I have been stained by my memories. Stained, tortured and abused. I am dripping with incomplete conversations and uninvited sexual tension with strangers in grocery stores and elevators.
I write to soothe some memories, to drug them for a while, pretend that I am in control. I write to preserve these memories.I am haunted and possessed by what has happened with me. Its nothing tragic as one might expect. No life and death experiences. I just woke up one day and decided that I was empty and sad and this sadness grew on to me like a parasite. As I grew older I let this parasite develop a mind of its own, let the disease become me. If you ask me, I cannot tell you the exact moment that I caught this parasite. I guess I was born with it. But I do know when it started getting stronger than me. It was when I met Sarah. It is this particular memory of her that burns sometimes, randomly, without a warning in my chest. Not in my heart, but somewhere close. Somewhere I cannot put my finger on. This memory of a girl. A girl who had a face like autumn. I cannot forget that face.Sarah was my senior in school, I was 16 she was 18. A small town legend. She was one of those girls who wore short skirts and smoked cigarettes on empty stair cases. The ones who wore cherry lip balms and always had their nails trimmed.
You know what I mean, we all know girls like that. Every school has that girl. That self abusive beautiful girl. But Sarah was a little different. She was twisted. We all knew she was not another pretty face. We were scared of her. I don’t know what about her was threatening.
She had a round face and red cheeks. She looked younger than she was. She was not known to be aggressive. If I think about it now, it was her eyes maybe. If you looked close enough, right into that black spot of her pupil, if you look carefully and long enough you might notice that she had icicles in her skull. It was this frozen dead gaze that you can catch a cold from. Thats my best guess. I can be wrong.
She was our topic of discussion, the buzz in the beehive, she was the one riding all the rumours there were. Boys swore that they lost their virginity to Sarah, girls swore that she went through a lot of plastic surgeries. I even heard that her lips were plastic and thats why she does not drink coffee, they might melt and fall off. We all knew they were lies but we were kids and it was fun to fantasise.
But no one really knew her. She usually walked the corridors alone, with her eyes straight ahead. She was average in her class. She was average in sports. She was not a big talker, she might smile at people some times across the halls but she mostly kept to her self. I never saw her carry a book or listen to music either. It was like she was a blank paper that we all were writing on with our own teenage insecurities.
I however had more access to her than most people did, she lived across the street from me. She moved in when I was 14. She lived with her mother, I never heard of her father but her mother was a polite lady and maintained a really impressive herb garden. I could see her room from my balcony if she ever opened the windows, which she almost never did, only sometimes when it rained.
The colour of her walls were of that post beer piss coloured yellow. I always thought I would go mad if my walls were that colour. It was a really disturbing yellow, I cannot imagine anyone falling asleep in that room with those walls, with that yellow. I hate that color.
I had never spoken to Sarah, she was not the kind of person you could simple go up to and talk. That however, changed one day.
There was this place I used to call Neverland, it was a 15 minute walk from my house. It was this abandoned house with weeds in the garden and rust on the door but the backyard had a tire swing where a small black ugly cat used to stay. I used to go there, sit on the swing with that stupid cat and sometimes drink some rum I had stolen from a shopping mall. I hid the bottle behind the big wild grass that had grown over the edge. That was my Neverland.
One day I found Sarah sitting on the swing with my cat on her lap. She was still in her school skirt and blouse. Her long legs dangling, the cat had scratched her calves and the blood had dripped down her leg and got soaked up in those white school socks. She didn’t seem to care, the cat was still on her lap, peacefully purring.
She looked up at me. Her bangs falling over her eyes. She went back to petting the cat completely ignoring me.
“You’re hurt” I said.
“I have been for a long time” she said so monotonously that it hurt me physically.
“This is your cat?” She asked.
“No, I just feed her sometimes”
“You don’t have to feed wild cats, they can hunt.”
“I know, it just makes me feel better”.
She looked up and smiled so slightly that I am not even sure if that qualified as a smile.
She reached out inside her shirt and pulled out a lighter and a cigarette.
“You don’t mind the smoke, do you?”
“How does it matter? You are going to smoke it anyway”.
She laughed. I had never imagined she could do that.
“You are going to whip out that bottle of the Devine nectar of gods or what?”
“How do you know that? Do you stalk me?”.
To this she laughed again, still it was really unsettling to watch her laugh. Its like drinking gasoline when you are already burning up inside.
“I was sitting on the roof of my house you know, smoking a blunt and masterbating to the sky, the usual you know and I saw you jump off the window and get out on the streets at around 4 am with a black hoodie and a small bag pack. If I am not wrong. It got me curious. And as a concerned adult just looking out for kids and other human beings as their civil duty I felt I must follow you, you might get into trouble and you might need help”.
It all made sense. Because I wanted it to.
“So you followed me here and found out that I was a 16 year old drunk and a sociopath who talks to herself in abandoned places?”.
“Precisely”.
“Did you tell anyone”?
She laughed and shook her head, her eyes on the cat the entire time.
“I watched you whispering to your self but I was too far I could not hear what you were saying, so I waited till you got a little tipsy from the rum to sneak in closer. So I waked in the shadows right behind that tree and I heard that you were not just whispering random things you were having a conversation with yourself. Like you played two people. I thought you were rehearsing for a play. But it did not seem like one. I remember you said ‘I don’t think you will understand how black death is until you have seen the night deprived of the moon’ and then the other you said ‘moon is just a rock who just got lucky to get caught in earth’s gravity you cunt’.”
