Departing thoughts…
I could feel it somewhere, like a part of my being my which had been born with me when I was born, but had not grown with me when I had grown, like a part of my being that I had once known, but left behind when I was born. A cloudy awareness of something that coil have been, and yet was never lived.
—Women at Point Zero by Nawal Saadawi
How easy it is, the abandon. The body in bed. The bed carried in the body. The sleeping mind and the murmur of a heart losing its voice. The murmur of a heart that hasn’t died yet but is it on its way there. To watch the failure of yourself. To look down at your empty hands, holding 29 years of life and only that, and in wild disbelief, you ask how did I get it so wrong? And you ask with the abandon of someone who no longer believes she has any chance of getting it right. There’s been too many migrations. Too many men. Too many I’m trying over again’s and too little youth left to believe in another lie. So here you sit. In your grandma’s kitchen, where you’ve listened to a hundred sentences that should have been the last from her, and you stare at your shadow across the kitchen table, and the fact that you’re too weak to feel the urge to scream scares you. If nothing else, the scream was always there, under the skin of silence, pressed against your chest. You hated the pressure of it. Until it was gone, and you understood what was scarier than the urgency of a scream: the lack of one.
I will lie and say that I am fine with this end. This terrible end. This end that mocks the other I thought I’d penned in my mind. Except the truth is, I never dared imagine a life for myself outside those walls. I never said, as maybe other trapped kids do, when I get out of here, I’m going to do this, and I’m going to go here, and I’m going to break this rule and … I had no plan. And when the end came, I had only enough time to decide on loving a man who lived in another kind of prison. I had never really believed in a life for myself after or outside that prison. And so when the freedom came, and it came large and gaping and promising, I completely lost my way, landing in so many places I’d forget where I was. I had no training in freedom. When it came, it came suddenly, and I can’t help but count the years since it arrived, and the years I’ve messed it all up. This freedom, this wild, forbidden cup that’s been kept away from me for so long… I can’t seem to make sense of it. As if it came to me with instructions in a foreign language. One day, the borders opened. I could go anywhere, do anything. So I went everywhere, and did everything, and lost singular desires and destinations I could no longer remember. Each year, I told yourself, I’ll learn this foreign language, I’ll figure out the instructions, and another year slipped with the manual fraying at its edges, its language still as unknown as it was the year before. I keep meaning to start all over but I never really do. I bring scraps of poems and art and memories of men who deserve no memory into the next year, and I add more scraps, more men undeserving of the space in my mind.
“When I looked at the streets it was as though I was seeing them for the first time. A new world was opening up in front of my eyes, a world which for me had not existed before. Maybe it had always been there, always existed, but I had never seen it, never realized it had been there all the time. ”
Until I landed someplace strange, someplace that doesn’t look familiar, and suddenly I want to see nothing that resembles these past 10 years. No boxes, no suitcases, no men, no cities. No buses, no art. You don’t know what you want, only that you want nothing. Like my grandma, who waits for the end and wants nothing. Some days I am her. Waiting. But life had been good to her. There are so many photos to prove it. What happened that made her so bitter, and why did I enter so late in the novel? When the family was in its final chapters, and all joy had long passed.
Everything feels impossibly hard. I want to start over but there’s not a penny I could start over with. I want to speak to god and ask for help but I haven’t met the other god I’d rather talk to yet (the one from my childhood doesn’t listen to women like me). I want to find a stable, cozy little place but I have no idea where in the world to start looking. I want meaningful, deeply fulfilling days but I don’t know what that means, or what that looks like. Once in my life, there had been so many chances to taste life, to feel it, to be it, to breathe it, all taken from me, and now that I have all the freedom to breathe as much of it as I want, I no longer know how. Every conversation with a friend turns into a serious one. I don’t know how to laugh, how to break rules except to show skin. I don’t know how to dance, how to be messy. That doll-girl won’t be crushed. She takes over every time I am with someone, and every night I crash her face again and again she rises in me the next morning, unscarred. I will never understand this. This specific kind of suffering. That someone could deny you life for so so long, and then, you are set free and have every chance you’d dreamed of, and instead, each morning you take this beautiful life, this thing you begged for, were so hungry for, went wild for, were ready to give up the only safe place you had for, and you set it inside a cup of cold coffee and you drink it away, and you beg god not to make you feel what you were doing, because once you have felt it, once you’ve seen yourself, that was it. That was the end. You couldn't unsee it. What they took from you will remain taken from you even in the absence of the hands that did the taking. And you begin to believe that life is a cup of coffee, a list of emails you’d rather not answer, and tomorrow to try again.
