Imagine to Remember

It is said that the world is not ruled by words and laws but by symbols. This is truer still of our subconscious worlds. As I begin to look back on my experiences with the inner eye of introspection, baseerah, I can see the formation and repetition of symbols of my own life. And these symbols often make themselves known in the most mundane moments, they are not necessarily beautiful or even violent but they are striking, and they have engraved themselves into the lining of my subconscious. And there are certain scenes I keep coming back to over and over again. 

Although not the most gruesome or disturbing scene of my young life, it is a moment where I was changed. And one that especially now is ever present in the forefront of my mind. It was one of the glorious summer days, late in the morning, as the sun’s rays stretched out towards its zenith in a sky of endless blue, in the courtyard of a housing project, we came across it, that haunting site and it struck us mute. There on the warm concrete wall of the building, clinging, squealing was a baby bat with a broken wing. We crowded around it, pulled in by the all too human mixture of empathy, disgust, confusion, helplessness and morbid curiosity. Its cries of pain, loneliness, the assault of the sun on its delicate skin and half blind eyes, the encroaching shadows of scared children looming over its shaky body. It was an awful sight and yet in its own way compelling. It was a moment that plunged us into an eternity as we watched and waited with shallow breaths. And then, and then suddenly we were pulled back into the confines of time and space by the shrill adult voices shooing us away from the broken creature.

I never did know what became of the little bat. Was it put out of its misery? Did its mother mourn her lost child? Perhaps the little bat was healed and released back into the wild where it found a place amongst a new community, taking refuge in new caves where it longed for its old life. Did it fly over our neighborhood, looking down on our building, remembering “This is the place where I almost died”? Or maybe there is a version of reality where mother and child are reunited, wounds are healed, and although their former selves are no more, new beings are born of the pain of transformation, taking flight into the inky night sky.