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Mattresses are keeper of dreams
Betty does not sleep a lot. There is a voice whispering dirty secrets at the back of her head. Some nights, it spreads; like a purulent and festering wound. Coiled underneath her tongue, a sugary taste behind her teeth.
Come, it murmurs in the swirling wind, come and see. Come and come undone, I’ll make you whole. Come and see. There are still so many things left to destroy. Come, they do not deserve grace nor kindness. Come, and warm your hands in the metallic taste of life.
Come and see, it says in convoluted ways, you already know more than they do about all that is. Let me tell you about all that will be. Let me give you the keys to all the realms, to all the worlds. For you are worthy and they are nothing.
During the days, the tone changes. You useless cunt, you dirty whore, it spits barely above a whisper. Why do you keep letting this happen, it screams in a hum. Why won’t you change, why won’t they change ? You are nothing but a weak and lost child, when you could have been so much more. Make them see, make them fear, make them want. For you could never make them treasure.
At all time it sings, like an old rhyme and lullaby, repeating itself without end. You’ll never know, you’ll never understand. You’ll never be. You are nothing but a left behind piece of a forgotten past. The Gods have stopped walking the land a long time ago. The forsaken and orphaned kingdom was taken in by greed, the now New and Only King.
Join me, it states sometimes. Why do you keep fighting me when it only means fighting yourself? Surrender tastes so sweet and you always did like sugary treat, didn’t you girl? Fat, fat, fat; fucking waste of space. Undeserving woman, ungrateful child. Misuse of potential. Why won’t you see? Why won’t you do better, be better? You should have been left to rot.
Growing up, she learnt to ignore it. To protect her heart from its deceitful lies, to stop the words from landing like blows after blows after blows on her beyond than battered body. Until it stopped bothering her, almost became her own private comforting song.
She still wakes up with fire in her throat, though. Clawing at it, suffocating and fighting for breaths too big to come through, let alone for the screams to come out. Trying to break free from something that is long gone, the too tight hold nowadays only in the form of sheets wrapped in a disarray around her.
Now that she's older, the lies she weaves, even to herself, have stopped burning her lips. But the ache in her jaws, the sensation of a too full mouth, the ache and burning between her thighs, the goo inside her womb and the urge to claw at her skin; this, it never leaves her.
For this is her very own private war: the one lodge like a pit in her stomach, like a hole in her chest. The one she fights every waking moment, every sleeping instants. The one waging in her madness of a brain, inhabiting her decaying body. The one being dragged by confident but painful steps, hanging from trembling but precise hands.
This is the path she walks on, she thinks. She is a solider, has been since she screamed her first sound, will be until the last stuttering breath leaves her lips. War is all she knows. Like an old friend from childhood that you used to hate but now welcome nonetheless, for it is the last reminder of all that is lost.
War has been instilled in her blood more than love ever was. And like all spirits, it became stronger and more savory with the years. A bountiful blood. War inhabits her lungs and the back of her eyelids.
Nevertheless, knowing it will be the only thing walking at her side until the end does not stop her from longing for peace. From whishing she knew how to sign that peculiar treaty, how to submit to that particular brand of diplomacy.
Sometimes, she craves telling people how much violence tenderness, so easily acquired by most, has and still cost her. Other times, the pride of a weapon forged for survival keeps her from whispering any words. She was made from pain and disdain, yet she will die with gentleness and fury in heart. Waring, waring, with no hopes of coming back home. (For you, girl, home you have none, it whispers).
Unwinnable war: heart of one conquered battle.
Forevermore it will last indeed, but she’s no longer just a soldier following orders she does not side with. She’s an Empire now. She gets to decide her course of action.
She had been acquainted with this warmongering knowledge by her grandma. An ageless woman who once had been as beautiful as cruel, but whose beauty had been taken by the horses of the years in their mad race, leaving behind in her mind, by way of wage, the echoes of unsaid secrets of all that was, had been and would be.
Yes, she had warned her about it during the first time, while holding her wrists down, while she, as a girl, had been made to pray, between the whimpers and hiccups and the injustice of it all. “This”, she had said with her sybillin whisp of a voice, “this is the price women have to pay. This is the fight that carries them. Whore or mother. For everything has a price, and all has to be an equivalent exchange, one way or another. Trade is everything. Do not forget it, child.” And Betty, even when young in body and wild in thoughts, had never been naive enough to believe herself a mother. And anyway, she learnt later that even mothers could be made into holes.
