your alliteration lent a strong substance to this piece that i myself have felt so many times before... put so openly and rawly on the line by you... introspective read that leaves my mind pondering life... as it should be... blessings...

wow... I felt torn up just reading this... have often found myself in the sewer with the rats... great read... thanks rula... great read

I don't recall recruiting you as my biographer - whatever - instant gratification, favourite, potd...'towering far below the rest' :) It had to come...

Pretending to soar and actually soaring are only differentiated by the amount of faith we have.

It's general enough to fit so many women, and yet it has a distinctly private feel to it. I can't tell if you're peeking at someone outside yourself, or using a mirror for the reflection. It definitely adds to the allure of the description. The movement from paragraph to paragraph excellently captures the subject's movement from experience to experience. There is enough not said that it leaves me wondering, while there is certainly enough said to wrench my heart for her. And on a personal note, it's amazing to me what our intentions accomplish.

I saw abit of Mother Teresa in this, but other parts speak of a wider deeper experience. Compelling read, makes me want to know more.

And she ran……. Majority of us can so easily identify with 'she' and her running. Running unhindered towards her death in the disguise of life- 'pretending to soar as she was falling, faltering, fading…'Yes, fading out, leaving no marks, no signs of her ever being ALIVE, living out a process of death, a process we are all CURSED TO LIVE in the absence of CHOICE TO LIVE, aware of our living, a useless and meaningless, joyless, bare of all the beauties,( from our point of view) a life but a necessary link in this never ending chain( from nature's point of view). This sad piece is not just an account of a life wasted with all the potential intact and unexploited but also a comment on how we approach our lives. How we excel in the 'fall' in the disguise of an ascent, singing while 'breathing, bleeding, breaking…'. This fall is alluring. So intensely that we lose sight of the evolutionary scale, the very life it self and instead of trying to ascend those invisible heights we descend ' to sewers flying with the rats…… sailing… suffocating, shivering, sinking…' Yes, the death is alluring which doesn't let you LIVE. One who is begotten is cursed to run as fast as one is allured to this death disguised as life, driven by this death instinct. The one who realizes this, as you have Rula Shin, STOPS, rather struggles to stop tearing all the shrouds, face to face with the death, getting into a long drawn battle with this imminent death disguised as life. I wish 'she' STOPS and evaluate her life measuring it in terms of LIVING rather than 'flying having never flown, forever soulless lost drifting, dying, dead…' This is a sad commentary on the lives, living this process of death.

The last stanza... WOW! This piece is so powerful. I have read it many times and still cannot find th words good enough to comment on it intelligently. Absolutely wonderful read!

I am awed, broken and in tears. I am silenced by the depth of this and my own personal reaction to it. Numbed by the sheer cold beauty of flying down, not up, to meet your destiny. I am saving this to my favs, so I may devour it at my leisure.