Time Lies

they say dry your tears and face life joyfully and how am i supposed to obey? it is not that simple,  i am a coward and i am lost. my face is raining and umbrellas are foreign.  the instruction manual is written in a language i do not understand. the snow is spinning around me and my hands are  frozen, my fingers are falling off, can’t you see it? can’t you see me? the sun does not know me. the sun burns my retinas. my lungs are full of blood and i can finally breathe. don’t you  know? don’t you hear it? i pick a rose and it does not scratch me. there are no rosebushes here. i’ve been laying in the road for a decade. this week was the longest day of my life. the clock is a liar. the calendar leers at me. was i ever a child? tomorrow was years ago. yesterday will happen centuries from now. aren’t you looking? aren’t you feeling it? life lifts my face with its finger and i fail to meet its eyes. the rain persists. i am screaming.
do you hear me?

*some of the stylistic choices i made in the poem are not compatible with the edublogs editor

This poem is in response to the short story Half A Day by Naguib Mahfouz, specifically the quote “Dry your tears and face life joyfully”. In the beginning of the story, the narrator and main character has mixed feelings about going to school. He is essentially told to be a man and suck it up, which is something a lot of boys and men have to deal with when their mental health isn’t great. While the story itself is not about mental health, it expresses the whirlwind of emotions, thoughts, and beliefs one goes through as their life progresses. Especially as children, many of us are taught to “switch off” our emotions- women are expected to be docile and quiet, and anger is seen as a sign that she is too wild and crazy. Meanwhile, men are supposed to be cool and calm, without complaining or being sad, as it is a sign of weakness. This suppression carries into the teenage years and often into adulthood, when mental health problems begin to arise and one cries out for help without ever really being heard. It has been proven that bottling up one’s feelings can often lead to mental, emotional, and even physical long-term effects that only make everything worse.

Throughout the short story on which this poem is based, there are several contradictions and changes- such as the narrator at first finding school nerve-wracking, then cherishing it and finding it enjoyable, then once again hating the monotony and arduous environment. This can also be seen as the teacher being kind and sweet but then also stern and resorting to physical discipline. Another example of these contradictions is when the narrator leaves school and meets a familiar man, who says he is not doing too well, but then praises God anyways. These juxtaposed contradictions serve to prove how life is chaotic and unpredictable, the biggest example of entropy. These disorderly qualities were emulated in my poem, where I make several direct contradictions, such as “the sun does not know me. the sun burns my retinas” and “my lungs are full of blood and i can finally breathe”. These lines are tied to the prompt, “Dry your tears and face life joyfully”, as it is not possible to be joyful when life is full of confusion and contradiction. I personally find that there’s a lot of things I cannot comprehend because they are not logical, even though they are just facts of life. It can be hard to accept these truths and dry one’s tears when one is surrounded by the unpredictability of existence.

Another quality of the story that I emulated in my poem is the element of questioning, and the internal monologue in general. Once the narrator of Half A Day leaves the school, he is surprised by all the changes that have taken place while he was at school, questioning where the gardens and fields of his childhood have gone. In my poem, these questions are more direct, asking the reader if they can hear them, see them, feel this confusion. A stylistic choice I made in this poem was to bold the questions more each time, indicating intensity  and urgency. While the story’s mood was one of bewilderment and disorientation, the poem is more of desperation, anxiety, and angst. Questioning is a way to indicate the importance of a detail, such as the industrialization and modernization in the short story, or the warped sense of time in the poem. Tying these details into the prompt, it is apparent that it is not as simple as drying one’s tears and moving on from past trials and tribulations. There are always inconsistencies and things to question, which makes facing life with joy much more difficult and complicated than it sounds. 

There are also specific elements of the story that I incorporated into the poem, such as the rapid and jumbled passage of time, as well as childhood’s fleeting pace. The repetition of the questions and individual statements further the urgency and confusion that is meant to be presented in the poem. The true response to the prompt is present in the final line, “life lifts my face with its finger and i failed to meet its eye”. It adds an element of personification to the prompt- the speaker of the poem is unable to face life, with joy or otherwise. The line “tomorrow was years ago. yesterday will happen centuries from now” also alludes to the part in the story when the whole man’s life passes by in half a day- again, the warped sense of time. In the beginning of the poem, it states “my face is raining” and in the end, this motif is again brought up by “the rain persists”. This cycling back to the beginning is similar in the story, as the narrator keeps talking about how his father will pick him up from school, but instead, it is the grandson who takes him home.