THE SCARLET WOMEN

Story 2 - Deathless

Bang! A terrifying sound disturbed my sleep. I wasn’t pretty sure about the noise, was it a gunshot inside my head or something more real outside of it. Abruptly, I stood out of my bed and tried to convince myself about the exactitude of the condition rubbing my eyes in a sleepy way. A soft cold breeze from my window with waving linens in its direction pulled me unwillingly towards it. A wave touched me, blowing right from the north-east and made me alive with the normal human feelings of coldness. As I moved towards the window, my feet got wet. I thought the breeze spilled the water of glass kept by the window. I reached for the light quickly and my eyes were freeze of the scene inside my room. There was blood everywhere flowing out this girl's head. She was dead with a gun in her hand. I got terrified and numb. The fear made me spineless and my feet squelched at every step. I started to blab piously. Who's she? How she got here? I couldn’t think much except with all courage I decided to move the body and see the face of it. I tried to move it and what I saw I could not believe. I was dead out-and-out. I refused to tell how in a whirlwind my fear turned into the privilege of this sacred death. The body lying dead on my lap was of none other than me. I was laughing at him.

Suddenly somebody knocked at my door and I woke up drenched in the sweat of that dream. These days I through my eyes had seen you standing near you all, though sometimes in reality my blindness is confusing and it makes me feel like I'm still alive. Julia was out there.

-You cannot hide behind your shadow and live like a recluse. –Julia said. Now you've to face this world in a more acquittal way. You cannot blame yourself alone for all things that happened; now you have to put it on this world and burden them with their retribution. If we're a sin, let them be more of us. If we're a sinner, let us be more like them.

-How could I let myself live when there's no reason left behind? –I said. For me, it's 'bout finding joy in darkness, and not fearing death, no not today. The sun may rise, but still, I'm like sunless and nameless, wandering not is wearing a 'stitch, on the island where time isn’t counted in the sand. Julia, how could I face this world like Scarlet when the color of her eyes carrying burning flames have extinguished? Tell me, Julia, Tell me, and help me to kill myself. Ain't they'll be bringing us all immortality, holding communion so the world is blessed, for my mortal submissiveness, who else except him could lay my soul to rest? And I don’t expect your answer.

-This ain't a way you do penance. Julia exclaimed. There's only one way to get out of this excruciating misery, now you start living not like a war victim but like a warrior. You can be a traveler of light and creator of your own universe. Let this life end in this journey of finding self where someday you can live the life of a drifter of pain and dreamer of peace.

-Now I'm nothing left inside, I'm just a silhouette against the glow of the burning inside me. –I said and felt neuralgic. This war is mocking over my grief and my grief is mocking over my life. You better know why circumstances went tempting to kill me and end this war.

-Our lives are just a surrealistic dream. It'll always try to take us by surprise. –Julia said. Never it gonna free us, nor gonna shackle our dream. Do you know what the biggest travesty of our lives is? It's about learning never to be ourselves, and also be ourselves to learn how never to be ourselves again.

-Nevertheless, sometimes the lesson of giving up is the only thing left to learn when push comes to shove. –I said. I don’t want to be justified, and I don’t want to be vindicated either. For me, this universe is contracting against the law of divine. The whole of me is now a formless shadow of dismay and distraught.

-We don’t believe in divinity as we're divided among the sacrilegious and profanity. –Julia said. But we believe in reprieve through our own empowerment, not like men's lamentation but like woman's transformation which transcends men's tractability over us. For ages they have controlled our dreams, now it's our time to control their reality.

-I remember to forget the soul inside this skin. Beneath me lies an absolute being tortured by the unholy spirits of this war. –I said without knowing what I said. Nothing could heal the trauma of this war, except another war against me. Death might end my misery, and I might stop seeking the reasons beyond absolutism.

-There's always a moment of orderly silence before death arrives at us. –Julia said. It put your heart on eternal fire and let you see how we had been fooled all our life by just those words, we never would know that's an illusion of our death. Up to now, our life's been defined by what the eyes see. Now it's about to be defined by what it doesn’t.

-But there never could be some convincing pain left if I never reject to follow you. –I said. This pain may be false but its suffering is real.

-And therefore, you've to live, not just for yourself but for them. –Julia said. This coward death could never be your redemption. You only could find your deliverance in this ungodliness way, if you cannot find it in a godly way. Sometimes you are redeemed when you suffer the damnation. The torments of damned only could lessen this insufferable pain.

All those words of Julia gave me the courage to hate myself more than this. How could I let myself die so easily? How could I die such sacred death if I already were defiled? The simplicity of this life is sometimes found in the complexities. There's a manifestation of this exiguous nothingness turning into colossal divergence and changing into pellucid significance. Now I knew, from here there's no turning back.

Now I never let anyone take advantage of my meekness. Julia taught me her astuteness and I taught her my innocence. There's nobody except her to share this abjectly miserable world. And I shut the doors of all those dreamlands and opened those more real and chaotic. I burnt up all the memories of my past and never cared much about the future. What’s happening is wrong or right, it doesn’t matter unless it's happening to let grow creeper of hatred inside me. I already began hating myself and loving Julia more. I knew I never could attend my own cremation.

I was traveling everywhere, even sometimes faster than my own time. Gradually, I lost the feeling of losing myself. Instead, I was dying every day, also I was finding myself every single day. The more we get closer to our death, the more we break every fear down. From this vantage point, everything becomes clear.

Julia started visiting my place quite often. –C'mon, today I'll take you higher above. You'll love to be at such a place where you can dance in the music of your pains, much higher where you'll not remember about this pit anymore. –Julia said and took something like grass out of her bag. It was raining outside. The night got more seductive of its smell. It was the first time I tasted such stuff and got stoned in a few minutes. Julia was right. I was flying very high and wished I never get back to this place. –Oh, Julia, I…I… ain't I dreaming? –I said. What…look what you made me? I know this ain't real, but this ain't elusive though. Oh Julia, Julia I want to kiss you. I see myself dancing with you. And I don’t know for how long, but for long enough we started laughing hysterically. From then, she started touching me and I never stopped her.

When anyone tries to love me, I push them away and make them hate me. I know a man could never fall in love with a prostitute, though sometimes they try to pretend just to make them feel that they could love in real. For many, it’s a better way to self-help. Take away my pain, ain't afraid anymore. I ain't believing in love anymore, just staring me into my eyes and finally, you'll see the depth of pain of love in it. I built myself up flying in circles of the wings of hatred and abnegation. Now I'm a fusion of hatred and anger, darkness and failure, rage and resentments, and death and deathless.

I keep on fighting and more I do it strips me down bare. This fulmination against the whole world is another war more dreadful than outside occurring inside me. I already was burnt into ashes that night. Since then this mortal body and its flesh we're torn every time, sometimes by the people and sometimes by the circumstances. When I think of you the night shatters and the moon disappears, and I find tears of you falling on me through this rain, if only my death-wish was to come true I'd wish to hold you for million years just to fix you. Julia appeared after the rain. 'Life's sometimes more beautiful when miserable, it lets you dream more beautifully than when you’re happy'. –Julia said.

Literally, life's gone far beyond this worldly misery. I'd been destroying the whole of me in parts; it makes me do this all mindlessly. How do I wish this body could burn of its own eternal fire? I was being filled up with vile each day when the moment of nonchalance runs over my body; I'm waiting for getting overflowed when I'm brimming over it.