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By Dr Hawar Moradi:
This story is dedicated to the young girl who was raped recently in Erbil.
I dreamed,
that I am a butterfly,
sitting on a white rose.
It was a normal beautiful day, as any other day. In the heart of the blue sky, the sunrays one by one were breaking through the few motionless clouds on their way. In between the crack of the curtains that were covering the only small window of my room, these hairline radiant sunrays were hitting over and over again on my cheeks. Like rain drops falling from the sky down into the ocean, the sunrays made a little mark and then disappeared forever.
I was turning on the bed, partly because of the warmth, which had gathered together to fill the room with warmth. With each second this cloud of warmth was growing larger, piercing the smallest openings in the room. I was turning in bed also partly because of an unfinished dream that was shaking me up and down like the small corns of sand in an hourglass, a dream that had been there during each night during the very short life of mine. I was not being left in peace in my bed, my body sooner or later had to leave its niche, the bed, and fill another space in the room. The daylight, the sunrays and the reality declared its triumph over me and I, still half asleep with half opened eyes, lifted up my body from the bed and, walking unsteadily with one hand on the wall, finally made it to the bathroom.
As always, forgetting to the turn on the warm water first, which had become a habit, maybe consciously or subconsciously the sudden rush of the cold water on my body surely ripped me away from the world of my dreams and woke me up to this normal but beautiful morning. As always, late and in a hurry, I put some fruit in my bag, drank a tea with some bread and honey, which my mother had prepared. My mother always woke up long ahead of me, prepared the breakfast, and sat and waited for me. I got a kiss on my left cheek, said good-bye to my mother and headed out. I liked walking. Walking gave me some time to be under the hot sun, which was shining every day from morning to late night. Every day the shining sun had me walking under it; definitely it made me feel as if the sun was shining for me, as if I was the reason why the sun would wake up every morning at the same time, leave its own home, head towards zenith and start to brighten up the whole universe. The sunrays in all shapes and colors, like the drops of rain in a rainy day, were hitting over and over again on my cheeks, till sweat would come down my forehead. From time to time I would have to sweep the sweat off but sometimes I would just let go and suddenly would feel the salty sweat in my eyes, as if trying to wake me up from my dreams.
Yes I loved dreaming. I would dream about anything. Dreams had become my best friends, they were there no mater time or place. Even in the daylight, under the melting sun, the dreams were there. I would carefully take a step out of reality and enter a small dream; from there I would take another step to another dream. I would keep on like a little girl during a day in spring finding herself in a field of flowers, looking for that tiny, most beautiful flower that doesn’t exist, but she would still look for it. I would run round in the dreams until I get lost and it would take me a long time to get back to the tiny reality, that was called life.
I would dream about being a butterfly during a winter day. I would flap my wings, flying around the trees, over the rivers and over the small corns of sand that would be swept away by the water in any moment. I would say hello to other butterflies, then I would find a flower, a red rose or a white one, maybe even a colorless one, but I would definitely chose a blue one, since it was my favorite color. I would land on the blue rose for a short conversation. I would tell her about my dreams and wishes, or simply some other silly stuff, maybe even about the books I read. Once or twice I would recite a poem for her. I would give her a kiss, hugging her firmly before once again flapping my wings to disappear in the horizon.
Today was a beautiful day, not only because I felt free under the sun, but also that school poetry was waiting for me. Imagine, the whole day I would sit and sink into the world of poetry. All those beautiful words put together to become a poem, all those simple but beautiful words were waiting for me. It was hard to walk as normal; my feet gladly took me to the classroom as soon as possible, even though all the other students would always come late. I opened the door and saw my teacher waiting as always, I said hello and sat down in the first row, and she would always give me a smile. Even this time the smile was there as if she had prepared it with all her finest and purest feelings and let the smile just shine on my face. My teacher and I would sit down and talk about words, put them together and build something beautiful for example:
It was me,
huge amount of happiness
Some laughter and,
a smile
Now,
I am with,
a world of sorrow
Tears and,
huge non-ending cries
After this and many more beautiful poems, the day was soon over and it was time to head home, to my mom, who would be waiting for me at the end of our street to help me with my bag, and the hug, which she would not let go for some minutes. I said good-bye to my teacher and closed the door of the classroom behind myself.
I heard someone shouting and suddenly felt a clap on my shoulders; I turned my head and saw my boss. Wakeup, stop dreaming, he shouted. The daylight, the warmth in my room and the cold water in the mornings, they were all my enemies, which over and over again all forced me to come back to the hardship of the reality, to the world I had no interest in; neither did it have any interest in a tiny being like me. They all took me back to the stress, the busy people who really had nothing to do, except being busy. Once again I was forced to leave the words, the blue rose, those small corns of sand deep in the shallow river. Once again I transformed from being a student, a butterfly to the poor little girl, who had to work hard from early day to late nights.
There were customers all over the shop. The queue to the casher was long, and I had to hurry up before my boss would break his silence and once for all and make me workless. I have been working in this shop since I was a kid, and I vaguely remember when it was that I was a kid. The money I get every day is hardly enough for my mother and me to survive for the day.
