Don’t worry, you were still soundly asleep when it happened. Your eyelids were closed softly and you looked unperturbed, almost child-like, undisturbed by the usual worries that often infested your brow, worries which my loving eyes could no longer disperse. You lay on one side on the white, unmade bed, and a sliver of sunlight cut your half-naked, freckled body in half. ‘When we fall asleep, where do we go?’ I used to question my mother incessantly as a child before bedtime, my tired, anxious eyes fixed on her calming face. A face that was immersed in darkness, so that I could only discern the brown, sweet eyes which shimmered faintly like distant stars floating in a pitch-black, bottomless sky. ‘Where do we go?’. Most of that morning is a peaceful blur enveloped in the cotton-wool of dreams, and yet I do remember it vividly, I can’t be mistaken, I kissed your brow softly beforehand.
The night before I had decided to take a bath. You had gone out, and I had fallen victim to such an exhaustion that this time I did not have the strength to try to find out where. Yet I was feeling lonely as usual. I think it was Sylvia Plath who said that a good long bath makes even the bleakest of situations better. You plunge into the fuming waters and forget the world for a while. Perhaps you even manage to forget yourself. I headed upstairs to the bathroom and filled the tub to the brim, then took off my clothes religiously and left them on the white-tiled floor, like a snake that sheds its excess skin after a change of season. Before plunging into the hot water I carefully examined my body. My neck, which used to be covered with your love-bites, like roses that have managed to bloom in the snow. I used to carry them proudly, even want to display them, like a coat-of-arms. My pointy breasts, which you thought were just the right size to be held in each hand. My arched back, my bony feet. A human body that had once been venerated like a piece of art on the altar of love, the object of your devotion and which now was just a common human body. I did not look at my face, scared that I would read too much into my own eyes. I had lost weight, but I knew that even if I became the mirror-image of a stick-thin fashion model I would not regain your love in the full purity of when it exhaled its first breath, a long-ago that I still call yesterday, of when it quivered softly yet vigorously like a newborn, fluffy and feathery and pulsing blood-red. I felt a twinge of pain in my stomach.
Calmed by the hot water I lay immersed in the tub. That night is when I made up my mind. After that bath I knew so clearly what would happen soon and was reassured to a point that I wasn’t mad when I heard you come back at three in the morning, smelling of alcohol and perhaps some other woman. I smiled when you crawled into bed next to me, and I moved my body as close to yours as you would let me. I was so used to the crumbs of affection you let me have, once in a while, like a starving bird, that I had begun to consider them a feast fit for a king. I let myself be refreshed by a dreamless, aseptically white sleep.
Shortly before falling into that death-like slumber I thought about Sylvia Plath again for some reason. I think it was her who went truly mad and killed herself. What did actually kill her, I always wondered. Not being loved enough? No, some are not that lucky. It was too much of it – an excess of love – that whispered a death-wish into her ears.
And so it was an excess of love that guided my hands too.
***
Remembering the first time we made love gave me the courage to do it to take the matter into my own hands hands so fragile so pale always cold you used to say and yet so resolute it was the middle of the night a summer night so quiet I could hear your heart beat and that night seemed never to end you slid your hand on my body and said so this is it the first time that I get to touch you naked I want to get to know every secret spot you stared deep into my eyes throughout and I knew I could let you love me when I I I held the kitchen knife and aimed at your neck it must have been a quick death I held the knife and plunged it with a newly found resolution into your neck I hit a main artery and your crimson blood spurted out of your neck like that of a slaughtered beast and I felt horror mingled with a strange ecstatic pleasure
I am better now. Sometimes I open a drawer to find a nail, or a finger, or a piece of your stomach. Sometimes I look at the bathroom window and it is splattered with dried blood. I have learned to ignore the smell.
***
Who am I fooling. You never came back that night. Deep down I knew it would happen sooner or later. After that bath I sat on one side of the immaculately white bed and waited in vain till morning and birdsong, perfectly still like a marble statue. And what kept me alive was the knowledge that the heart in my chest, that redbreast heart faintly, imperceptibly beating, was my own. I sat still and listened to it for a while longer, then headed downstairs to have breakfast.
2019
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