As for the other lesson, it got imprinted so much in her skin she could not have forgotten it even if she had wanted to. She knows she did not fully comprehend it for a long time, though. That sentence, “one way or another”. She refused to understand it completely, for back then her heart had not been ready.
And she had thought: “The price is in the flesh, be it by pleasure or pain, lost or growth”. It’s what keeps her awake for the longest time, that thought. If she had been braver, if she had allowed herself to get it, to see, then maybe she would have elected to change her course. But she knows that she would not have. She is as she was, could not have played at being anything else.
And while she always payed the price, she still struggles to see how she received her payment. No, that’s a lie. Like her grandmother: they took from her flesh, they gave to her mind. The real price for knowledge had been the crippling acceptance that nothing had ever been really hers. Condemning to be, always, a wanderer with no home, no lands, no boundaries, no legacy.
Yet, when she traces the marks left on her body by life and unkind hands, when she caresses her own skin like she imagined a loving man would do, she dares wonder.
Maybe, after all, home was here. That body sullied and taken from her before she even bled like women bleed, that mind tormented by the storm of steady suffering and sudden and strange satisfaction, those eyes old and haunted but still kind even when cold; yes, maybe, this was home. And she had never been lost, just blindsided and caged. Waiting for the usurpers to leave so she could reclaim her lands and start growing her own crops.
So she gives them back their dirt and blood, and keeps the growing life for herself: having discovered than even in war life can find a way; if given freedom to.
People used to describe her as cold hearted and terrifying ; nowadays they see her as soft and caring. For this, she gives them the love the ones from her past never gave her, and keeps her war at bay, rotting and raging inside, where it cannot touch them. Like the last explosions of a dying fire. Unheard by the buzzing world around it, but what a violent sound for such small embers. Life, nothing but a whole lot of scales and perspectives.
She would still burn the entire world and kill every living thing for her people, though. This has never changed. At night, she prays the old gods for the peace outside to last: she does not want those who describe her as mother to see the monster hiding behind her eyes, always ready to destroy in order to protect. Or sometimes, just for the sake of destroying. But, no, that was a long time ago, or maybe not, maybe it was today. Ablaze between her sheets, time becomes an elusive thing: nothing but ashes in a storm. Above all, she doesn't even want to think about them seeing the whore that was made of her all those years ago, the one she was just yesterday. She was aflame, she rose; she chose, she was changed. Equivalent exchange.
That's why, when they ask about her life before them, she tells them beautiful stories of princesses and family bond; of heartaches, yes, but of warmth too. And they believe her, bask in her tells of glory and sun. When they yearn for more details, she says “This is the story I remember, the rest I forgot” or, starving creature that she is, she steals from others snapshots of life to feed them.
They don't have to know those years will forever be etched into her very bones, into every capillary flowing through her body. They don't have to find out that the nice story about crêpesand syrup belongs to a French girl she once fucked for free, or how the dances and music and sumptuous feasts were fevered dreams had in a cell.
For memories, to her, are a thing of the flesh more than pictures of the mind. Childish dreams were hopes like ropes gripped so tight her fists ripped from it. Remembrance are famished nightmares embedded in the pungent and inert stink of decaying blood and minds, more than murmurs of was and when carried by gentle sepia breezes of a south wind.
They call her the woman with the nice life, with the kind smiles and open arms; underestimate her but that is nothing new. She is used to it. Like she is still used after all these years to the ghostly clasp of a clenching stomach, to the cold current in her marrow and the shrill sounds in her head moving to the drums of a too fast beating heart, to the noises of metal against metal and against flesh and against bones, to the smells’ stinging taste of sweat and skin and strain and shame. She is used to it.
But, once again, time is a loop woven within a loop within a loop, and memories are doors and yesterday and today are happening all around again at the same time. Time was never a line, not even one simple circle. She drew it once, tried to explain the intricate, convoluted and tangled nature of time as she perceives it. The doors in her brain bring back the gnawing ache in the upper left part of her jaw and the tender pain in her dangling second and third molars. Anyway, she’d gladly take their gentle disregard over the vulnerability of truth any day.
Her brother in arms, years ago, who knew without having ever questioned, asked her if she was able to feel compassion for the girl she used to be, for the ones who raised that girl. And since compassion is without mercy, and mercy she had -had, has, have had- none, she said yes. Found comfort in it. On the verge of awakening, in the limbo between awareness and sleep, she finds herself wondering if, that too, is a lie. Whatsoever, it does not matter. Like she said, lying does not burn her lips anymore. It only consumes her heart.
