Chapter 17
Written by: Lily Dorranian
** This is an extract of a monologue from the novel that I am writing **
The water of the river is cold. It finds its way into my socks, seeps into my shoes and drags me further down into the freezing shadows. The rocks in my pockets are cold. Picked from the river’s edge, for the first time in my life, I felt like I had a choice. I have felt the cold my entire life, in the gust of breeze piercing my skin after I had been birthed, flowing through my hair as I soaked the clothes of my husbands, in my bed late at night.
We are born into this world, sticky and red, crying. Suffering. Cold. Before we have even taken our first breath, before our lips can even depart from each other to inhale a gust of wind, that sets our fire and souls alike alight, before we can even live, we have died. We are born into this world with someone holding a razor’s edge against our throat. Before we can even live we feel. The coldness of the steel, the sharp edge pushing into our skin and edging into our souls, minds. And we grow like this, we bask in suffering, we contort our bodies like an old elm tree twisting its own trunk around a fence, absorbing the cold, the suffering, the hatred. We nurture the animal that is clawing at the bars of their enclosure. When we finally take that deep breath and give out the loud cry, that is the sound of the lock of our cells being shut tight and the key being thrown away. I am sick of the cold prison floors.
When I was a child, small, vulnerable, chained and wallowing in my youth - a lamb - I was taught that as god-fearing Christians we have certain priorities. Sacramental duties, obligatory rites such as marriage, birth, devotion, prayer, service and love. Marriage, birth, devotion, prayer and service are clear, understandable and irrefutable. I obey, I birth, I devote, I pray, and I serve. But love. I have always been unsure of how to love - was it yelling? Raising my voice? Complying and being ordered around? Mothering his kids? I came to learn that there were two sides to love, the manifestation of it in those acts of service, and the personification of it; internalising the characteristics of love and displaying them. According to Corinthians; Love is patient and Love is kind. Man has always worn this message on their sleeve. But love? What is it if not patient or kind? At it’s very core, what does love mean?
Love takes work. Our once living, now coffin-stricken God had spent centuries and millennia proving that. It’s a laborious, gruelling sufferance. It's a sacrifice. It’s unity, and in unity there is strength. But what does it mean in a world filled with so much death? Death of dreams, death of identity, death of choice. This was not the first time that man has killed, and will not be the last. He is sick, His heart is crooked, He empties the world of love and hope and fills it with so much decay. He fosters his motives in hate, and he plants his seeds of hate in everything. How quickly these seeds grew, sprouting with an angel-like innocence, so small and unaware of the world, roots lengthening themselves deep into the soil with the worms and the bugs. These seeds grew into lovely flowers, sweet, gentle scents, picked and shared amongst a bouquet; attracting the buzzing life of nature, now suckling at the teats of man to pollinate the world with it. ‘Share, please share, my buzzing friends!’ man would say. ‘Share your honey with the world, soak us, drown us, fill every crevice, every crack, every hole and empty space with it, fill us with your sweetness, drizzle it on our blooming consciousness, make our world into a honeycomb and hive’ he would continue to shout into the abyss of buzz.
Love isn’t patient, nor is it kind. Love isn’t an old friend, I don’t see it in anything, I don’t hear it in anything, I don’t taste it, all I taste is that sickening honey. My life isn’t white or blue, but it’s yellow and submerged. I taste it, the honey, dancing on the tip of my tongue. I was born in it, not sticky and red but honey-soaked and golden, feeling it latch onto my skin and drizzle onto the cold tile. I was baptised into the harmonic buzz, and so I’ll die in it. The sweetness and gentle touch of the honey will embalm my body and stick to my soul.
The world is full of death. Death is an old friend. Death is kind, Death is patient. Death has watched us grow from children to adults. Death is a mother, Death is a father. Death is rebirth. Death is the key to my cuffs, the unlocking of my cell, the freeing of my soul.
Death is in everything. You can only see it when you have truly opened your eyes and become witness to the world passing by without you. You see it in a glance, an order, a birth, a marriage, death is always lurking in the shadows, cowering in the corners on all fours, set to pounce. Death is in the buzz of the bees as they pollinate our world. We try to drown it out, the buzzing roar, by fulfilling our duties, being what is expected of us; submitting, serving. But it matters not what becomes of our vices because there comes a time where we cannot run any longer, we cannot drown out the roar. We cannot ignore the dance that we have shared with death since we were white lambs of this world. We tango, we waltz, we grow accustomed to the seismic and quivering terror of the silence.
I’m not the first to come to this revelation, there are many other prisoners that have been kept in their cages like I have, nurturing the shaking terror that is chained in the darkest realm of themselves. They found their own keys, and they ended their sentence, in various different ways. Not all death is literal, but it is all chosen. Did they simply choose death because the comfort of absence was closer than the presence of love could ever be? I am sick of the cold. I understand now that it’s the fire that I must embrace, that I must be ready for; to burn myself in my own flame; to purify, to cleanse, to free. To feel the sins of my past, present and future leave my body, to finally escape the physical prison I have been kept in since my birth.
God is dead because it is who the world expects us to be - silent, submissive, absent. But this is our freedom, our way out. This is my escape. To set that animal free and feel it ravage my body. I am sick of the cold prison floors. How could you become new if you haven’t first become ashes?
