Field Notes ▪︎ Prose (2)

19. You put the wolf inside the girl (before)

At midnight, half my flesh unraveled by my ripped robe, ribs smeared in fresh blood, wet grass and dry mire. It looks like rot has finally spread to reach my hand in the end.

Towards the window of my bedroom I stand; the smell of jasmine sambac thin in the still atmosphere. Back; way back beyond the fields of almonds and the lone cherry tree that long nursed my sweet tooth's caprices, the ether abandons it's cerulean tides into the crest of the horizon cooling the day from summer's depleding heat.

I can feel the pulse of my heart in my left ear; I open my eyes.

The vast blue curtain I'm being immersed by lends me discretion, quiet a generosity I never thought I'd be offered on such a weighty night where even god stood watching without saying a thing, and I prayed to make this violence go away and depart me the way light's gleam had vanquished in the tunnels I found myself in. I did. I did try; made my thoughts better, rounded my perception of suffering to be pliant; acceptant. Readjusted my true reactions in good faith to the conviction that it was the needed lethal thread to sew the map of my journey; a collosal rove I did believe in. It had to be bigger than life itself to fill me ! I told myself, It had to be the most tender embrace the universe could give me ! I assured my infancy, It would take me !

Make it like the movies: where girls are buoyant dreamers chasing the lucky star that fell just in the right city, where childhood tasted of vanilla and knees got scratches from riding the bike daddy got as a gift, where you have a certain natural charm that makes conversations easy with everyone, where even when the storm hits the tide always knows when to turn.

To survive once, that's what I taught myself to hope for. I did it for so long until the day innocence had her last breath on the threshold of my acknowledgement to know that evil, pure, has been sleeping in the drawer of my socks, turning off my lamp, scribbling in my secret diary; resting in my body to sleep.

It has been vialed since the day I lost my baby teeth and made adults exchange them, unaware still smiling, with predator canines.

I knew suffering was not a caring tool or a leading hand anymore; it never meant being indemnified with a telescope overlooking the happy end. Certain sufferings are meant for damage, just wounds meant to bleed for keeps, that; I learned my lesson.

Brushing my blood-spattered cheeks with the back of my hand, I let out a sight I've been holding since the moment I woke, for years. For the first time it doesn't make me devastated by the perpetual feeling of having leaden-like deposit fill my lungs again. This time when I breath-out nothing of the stannic heaviness is reserved to backup the hole I felt transending the realm of my body.

Liberating...like cutting your limb from a bear trap. Nothing is left to hold me back now.

I drop the axe to the floor then my night dress off my shoulders follows, stepping out of it I go to the bathroom. Axe back in hand I'm just a woman in need of a a hot shower 'till the sunrise creeps on my footsteps. But even then, I'll be gone.

January 22, 2023