Notes on Fragmentary Solitude

By Reem Saad

Notes on Fragmentary Solitude is a collection of fragments that explore the tension between love and solitude. Reem presents a perfect blend of emotional authenticity and the pleasure of finally letting go. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Reem Saad
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223741039

Book preview

Notes on Fragmentary Solitude

FRAGMENT 1:

I’m nothing but a brief, incandescent encounter. There are always truer words, kinder words, simpler and more ambivalent words to describe myself, but there is poetry in melancholy and joyous accuracy in spleen. The air and the blues, they all hit me the same, and they talk back to me as well. My thoughts speed and turn out to be frivolous and vain, but nothing I say is truer than myself. Nothing stays the same, not even your own flesh, not even your own wounds.

What is permanent? A flower and a knife, they all end up being the same; just because something is dreadfully beautiful doesn’t exempt it from being achingly dangerous.

Do we hold ourselves down to resist? I wonder. I wonder. My curtains are drawn, and the morning dew is fresh. No voice seems to come, my sirens are finally shut down, and I am, in my fragmentary solitude, looking for a way out.

FRAGMENT 2:

Today, I felt my morning to be more obscene than usual. I knew I attracted loneliness wherever I went, I knew it’s something in me that has the constant need to be a loner. I never knew what it meant to be a part of something, be a part of a sore reality. Even in the times I did feel like belonging, I ran away as far as I could. Foreseeing demise and sunflowers on a midday in April. Is foreseeing demise a skill or a curse? I still don’t know. Maybe being alone meant harboring greatness that had certainty beaming through its light. At the end of the morning, it’s all tethered to a life that is not meant for me. Like the phrase I kept repeating to myself when I got out of my sister’s car, Everything true finds a way, I believed I was someone who is true, I believed I was someone caring, and I knew deep down that I would find my way.

FRAGMENT 3:

I once believed I was rooted in unconditional love. It ran in my blood to be so. But Love was always a fickle thing. Faded in and out like a seamless pattern kept shelved for years and years. I have not known love. I have only experienced it in solitude. I never knew what it felt like to be secure in love. It teems and gleams, but it is never present in me. It was conditional every time I had it. The idea of Love has its own catharsis. And how I express my love does, too. To be desired is not love, to be seen is not love. Only when we truly shed ourselves into an authentic Ideal do we feel love in its purest form. I only sought love out of loneliness, does that make me a parasite? If my flesh turned into instruments, if I knew, just knew, how to play all the words inside me, would anyone listen intently?

FRAGMENT 4:

My search for love always happens during times of great despair. A tactile loss of sense every time I tried to look for it. The stolid melancholy of being void and unfulfilled.

But I feel perpetual, like a never-ending song that tiptoes over a melody. Agonizing but sweet at times. I felt myself become more invisible with time.