'Dreams are wishes that neither live nor die. You are just left wondering whether to dig a grave for them, or bake a birthday cake. So I did both. I dug a grave and had a cake and I watched my dream be born and be dead every day.'
ONE MONTH AGO…
"Prisoner 1309!"
Every failure in one's life feels like the end of it. Not being able to make friends on the first day of school, getting a bad score on a test, running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream, not looking good enough in the pictures, getting rejected by your first love, disappointing parents, not getting a job in the first attempt, losing the meaning of life.
No matter how trivial the failure, it always feels like life had ended and something else had begun that was still life but never felt the same.
Inji wondered where did hers end, was it the day she had looked at herself in the mirror and realized her smile wasn't true enough? Or was it the day her mother had yelled at it for being a burden? Or was it the day she felt like she had never been born?
Or perhaps all of them? Her life ended every day and ended every day until it didn't feel like life anymore. She traced the feelings back to the root of it, and found out that everything was planned since day one.
Everything in the world was planned. Even Adam, the Big Bang, the Cosmos, the god itself.
On the day Inji was released, when she was supposed to step into the world and embark on a journey of life, she heard a question.
"What happens after Heaven and Hell?"
What will happen to the souls at the end of eternal life? If it's eternal, does it never end? She thought it didn't make sense.
"At the end of eternal life." the sound of it made sense.
Eternal means infinity. Infinity was a term coined for math, which simply 'not knowable'. It doesn't mean 'everlasting' or 'endless' or 'forever'.
Yet somehow, humans attached the meaning to it according to their own contexts. They are eerily obsessed with the idea of 'forever'.
All the lies and promises are called 'forever'.
All the failures are called 'forever'.
All the unknown is called 'forever' too...
"Prisoner 1309!"
The metallic sound of the door opened, the temperature dropped against her skin as she sat up and glanced at the wall clock.
04:47 am.
The 'forever' inmates told me why they released the prisoners at the break of dawn. She thought the concept of it was beautiful despite the context of it.
"So they can start a day as a free person without missing a second."
That made her wonder how fickle the concept of law is. It's fickle as ideals can be. Why would a person who has beaten, robbed, deceived, or killed anyone care about mere hours of their day spent inside the prison walls when they'd waged years for a moment of catharsis from their aggression?
That simply meant no matter what the kind of person, or the kind of crime they'd committed, everyone was the same under the law.
Not equal. Same.
The remaining days of their life are never ending punishment, and they dream of either dying or killing again. They become prisoners of either regret, or regress.
Inji was in the moment, one of those people on this side of the line between being prisoner 1309, and being free.
She thought 'What would I feel like when I cross this line? Would I be happy? Would I have hope? Would I want to live again?'
"Have a good life! Eat well, sleep well, and live well!" The warden said, waving at her with a smile. He was very happy to be getting rid of the gloomy, unresponsive and mysterious inmate like her, a middle aged man with an overweight figure. By the clean press of his clothes, and the healthy weight, his wife was quite the submissive, traditional wife.
Or maybe, he simply had a hope that Inji didn't. What others thought of her might be more kind than what she thought, that was the loophole of impressions. She never knew what the others thought of her, but she knew it wasn't any better.
Yet she smiled back at him, he was the only person to have smiled at her ever since she came here. If it weren't for his elderly face, she would have forgotten there was an end to my life too.
On her way back to my hometown, she came across a homeless summit. Now she wondered how her mind came up with that title.
A homeless summit.
It's a gathering of homeless people by the fireplace in the early morning and they would share each other's misery to compete with whoever has it rough. The driver got off the bus to grab himself a pack of cigarettes, not in a rush. Inji wiped the fog off the window and looked outside.
The homeless men were at it again, pretending to be philosophers chipping away at the fickle order of their times. If they weren't rich in appearance, then at least they are rich in thoughts.
"What happens after Heaven and Hell?" one of them asked.
"What do you mean? Its eternal life either getting dipped in sauce and fried in the boiling cauldron of the devil or having a peaceful life with both your wife and girlfriend in the same house!" another one replied.
"Do you believe that? Eternal life?"
"Isn't that the afterlife?"
"I am talking about after the afterlife?"
"Pffft! Who cares about after the afterlife? Isn't it forever?"
"But do you really believe it is forever? If there's a beginning of everything, be that beginning god himself, then there must be an end too."
"You are trying to say god has an end too?"
