jaié Miller

From: United Kingdom

Instagram: jaie_miller