Matches

So difficult to know what to do or where to go nowadays.

Every day new changes, new paces to pick up

and what we leave behind piles up on the sides of roads

we never imagined we’d really have to walk one day.

And the road’s one way.

No two ways about it.

Pillars of salt are passed to the past, all fire, brimstone, and ash, and saline streaks on my cheeks, burnt raw from the blast.

I’ve got this little crumpled map I sometimes see in sajda.

It’s lit by echos of an ayah I once heard long ago in a distant dream-like memory.

I wish I could remember where to go, how to get there, and how to make sense of these meanings.

I pray and then lift my hands to read the blurry lines of the handbook I was assigned at birth.

This one was passed down from son to son.

Not sure how they interpreted it though.

It reads differently by candle light.

Where’d I put my matches?