"I'm saying forever has an end."
There was a silence of a second, then groans, moans, and laughter followed.
"Dude, did you dope too hard? You are not even making sense!"
"Who the hell decided all thoughts should make sense? Don't mad exist?"
Inji thought why it made sense, that didn't make sense that forever has an end. She closed my eyes and listened to the homeless men's voice slowly fading.
Yet that stupid question plagued her mind as her eyes wandered the scenery passing by like a flash of lightning, the town wasn't the same.
From the seat next to hers, there was a beautiful scent of sandalwood with citrus notes erupting from the worn out covers. 'It smells…nice.' The first ever thing since she stepped out in the world was a scent of something or someone unknown.
There were buildings where trees used to be, and there were cars where people used to. Most of those buildings were new to Inji, built after she went away yet the old paint was chipping away from the walls and dipping onto the floor, the smell of the rusted metal and the decay of them made her wonder if they'd always been there and she didn't notice?
As she got off the bus and followed a familiar lane, she realized things may have changed for the sight but never the senses.
These streets smelled like piss and looked like a garbage dump in themselves, ripped posters at the vandalized walls, piles of trash laying around with flies hovering over it.
Even though it was a pile of garbage, it didn't quite feel any different than the house she found herself standing in front of.
'I hope she is not awake. Please don't be awake.' Inji prayed.
The lady of this house was her mother's younger sister and a very sharp woman. She looked after her store till late at night, and slept until the afternoon. She wore old clothes and put on new lipsticks, she hoarded money but never spent it. At least that's what she remembered her to be.
Inji took the key from under the flower pot and let herself in, the paint was coming off the door, drizzling down on the porch like fine dust and the metallic groans of the rusted hinges welcomed her along with the dark of the house which smelled like mold, the air like ironed paper, disgusting and unavoidable.
"Jani? Is that you?" Her aunt called out, from under the blankets then went back to sleep.
"It's me. I'm… back." Inji said to herself, freezing in her spot and met with the silence and walls. Her eyes drifted towards the ceiling and she noticed the spider webs, the paint still drizzling down.
There was no response from the other woman, and she stared off into the silence in relief. Several thoughts ran through her head, paranoia building up. What would her aunt say to her when she wakes up? What would she look like? What would be the first question?
There was no reason to celebrate, the calm that the house accepted her with was eerily. There were still a couple hours for the day to start so she pulled the blankets into the smallest room in the house, where they kept things that they didn't use frequently and immersed herself in the warmth.
Inji knew she wouldn't be able to sleep because she was in a new place and with old people. But she wanted the world to stop, for even a moment so she pretended to. And as always, when she pretended long enough, her body believed her lies and wore her out, sleep coming to her like death that never came.
"What is all this? Where did you get the money for this?"
When Inji woke up, her aunt was yelling in a whisper, but she was wide awake and pretended to not listen, her eyes staring at the ceiling and making faces in the cracks and cobwebs.
Her aunt, Arbi's voice had a screeching edge to it, the cigarette smoke that wafted off her clothes gave away the reason, the smell so strong that the house could feel it. Her lungs were swelling up, her vocal chords stiffening and tightening, making her sound like a goat bleating.
"Who else? Inji had a fat purse shoved under her pillow-" Jani, her twenty three years old son, a gym enthusiast, replied in his mass-ridden voice. He was the same as his mother, self-absorbed yet uptight and he sounded like a mountain ox in a mating season, genetically closer to her.
Desperate. Disgusting.
"You stole her money?"
"I borrowed without asking, there's a difference! I am going to pay her back, anyways! Why are you making a fuss about it, Ma!"
Arbi walked over and ripped the money from his hand, or whatever was left along with the chicken and bag of rice.
"Those are mine! Where are you going? Are you going to dump them in the trash? That's food! Food is god!" As always, Jani talked out of his brawns, but he was funny in moments when he didn't have to.
If he took less than what Inji needed, she would have forgiven. If he took more than what she needed, she would still forgive him because there was no way he could pay her back. And she wasn't interested in any other medium of reimbursement.
"Enough! Not your money, not your food! Don't you know what she does? Don't you not know what kind of a woman she is?"
Normally, one would be offended at the phrase 'the kind of woman' because there were endless interpretations to it. But the power in those words was a bitter reality.
'what kind of a woman' wasn't a judgment, or an opinion. It was a speculation, a place between the lines, a reality of one's choosing.
