“Sometimes We Need a Witness”

What happens when we search for ourselves in the dark? (Image courtesy: Carolin Thiergart, Unsplash)

It is evening and you are asleep, your ears registering the faint noise in your neighborhood. You are exhausted quite often these days, your skin pores open, they ooze the labor of being a near wife and a distant lover. Your body and mind are exhausted from the week that sits heavy on your chest like the old mortar in your kitchen your grandmother left you. Sometimes you wonder if she shifted her own weight in that lifeless object, something for you to carry. Women, you have found, have a habit of sustaining things that should be thrown away. You don’t dream of these things. They are your wakeful fancies. Today you are dreaming of the day your beloved will come to your city, leaving parts of himself in its folds, for you to touch when he’s gone. You dream of the alleys that will hug you with memories, scattered with dust that will rise and encircle fingers when you need warmth on a hot spring day when his absence leaves you cold.

You feel fingers moving your hair away from your neck. Your exposed neck suddenly feels cooler, you sigh comfortably, not yet awake, the dream still comforting, you aren’t yet prepared to let go of it and travel back to the evening. Insistent fingers start brushing your skin and your sleep-addled senses try to make out their texture. You don’t know how his hands feel. They have never touched you, like his voice has. Are they warm and flaky like this, dry winter skin collecting in patches? The hands travel everywhere now, they intend to wake you up now, you perceive that slowly and try to clutch at the remnants of that pleasant thought which was yours but a moment back. Warm, unyielding lips follow. You wake up with a start, confounded, staring into the damp darkness of your room and you marvel at the sudden heat inside the room on a cool January evening.

You coach yourself to hold very still. Swallow your surprise, you tell yourself. Hunger roams your body, rabid lips everywhere, determined hands holding you, you feel you are being sniffed. You hear the man, the one you know so well, the one you don’t at times, exhaling in satisfaction, he has not been fed in so long. You realize in panic the door is both near and far. You lie in that bed and wander the walls in your room like a lizard looking at yourself in that darkness. You don’t have reptilian eyes. They can’t see anything but blackness. They can’t see you lying suspended on that bed. But they can feel your body conquered, they know your panic, they sense that it’s a barter. Marriage usually is. Body for peace of mind. And you haven’t bartered goods in long. He won’t be denied today so you become analytical. You try and analyze if the grunts of pain are akin to pleasure. Do you sound this way to yourself, to him on the phone? Disgust pools at your mouth. Just a few minutes more and you stumble off of your bed and drag your heavy mortar-like body to the bathroom.

You look at yourself in the mirror. You marvel at how still your mind is. It knows what must be done. How the silent rebellion must be quelled. Your skin feels normal, devoid of sensation. Your pelvis feels a sovereign nation, entirely its own, tethered to the rest of you, throbbing away in strange guilt, but you know not for long. Soon it will be connected to the rest of you, some form of treaty signed. Only the rivers that flow deep underneath will unsettle more of the land each time. Lands don’t mark borders well in a marriage. Nothing is completely your own.   

Gypsophila Magazine, Intimacy issue, Issue 03, Vol. 6, February 2025

https://tr.ee/vll0BdWIBe