She finally looked up, breathless from the speaking. Smokers don’t have good lungs.
The cat jumped out of her lap, and started licking the dry blood trail on Sarah’s leg.
“I think it was extraordinary”. She said and got her eyes back on the cat.
I chose not to réponse and got the rum and handed it to her, she smiled and took a brave gulp of it neat.
The sun came down and the sky became that diplomatic purple, bugs and the mosquitoes and the tiny brown ants were starting to bother us, we stayed there, drunk and awkward just talking.
That was a great day for me. Not only I had an extreme confidence boost from being Sarah’s object of interest but also because it was good to know that.
I was a fool to think that it would bring me closer to Sarah. Not that I wanted to be close to her but it was just that it was nice to meet someone as nearly fucked up as you.
She went on about her days like she would have otherwise, I waited by that swing in my Neverland, for hours with that black cat. She never came.
A few months later just 3 weeks before her graduation some thing terrible happened. Sarah’s nudes were leaked.
They were everywhere, with everyone. It was a big deal for a small town. I remember those pictures of her, someone sent me too. I didn’t wanna look and so I didn’t. But I kept them I don’t know why.
Sarah did not come to the graduation ceremony. She hardly ever got out of her house. I know because I kept my eyes on that closed window. I just hoped that ugly color of her walls does not drive her mad. But her windows never opened, even when it rained.
Her mother stopped coming out of her house either, her lovely herb garden had died. Withered, choked and quilted.
One day at around 3 in the morning I heard a soft purr outside my window. That tiny black cat was curled up on the dashboard of my window. There was no way that cat could have climbed up so high on its own.
I threw on a shirt over my black tank top and stripped blue pyjamas and sneaked out of the house. I bundled the cat in my arms and started strolling to Neverland.
My heart stopped as I saw Sarah there with the rum bottle in her hand, headphones in her ear, waltzing with her eyes closed, that broken smile sprinkled across her face.
I walked in closer and the cat jumped out of my hands and rushed to her. She saw the cat and then she saw me and smiled some more.
I opened my mouth to say something but she kept a finger on her lips and kept waltzing. Moving carelessly, she was not embarrassed of it at all. I kept staring when she moved her hand forward asking me to join her.
I walked up to her and she gave me one of her ear phones. Guitar music.
“Whats playing?”.
“shhh”
hold me close and hold me fast
this magic spell you caste
this is La Vie En Rose
I knew the song. I danced, she danced. Took a few bitter rum shots. Getting higher than the milky way. Moved carelessly melting into the lyrics of the song and the patience of the night.
when you kiss me heaven sighs
and tho I close my eyes
I see La Vie En Rose
I don’t know what I wanted, I don’t have a memory but I remember that I felt lonely and she felt lonely. It did not mean that I loved her or she loved me. It was not sexual or just friendly. It was ironic for us to allow our selves fall out of our shells, like crushed garden snails. I just moved and she moved, singing the songs, singing probably the words wrong but not giving two fucks about it.
give your heart and soul to me
and life will always be La Vie En Rose
We ended up laughing and drunk and song started playing again from the top. Like she was not rotting and I was not deceased. Like we lived in a drunk thoughtful state all the time. Like this was our reality and there is just me her and the black cat in this abandoned home, this old wilted tree with this unsafe tier swing.
I looked at her face, and I knew she was dead. You could tell it from her eyes that she had died. Her insides were painted that ugly yellow of the color of her walls. It was in her bones and on her flesh, it was between skin to nerves and everywhere in between. I saw her face and I knew that her heart might beat but she is dead. Dead inside.
She was half an inch taller than me. Better than saying that I was half an inch shorter than her.
She moved closer and kissed me on my cheek and started walking away. Without a goodbye, without anything. That kiss however was not out of affection or courtesy, that kiss was like passing on a curse. I inherited, that day, that cold dead gaze from Sarah. And the yellow of her walls.
She just said one thing.
“You need to stop feeding that cat, she will forget to hunt”.
She walked on and on, didn’t even look back. Leaving me there with that black cat.
I stayed there till in the death of the night.
‘I don’t think you will understand how black death is until you have seen the night deprived of the moon’
It was a no moon sky.
I walked back home by dusk. Went to school and went to the mall to steal another bottle of rum. One my way back I found a black cat’s corpse being dragged away by a big brown dog.No blood dripped from her body, she just hanged lifelessly from his mouth.
Sarah had died too. I knew.
A week later the newspapers ran her story. How Sarah’s mother was going through several psychological issues, how she shot her daughter right between the eyes, before drinking a bottle of bleach. The country ran her story. We were asked how Sarah was like. Most people said she was a characterless, fatherless girl who slept with boys and smoked cigarettes. The stories made her seem like a filthy person so the town did not weep for her, nor her mother. The stories died eventually because it lost it’s emotion,no one mourns for sick filthy women, at least not for long.
I cannot forget Sarah, the girl who had a face like autumn.
The burn is back in my chest again tonight, not in my heart, but somewhere I cannot put my finger on.