The Poet & The Scientist 1.1

They left their foreign cities, and forged digital alliances to meet in the epicenter of their colonised past. She packed the innocence of her scarred life, the poetry of her ancestral belonging, and he traveled light, burdened with his manufactured convictions.

He came with numbers and diamonds, and she welcomed him with extremes of veiled chocolates, cigarettes, and her words.

In the express train, there it was: collisions of shock and anticipated pleasures as they waited to reach the centre of what they once both called home. The conversation was just about to start, but the debates were silenced, the binaries were resting, and the potentials heightened.

The conversation continued, and foreign music played in the background to remind them once again, that it was indeed all foreign, all but their coveted explosion.

Laughter, tears and music all seemed wordless at a moment when her words were silenced and his numbers were subtracted to zero. Musky scents of occupied pasts in a room that witnessed the death of poetry and the abortion of science.

He tasted pleasure, she suppressed pain and both surrendered to a moment they knew will last for as long as… a moment does.

He watched her words fall asleep, and her defenses fall as his lips stretched with a small victory that he concurred her lands, and claimed them his. She slept to dream of her words again.

Outside the small window was the remains of an empire that insisted on stealing their belonging. They denied it with the smell of coffee, fresh bread and cigarettes stealing with pleasure moments of their lives. Outside that window, was the empire, but inside the room was Baghdad.

Baghdad: loved, hated and coveted stood uncontested in her eyes, Tigris flowing signaling him to taste home, and begging her to quench her thirst.. They both swallowed home to the point of rejection.

In Baghdad, the explosions went silent too, and the unfamiliar sound of peace alarmed them that it was too, coming to an end.

The music faded away, and the conversation rested to give space for a debate that mocked the rivers and the sweaty palms. His numbers increased, as her poetry resurrected: Words he tried to erase, and softness that suffocated his resistance. He screamed for proofs, as she scribbled words on sheets that witnessed her demise.

She wore her contradictions and he fixed his emptiness as they left for the train. Quite they were, but the silence has left them. He took a glance back at the building that welcomed their wreckage, while she held his hands preparing to let them go.

She was the poet, and he was the scientist.