OMNISCIENT NARRATOR
I'm sat at the same side of the table, the same couch that my ass has been wearing off for my whole life. My eyes focused on the newly flourished hairs on my legs; they always grow back a day after shaving. I look up at the red cabinets my mother hates. Cabinets must remain unspoken unless one wishes to endure the wrought story of how mother would've had a better kitchen if a better daughter from a less stingy man was born. I look down at my legs again. I think, why bother? If my existence is an illusion of someone tenable, if I'm hiding my short skirt and showing off my armor of lies, and if all I've ever known is not to know myself, why do I even bother?
I look up at my mother. This is a usual morning. I'm silent; mother is going off like a rifle, and the chair that used to be my father's place is empty. All is mundane. I'll eat a slice of bread with jam and pretend to agree with the death sentences she places upon deviants. But then, a breeze... something unusual is creeping within. It is partially familiar and just as strange. My thoughts slowly calm like the Dead Sea, the silence before the storm. I'm used to the figments of my imagination; I held conferences and stadiums in my head. My mother saw past my fabricated faces in my head. But this childlike fever never got out. I've kept it safe in a prison. It worked well all my life. Since, as my mother says, my skull is thicker than iron.
What I'm not used to is this rising eagerness, the banging on the bars, and the rush of it. A riot is at stake, and I just threw the keys. I polymorph into some being only capable of observing. As I rise above, I look down on my own pathetic body and the horrified look on my mother’s face. There is no air, the sound is annihilated, and I've never taken a deeper breath. I have no lungs now, but this must be how fresh air tastes like. Not a single visible part of me, only me. It had been my greatest wish to escape the shackles of the body, a quite limiting thing that has to be fed three times a day, cleaned, and cared for. All that work only to walk beside other bodies and be perceived from the outside. Where I live is inside; there, I don’t need to be shaving, brushing, or worshipping. For a second, I got what I wanted: death and a life without actions to take. An omniscient narrator; there's no harm when the story isn't mine.
The room must be filling with air again because the sound is now traveling all around, my voice confessing and releasing. I'm slowly back to my flesh and bones for some reason unbeknownst to me. Most friends of suicide victims on TV say they never saw it coming, and the victim seemed ‘normal’ the day before. Until now, I had always thought I would die with no errand left to the living. My mother raised me to be prepared; my shroud was ready before my crib. But I jumped to the torment of the grave on one Wednesday morning while my mother was having tea with a plate of judgments on the side. In her hand is the deed book filled with the sins of someone just like me, the daughter she sculptured with promises of false prophets.
Now I’m turning into a something from a somebody; something intangible, a pervert, a heretic, a sick limb that should be amputated.My body is filthy with the touch of a man, my mind is rotten with no sign of faith, my blood is polluted with drunkenness, and my lips are stained with the kiss of a woman. During the fasting days of the year, I starve to please, not God but you. I was so spellbound by your snarls that your tidal love felt worthy of wasting all of me. It felt enough to be something only capable of lying and scheming for bits of love. If lying at one's own expense of self was a mitzvah, the gates of Jannah would open first for me, mother.
Begüm, 20, Istanbul - Turkey ✯ IG: @venicebeyach