A Character

“All born of mortal womb
are slaves to Moirae.”
She reads the line,
and imagines the loom
with threads crossing,
a world woven of people’s fates.

And she feels the urge,
to distract the hand of Clotho,
to snap Lachesis’ measuring rod,
to steal the shears from Atropos.

A futile urge, yes,
but the body thrums with it,
like a moth beating itself senseless
against a pane of glass.

She walks through her days
like a marionette lost in its own strings.
The roads lay ahead without choice,
each step dead set,
each boundary drawn,
each syllable planted in her
before even her tongue was formed.

Even the questions she asks,
“Why did this happen?
What was my fault?...”
They taste of ink,
as though someone has
wrote them inside her mouth.

It is not despair that extricates her,
but the suspicion that,
this despair, too, is scripted.

The Moirae are nothing
but distracted authors,
scribbling a scene,
forgetting the page,
leaving her stranded mid-sentence.
That is why the days freeze,
her life fills itself with
blank paragraphs of nothing,
unlived hours gather dust,
until suddenly,
the sisters remember her
and the plot of the book lurches forward again.

And so she names them distracted authors,
like the authors of her world,
writing worlds without knowing
the ink they spill is blood,
the threads woven are veins?
The characters they grow tired of,
the characters they abandon between chapters
are alive.

She longs to rebel:
to tear the thread,
to burn the loom
to step beyond the fate they have written...
To be, if only once,
the author of her own ruin.
Even if failure is certain,
even if death is the only left sentence,
it would be her death,
not the Moirae’s punctuation mark.

But what if even this hunger for revolt
is nothing but a written trait?
What if the Moirae
placed rebellion in her chest
only to laugh,
as she mistakes her chains
for wings?