Singing to deer

*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism

(*artwork by Incé Husain)

It’s 8.50am. My room is a soft grey dome of light. I wake up to an Al Jazeera notification that Israel is bombing Lebanon again. I didn’t sleep most of the night. I prayed, tossed and turned, dizzily made eggs and mint chai for sehri, fell asleep richly at dawn.

Now, to steel myself for my research meeting. I’m paper-writing now; writing is my safe place. In the hallway, X tells me, with her luminous hazelnut eyes, that she had a nightmare about satan. She hugs me, almost claws at me, says “pray for me, I was screaming.”

The meeting goes well. The forest behind my building is grey, the trees bare and the green river retreating from its floods, frothing and circling patches of shrubbery. Cardinals are trilling. A woodpecker rams its head loudly into a tree. The air is cold and sharp. The forest is a dome; the birds, the river’s rush, and the winds are so loud I forget I’m on campus. I forget I’m in London. I could be anywhere at all, ankle-deep in dry yellow foliage.

A quick shiver in the trees, and I see a deer. She saw me first and had frozen, so still it was like she was painted on the air, a sudden, eerie apparition. Her eyes are large, her cream ears tufted, her nose black. Her face is a soft elongated symmetry, perched on twisted neck and still silver body. She distorts seamlessly into the trees like a mirage. And then, in a bow of trust, she begins to graze. I, too, relax. In the near distance behind her, I see two other deer dipping their noses in earth, white tails wagging. They inspect me too, lifting their heads, twisting their necks, drilling those unblinking liquid gazes. I stay still again, a stranger in a blue coat. They paw at the pale dry grass. I watch them easily, their soft sinewy limbs and erratic paralyses when I twitch. They’re cautious but not shy; they trot closer, coats of silver, cream, and oak. They’re somehow noiseless, like hallucinations.

The deer cross into the clearing in my path. They are resigned but poised to run, carry a slumbering tautness in their limbs. As I watch them, the song “The night we met” unfurls in my head. It’s haunting, yearning, whimsical, made of regret and prayer.

I am not the only traveler

Who has not repaid her debt… 

It starts to rain. I feel it in my hair, dripping down my nose. I close my eyes, listen to its dull roar.

…I've been searching for a trail to follow, again,

Take me back to the night we met.

One deer freezes, staring at me with her foreleg raised in mid-step. The river rushes next to her. The others wait for her to move, to do nothing. Branches coil behind them.

I don’t have a trained voice. I’m not sure I have a nice voice. But I remember a video on YouTube of a girl playing a harp in the woods and a lone deer that would find her notes, listen until she finished, and then run into the void of foliage. It feels right to sing quietly, shyly, in the most threadbare of a tune.

“And then I can tell myself

What the hell I'm supposed to do…”

They raise their heads, ears twitching.

“And then I can tell myself

Not to ride along with you…”

They listen to me for a few verses. They come closer, watch, graze. I can hear the crunch of their movements now, their distinctions against the river, rain, and wind. We share a fragile understanding of stillness and attentiveness.

“When the night was full of terror

And your eyes were filled with tears…”

How did the deer find themselves here? This forest is not really a forest. It is a strip of trees bordering a river and a city-like campus. It will be loud soon, non-tranquil with the undergrad rush. My voice becomes braver.

“Take me back to the night we met.”

Soon, the deer cross the path, camouflage to the thicker trees by the shore.

I continue my walk and try to think of why the deer remind me of this song.

Their unblinking eyes? Their tranquility coexisting with the readiness to run? Their easy wandering? The matter-of-factness of their existence, that somehow made everything feel allowed, that built windows into shut doors? The way their grace merged with the rain I love?

“The night we met” is by Lord Huron. “Deer” in Urdu are “hirin”, close enough to “Huron”. Maybe it was just a semantic match.

When I’m home, I fall asleep almost immediately. My room is as I left it: a soft grey dome of light. I hardly realize that I fall asleep to a rainstorm. There are growls of thunder so loud I wake up flinching until iftar. ♦