Our End Was Yesterday

The end is the image in my head that wraps its arms around me and whispers that what slumbers beyond the houses there on the horizon wants only evil for me. To seize and take me, to look so deeply into my eyes the way only those from this lost neighbourhood can. To pull me up by my jacket so I lose the ground beneath my feet, to press me against the wall so I miss home and then throw me away when my resigned screams become too tedious.

Before the houses you paint dark, you shield me, you say. All you want is to wrap me in cotton wool so that nothing happens to me that has happened to you. Who must have seized you like that, made you lose the ground beneath your feet, so that your caressing feels today as though with every movement you were scraping away the scab from my wounds?

Did they trample you underfoot? With words? With looks? With the eternal seconds of days when you were not allowed to be yourself? Who made your skin so cracked, gave us this eczema (and brought us to the point where we attack and decompose our own healthy cells), that you fear for me so, Mum?

I know that it is your story that finds no place in my words. But I notice nonetheless that this story is the image in my head that wraps its arms around me and tells me that the faces grow more evil with each day, the conditions more unbearable, the stench of faeces smeared around our mouth, more acrid.

You remember the first time it happened to you. It fits so well with your brown eyes and black hair and dark skin, you know, it is not as if, they said, and you ran at their pace to the bunker in which we have always lived. The worst thing is probably that this refuge itself became your undoing.

I know how wide your eyes become before the hands that once forbade you everything. I saw it in the moment when you tore the ring from your finger and threw it against the window pane of the bunker. It bounced back, clattered on the dented parquet in time with your screams, which sounded the way broken letters would sound. Because language had long since abandoned you.

In my life I have never witnessed a voice that unfolded more intensely, never seen more confused sounds leave a body, never beheld a face that reeked more of decay. Faeces mixed with the blood that he was, together with tears and mucus and collected in the furrows of the spasm that disfigured your face there.

It no longer had its original contours, everything blurred so that I too could no longer see that I came from you (or perhaps I was simply afraid of it). In that moment the dam must have broken, I thought, the one that had always held everything back.

I was glad that he put the ring back on your finger after your hysteria, stroked your back and you could not help but smile with the sticky mouth his lips left behind. How beautiful your lips when you – and how ugly it must have looked from inside.

You swallowed screaming letters and never ate anything else again, muscle decomposed fat, decomposed organs, until they do what we are probably best at: fail. It is not as if you did not try to do better, you forced yourself to vomit so relentlessly and chewed a second and third and fourth time on the broken ones that simply could not get out of you.

With each day, with each letter that did not leave you and after several attempts finally decomposed, your story lost a little more. If you could not even write the beginning, then it explains to me that you did not need God* to hold you back from the end.

Even though your story loses its actual form through my twisted tongue, it becomes at least something that stands on solid ground again, lies or swims – at least tries.

Sometimes I wonder if she would have won if you had flooded the bunker. Would anyone have asked then and would she have won if we had all drowned? Would she and you then be free?

What would God* have said about it? Would he have understood you too or sent you to the burning houses there beyond the horizon? Had you scalded with hot water the way you told me it would happen if I left you?

What if the end were not the ring that found its way back to your finger? What if the end were not tomorrow?

If tomorrow is not today, not yesterday, not the day before yesterday, not the way they trampled and spat and laughed and screamed and died, not the bowing piece, the servant, the thing to take, to seize, to shake, not swollen eyes, cracked skin, bunker made of bombs, words without letters, avoidance, repression, suppression – if it is not I who you catch in your arms?

What if it is not I who runs at your pace because she is too weak to carry you with all of it, with all the story, with all the end that I am today in your arms that are no longer there because end 1 (the silence) was end 2 (the embrace) was end 3 (my prison) was end 4 (our silence) was always only the beginning.