fifteen (the monologue) No time to cry, No time

fifteen (the monologue) No time to cry, No time to cry. just because i have the practice and capacity to bottle up like a metal tank doesn't mean it can't explode. skin my body and make a drum out of it. i know, i bet, i reckon that it still won't say it was a bad time. i know i bet i reckon the drums will only echo what she had convinced her hazy memory to recite: "everything is nice and rosy, privileged and cozy." just because i have a thick skin, thick enough to let you make drums out of it, doesn't mean i can't have a nine out of ten on the scale. numbers. only numbers matter, the number of people you leave behind grieving, the number of tiny hair accessories lost forever, the number of unpaired barbie shoes, the number of times you suppress a sneeze during a funeral because it's not quite the glorious justice to death, the number of slaps that were regular doses. he pulled my ponytail and he pushed me against the wall-- tell me i had a witness and i know i bet i reckon that she hasn't still forgotten that scene, but i know i bet i reckon that he has. i remember being obsessively suspicious for months, in case he chooses to kill me. he's nice now. i still live with him. i don't remember if i was eight or ten or twelve or fourteen but i know that if i mention it now, he honestly won't remember doing it, while i, i will be the problematic one in all my relationships, washing every loving touch of loved ones as if it's sewage water. i wish i could fight him. it was a war. but in a war, it's follity to sacrifice your organs to make an abstract thing "survive". the smartest are the ones who manage to be the least killed. (drum-drum-drum~ escape, it whispered, RUN. but i was to escape to where? this whole world is a goddamn warzone, except the flower fields) the best warrior is the one who manages to be the least killed. except when you're only a witness. witnesses like her. but what do i know? maybe he fruited his flowers in her too. i am one fruit. i know i bet i reckon that that woman is a hand puppet, you just have to hold her body to make her squawk in your own voice. and you could put your hand in her because she was raised to be hollow. how unlucky it is, for women like me, who were taught that they needn't have spaces, but were later carved out, starved out of flesh and blood, in shining spoons and golden knives. some of us refused to be puppets. they are now with those unpaired barbie shoes, where their thick skins make drums. the other ones, women like me, who chose to be puppets rather than dead drums, wonder if filling for that scooped out part exists. sometimes a spirit fills it and reminds us to frantically remove all living touches from our puppet bodies. till then, we squawk in heavier voices, not our own, we squawk a lie: "save us, save us" but we only need a flower field to lie down in, only for a few thousand years, so that the hurt evaporates like a rafflesia halo scent and it rains only fury, the worst fury, murderous fury, on all the hands who drummed and on all the hands who held the carved out bodies. and May those hands Burn forever.

Ramona Singh