Which is a good thing in itself, unrelenting proof that she still has one. Whatever they took, they were never able to take that from her. Whatever they put in her, they were never able to corrupt it. It's a reassuring thought, the kind that allows her to fall back asleep for some time. Besides, when she wakes up again; alone, her womb bleeding and her arms empty, well, it also helps her pretend she does not care.
She closes her eyes on the family she wished she had birthed who came out stillborn. She breathes out the love she felt all those years ago but choose to abort. Denying herself again and again what she had always wanted until life denied it for her, for ever. Another journey she will not be able to discover. Punishment for a wicked saint.
Auto-cannibalism or eaten by old lessons, same outcome. What you think, you create. Gods know, she has always been an expert in self-fulfilling prophecy. Since she was nine, she’s been too old to blame life for her personal failures. She is the mastermind architect of her own demise. Never had enough ego to put the blame on someone else, never had enough hope to welcome the responsibility without the guilt. They dirtied her body, and before she realized it, her soul was stained too. Her hands: covered in black goo.
There had been a time where she would have ripped her own ribcage open, offering to those who reap her still beating heart. Here, here, for I don’t know how to use it, take it. Make it pure, make it holy. And those who watch would have said, why bring us your horrors when we only ever wanted flowers. And her body, lying on the stone altar. For death is life, and life is death and maybe there always was something wrong with her because she has only ever understood one side of the coin. Gentleness, foreign taste on her skin, forbidden touch inside her flesh. Thinking about it, she has never received flowers either.
Her grandma also told her, “Weep not for what could have been nor for what is lost : only fools drown for hope, losing themselves in illusions and fickle dreams. Only men write poems or philosophy miscellanies about transversal and parallel possibilities. Forgetting themselves in something they do not and cannot understand. While you, girl, bear the weight of womanhood: pure creation, absolute destruction. Women understand that men are unwise, for they are wiser and tightly linked to what is Just and Holy, what is All and Oblivion. They lead to the shore of knowledge or to the reef of wreck. They carry life and death, are one with the primal movement.” There, she had paused, and look at something Betty could not yet see, and hadn’t been able to see for a long time, her lips between a snarl and a laugh. “At least, they used to be. This is why men stroke them, cut them and fasten them in a bind of which they were prisoners first. For they like getting lost and despise being lost alone.”
“You see girl,” had whispered her meandering voice, “what we are doing now is a gift. All your life, men and women who have forgotten and lost themselves will try to hurt you in order to make your step falter. But you will know all types of suffering so intimately, you will never waver. For this is the way: blessings are always curses. Do not get caught in illusions and probabilities past. Do not make all this pointless, do not transmute your life in a Sisyphean task. For you, my girl, do not have the luxury of being a fool nor a man.” No matter how much she hated that wretched ancient woman, Betty had always listened to her advice. You had to be wise to survive that long.
And yet, her people must be right, she must have been getting soft. This is the only plausible explanation she can find after her lonesome wandering in the caves of her mind. What other reason could there be, after all, for her dreams to be haunted by warm hands and crooked smirks, by incandescent eyes crossing through every layer of her being and pining her until she could not move nor leave. Her dreams, where she could smell that scent which brought back to life erratic and languid movements inside of her. So alike the one the soldier she had once wanted to follow until the edge of the worlds had been able to create. Until her mouth opens in a choked cry, her eyes see and her ears ring. Like an old and forgotten melody, brief but smothering her usual lullaby, climax of a freed symphony ; it comes back to her. She would not have mind being lost with him. She wanted to.
It almost makes her laugh; once the fire dies down and the cooling and damp sheets cling to her, when that combination of notes is buried under an usual rhyme, when she does not remember, is she awake or asleep? It almost makes her laugh then, when she realizes how foolish she must have become. Seeing boys and girls, looking like the perfect combination of him and her, running between the twisting limbs of sleep.
But then, her people call, and she tears the sheets away from her prone form. Plant both feet on the cold ground and feels the heat leaving her skin, the drumming of a war inside her veins. She gets up and remembers: she is no fool nor man. She hasn’t lost anything, since she never had it to begin with.
When she meets with them, one of them say : “Have you heard some weird choking noises during the night?”. While flipping crêpes, she says no. She asks them “So, what’s your plan for today?”. They smile gently at her without a sound, eat, kiss her cheeks as thanks, and leave together. She stays behind and stands alone in the deserted kitchen, gazing at something she does not yet see. A headache is starting behind her eyes.
Betty does not sleep a lot. There is a voice whispering dirty secrets at the back of head.