Postcards & Text Messages

If you’re here, then hello there! This is the beginning of a project I’m working on, so let me walk you through it.

The title is Postcards & Text Messages — as viscerally seen above — and it’s a collection of a narration outlined in poetry and prose.

I can’t really tell you much of why I started, but here’s the catch: I’ve seen the world through different lenses. What I can say for sure is that when coincidences are wrapped up in the dynamism of hard-wired life events such as an unexpected love situation, then there’s bound to be a story that evokes the exigency of time. In a fast-paced pulsating manner, the ability to experience emotions could be triggering, exhilarating, and at the same time unfortunate. Even when we don’t get to choose how our stories start and end, we’re blessed with memories as a rearview mirror to recount how they occurred. It is also a blessing, to get to share, recite and tell these stories to others. To remind our audience of something we might have lost or gained. To help the people who are watching and willing to listen to us, understand a picture that’s inconceivable, yet glaringly in existence.

Postcards & Text Messages is an elucidation of something that lives in me, yet not present in my body; a voice that speaks to me, but doesn’t have a tongue; a wish that I pray for, but do not worship; and a volatile translation of my thoughts, blending subtly with the cloak of my experience. Illusive or not. It may not really matter. All that matters is the story borne.

Postcards & Text Messages is about a sequence of fate-twisting circumstances that brings two strangers together, and they find themselves peddling against the waves of uncharted waters. In an attempt to shy away from the grim past, they find themselves with no compass that can give any direction to a place of promise. Except that they can only turn to each other, to find the light; within words, cryptic messages, and random letters. They can’t run from the uncertainty of the outcome, so one of them tries to tell his side of the tale, as it unfolds. Should in case, it ends in misery, then he would know he didn’t go through it alone. If it ends in happiness, then he would have a bit of ecstasy to share around.

It will be released continuously over the span of 2–3 months (if not more). I’ll make sure I do not post any other content unrelated till I wrap up the entire collection, so each part/chapter can appear orderly on my page.

I’m also creating miniature designs of the poems in every chapter to post on my Instagram and X account. I’ll also be posting full contents on Wattpad.

I hope you’ll enjoy every piece of it and check here regularly for updates. Thank you!

Here’s a poem from one of my favourites; Mahmoud Darwish, just to lighten up the atmosphere and to get you prepared for what’s to come.

This jasmine in the July night is a song for two strangers who meet on a street leading nowhere.

Who am I after your two almond eyes? the male stranger asks.

Who am I after your exile in me? the female stranger asks.

Well, then, let us not stir the salt of ancient seas in a remembering body.

She was re-creating his warm flesh, and he, hers.
Thus the two loving strangers leave their love in disarray the way they left their underwear among the flowery sheets.

- If you really were my beloved, then compose a Song of Songs for me, and engrave my name on the trunk of a pomegranate tree in the gardens of Babylon.

- From Poetic Regulations, by Mahmoud Darwish.

{series continues in my next post}