Inji woke up, slithering out from the blankets like a spineless worm and walked into the kitchen the sight of a bowl full of boiled meat, without salt and her cousin brother digging his teeth into it like an ogre from the man caves.
'He had always been disgusting.' Was her inner thought, yet she couldn't hear it inside her own mind.
"Inji! I borrowed some money and treated myself, celebration for your home coming! You want some?" He spoke, with his mouth oozing out rice and chicken, like a child.
"It's fine, you can have it all. I'm not hungry." She lied.
Even if she wanted to protest, she couldn't. She was living under her aunt's roof, wearing the clothes she gave, eating the food she cooked. She was taking a lot more than her cousin brother could even if he were to eat her whole life.
As Inji sat down in front of Jani, and watched him eat on her dime to the content of his heart, she realized two things.
One: only people like Jani would live well in this world, those who borrowed without asking and ate like they owned it.
Two: only people like her would live by tooth and nail, those who neither realized nor practiced authority over what they owned. Such people were considered 'saints' because they only gave, without questioning, without objecting, without taking.
However, the irony was this. What motivated Inji and Jani was the same thing, two sides of the same coin. He stole and ate while making a show of it because his mother was there. She didn't question or object because his mother was there.
As she sat down, her eyes stared at the bowl of rice on the table. The meat sizzling into the pan drowned in the oil, the grease of an aroma erupted into the air made her ponder over more unnecessary things.
Like the number of calories she'd get from the bowl of rice, the number of proteins from the grease ridden meat.
'If there's any protein in this chunk of animal flesh? The animals they inject with chemicals to fatten up. This is just air…'
She didn't have any eating disorder, her stomach still growls and her taste buds shuddered at the thought of meat fried in the tomato sauce with a pinch of salt…
The taste was just an illusion. To her aunt, it might taste salty. To her cousin, too salty. To her, perhaps nothing more.
"I am going out." She said, after finishing her breakfast in a rush because the house was eating her faster than she ate anything else.
She felt like the air that she was supposed to be breathing was suffocating her. It sounded, smelled, and tasted like meat.
The meat was just chaff.
"Out? Where to?" Her aunt emerged from the kitchen like a rat from its hole, her sleeves drenched and her hair a mess.
It always smelled like mold and mud inside her tiled, shining kitchen because the cabinets under her aisle housed water lines that leaked.
Her husband died while Inji was away. From what she remembered, she would always whine on end about her husband's irresponsible choices of life. His lack of regards for the future, his overly mingling with her cousin sister, his ill structured house and his awful spending habits.
"Once I move out from this rotten town, I am never coming back here." She would say because the neighbors, her in-laws and her relatives were 'plaguing her husband like fleas driving a mad dog'.
While she waited for the fleas to die, the mad dog died instead.
Inji thought she might have left the rotten town like she always claimed she would, but she didn't. Fake promises to one's self made one look an even better version of themselves in their own eyes, her aunt was that kind of person, believing her own lies.
"I just need some fresh air." Inji lied. She just needed to escape this hell hole.
"Why? You just came! Sit down! Let's have a talk! Like a family?" Her cousin said.
'I hate this family.'
"Maybe later."
"Huh? I thought you must have missed people when you were there but I guess I was wrong. You are still as intolerant of us as always, huh? I should have believed your dead fish eyes." He scoffed.
'Just eyes? The rest of me is dead too. Can't you see?'
"I am not intolerant, I just need some air."
"You just came from the town, too much air will get to your head." was her aunt's response.
'You are not my mother, stop trying to control me.'
"I will be back soon."
"Wait, take him with you. You shouldn't go out on your own." She protested.
'You should have sent him to prison with me if you are so worried.'
Inji sighed, twisting the doorknob in her hands and biting her lip. Several thoughts ran through her head, of lashing out at her, of reminding her that she wasn't her property, that she was still capable of doing what she did five years ago.
But silence was less troublesome than people like her aunt given an excuse to talk.
"There's no need to, really. I will be back soon, aunty. Don't worry, please."
When Inji walked through that door and glanced back at her and saw it in her aunt's eyes.
The anger of having her authority challenged, the fear of not knowing what was to come, whether she would return or not, whether her landline will ring or not, whether she would regret or not. It's only been a couple hours since Inji came back into her life, and she had terrorized it for years to come.
Because she was 'that kind of woman'.
The unpredictable kind.