Before that, she was a fountain of words.
She knew moments like these were rare, when words come so easily, so she captured each of them as they were birthed – as they took form, like a Mother Dog, she licked each amniotic sac holding the newborn intact until her tongue seeped through the glistening membrane and the word unfurled. She built a cage to trap each one, collected them for the sake of ownership, and like any Mother she allowed her sons and daughters to represent her. She feared no repercussion as her lineage displayed her “truth” so thoroughly, so obscenely, in the scribbled pages of notebooks, in blogs, proliferated and strewn across the digital ether, free for anyone to take and partake, to plagiarize and copy and paste, to re-form—it mattered not as long as she knew she was authentic and true.
And my, how the people gushed. They sang her praises and basked in her generous creativity. How the world was rendered so beautifully for a moment, all through her magical words—how the bitterness of their ordinary lives coloured so sweet—the well was bountiful and she did not mind sharing—her words were her gifts to the world—so willing was she to be used and consumed that it left no doubt in her mind—this was for a good cause, she was contributing to the great tapestry of humanity and it mattered not how she was used as long as she was consumed in completion.
And then it happened, and the world muted down to zero.
Down to an empty, blurred screen, populated only with the buzzing sound of white snow.
Once more, her life narrowed, the possibilities slashed to null, everything meant nothing and nothing was all they had for each other. A road less travelled becomes barren once again and somehow, she needs to accept it—this normalcy, this mediocrity, this reality. This life void of connection and passion, where people do what they are supposed to do and nobody ever strays too far from the median—there are no outliers in this land.
She wonders what gulf she has to cross, and where, and how many, in order to meet this outlier. An ideal fashioned in her head. She takes each broken heart from her past relationships—epiphanies from lovers scorned, break-up emails and texts from each ex-ghosted-best friend, lessons from her childhood—she puts the pieces together and Frankenstein a collage to form the perfect Other, one as resilient as she, as adaptable, and twice as passionate. Their moods are as unpredictable as the weather, they are idealistic yet still optimistic. With each other they never struggled to be heard, and never had the need to go hunting for words to explain/describe new concepts—because they already understood, they already knew—no debates in the marketplace of ideas because they got each other so completely, so thoroughly, and so they spent their time holding each other’s fists in their hands, marching to the capital. They screamed their demands and expectations from the world and accepted nothing less. A Utopia they both yearned for, a unified world.
She knows this perfection is impossible yet still, she longs for it. Longs for a day that might remain bright even after the truth is told with no disguise, no evasion, no apology, where she could just say because that was how old I was when I started getting raped and not have to soften it, not have to smile or comfort or take back the unbearable weight of everything that sentence implies, where what opens is not understanding but a kind of annihilation—a curious glimpse into a universe where a father’s innocent eight-year-old daughter is already being raped and will have to carry that knowledge like a stone lodged in her body for the rest of her life—and where she does not have to witness the light go out in his eyes.
Or where she can talk freely about why she knows about amniotic sacs, about Mother Dogs licking this membrane to help their puppies unfurl—why this image is so strong in her mind—because her sister wanted to prove to her how protective Mother Dogs get over their puppies and so in the middle of this dog giving birth, her sister cruelly took one of the newborn puppies and ran away with it—and in front of her eyes she saw desperation so strong she can still feel its sheer force on her shoulders three decades later—she is 17 and this image flashes in her eyes—she is getting married and this image flashes in her eyes—she holds her child for the first time and it takes all her heart to not collapse in this breathless, sudden avalanche, torrents of guilt and shame pounding underneath her eyelids, crushing her chest—as she recollects the Mother Dog’s panic, the Mother Dog’s sharp teeth clamping down on the amniotic sac coming out of her body so that she can pull it out faster—the animal looks at her and knows she is being forced to make an impossible choice so she falls down on her knees and tries to wrench the amniotic sac apart with her fingers while the Mother Dog limps toward her sister—all to make a point they both knew was true—what a pointless exercise, such goddamn violence—moments like these littered her childhood and she just had to accept it, had to swallow the memory down to keep it from determining the rest of her life.
A world where this puppy survives, where it continues to breathe freely three days later and grows up strong and loved, where she doesn’t have to memorize obsessively from veterinarian manuals borrowed from the library, exactly the steps she should have taken, in the smallest chance that this happens again, and nobody dies twice.
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