A hard day at work was finally over. I could feel how my body wanted just to escape into another being and just lay somewhere to once again let the dreams take over my life. But it was dark already; the hot sun and the sunrays had vanished from the sky. There were no signs of the clouds, and the darkness had laid as a mist over the village. Here and there you could hear some small insects in a small dampness which had finally come out to life from hiding, due to the melting sun, and were celebrating this triumph over the sun by making some noise. And in the dark sky there were some little stars blinking as if they were small eyes of some animal in the darkness that was hiding.
Just some hundred meters away from my work, there was a dark narrow street which I really didn’t like. It had always frightened me. This narrow street which had kept out the sun, always gave me a feeling of nausea and it made my heart beat fast, my muscles tense and brain sharp, as if my body was preparing me for a flight. This was not the first time I had felt this. Every night after work, for the past 10 years, I had experienced this feeling; I was so acquainted with it that I knew in advance just before it started. This feeling of fear, forced my whole existence to turn into the smallest organism on the earth, so tiny, I became almost invisible: The only way I could ever hide, if something would happen. What could happen I had no idea about, and I never thought anything would happen, since it had never happened to me. With the two walls on each side of me and only one way to go and nowhere to escape, either to go backwards or forwards. suddenly I found myself in the middle of the street.
It had never been so quiet in my life as it was at that particular moment. A moment that forever did change my life. There were no sounds from the small insects. The stars were not visible any more. The silence had swallowed with its total darkness the whole life in that moment. Suddenly there were some hardly perceived sounds. It sounded as if the small insects were walking on tiny small pieces of old, almost decayed wood that slowly were bending and touching the ground beneath without breaking down. These small sounds little by little started to grow. My heart started to beat faster, the breaths one after one were escaping my lungs as if to free themselves, and my pupils grew bigger, making the utmost effort to see these tiny small sounds in front of me. But not a single time I would look back behind me. Out of the fear of these tiny small sounds, and no matter how little they sounded, I never turned my head back to see what was behind me. I expected everything to be in front of me. I had just passed by what was behind, and nothing seemed to be there that would create such a threat, such a fear in me. The tension of my muscles, gradually built up in my limbs, as if it was a warning for me to run, and the heart screaming by its strong fast beats as if to try to fly away and survive this extreme situation, that it never before had been put into. Suddenly all these feelings got together and forced my neck to slowly turn back with my eyes closed, for the fear of seeing the unseen, the unknown, opened slowly my right eye without having the time to open my left eye, I saw a face in the darkness, hurriedly coming near, so fast that I never had the chance to see what it was and I fell down on the ground.
I must have lain some minutes on the ground, because there was a pool of blood right beneath my mouth with my lips deep down in the mud on the ground, and blood flowing down my cheeks. A silence was all that existed, nothing else. Everything was just pure darkness, and I could not hear anything any longer except the rattling sound of my breaths.
My eyelids were heavy and the breaths could hardly be exhaled. The lungs were filled with a strong heavy force, as if they could not expand any more. The heartbeats were very weak, as if they came outside of my body from a far place. With my head on the ground, eyes half open I just saw some legs. There were a few of them, I could not count how many. They had different colors on their shoes. I was there lying on the ground as a dead corpse at the same level as their shoes. For some moments I had no feeling in my limbs, as if they were not connected. As a dead corpse who has lost her limbs here and there and is trying to find them . Those were the hardest moments in my life, a life that had been scattered into fragments and a body that would never be whole again. I don’t remember what would happen in the next moment, I must have tried to raise my head, because I just vaguely remember one shoe, with very fast speed, as if the person was putting all his force into the kick and pointed it towards my head. I must have fainted after that blow, because I woke up some time after it.
Once again I woke upon the ground, with the taste of blood in my mouth. Several boys started to violently rip down each piece of my clothes while laughing at me. I was somehow semiconscious and was begging them to stop, tears were running down my eyes. The pain from my head was so severe that I could no longer feel anything. I was just lying there, with no power to get up and I was crying loudly, crying after my mother. I was begging them to stop. Like animals, one by one they took away my life from me, over and over again they forced themselves on me. After some minutes, I just gave up, I slowly got out of myself , went and sat down looking at my body, while being transformed into a bag of garbage, something I didn’t recognize any more. I closed my eyes and fell into a deep sleep.
I woke up several days after this accident. I didn’t recognize myself any more, as if I was a cut rose, a dead body. The butterfly was not there anymore, the sun had long been gone from my world, it was no longer shining on my cheeks. The white rose had died. The pain in me started to grow, making me feel every growth, every second how it made my body to want to escape itself, to just leave it behind and never return. I was dissociating from myself, the one me, before that night. I simply unconsciously left myself behind, let myself stop being me and entered another me. I didn’t wish to continue my being me. I see that night every once a while, sometimes so much and so real that I feel that it’s happening all over again. I hear the voices, the steps, I see the shoes, and I hear myself crying, begging them to stop. Recently I have been hearing voices, when no one else is nearby. These voices are there, they are asking me to do something. They ask me to end this entire nightmare. They used to be nice, at first they were feeling pity for me, but they are much more aggressive these last days. They blame me for what happened. The sleep has escaped from my world; I am living in a nightmare inside a nightmare. From dawn to dawn I live with these hallucinations that ask me to kill myself, to end this pain in my soul.
My mother’s tears, her sorrow, her cries late at night keep me awake. Day after day, I sit in my room in the darkness. I never read any more, the words, the poems are nothing more than meaningless words, which I hate most of all. The darkness of my room and my loneliness is all I have. I still can’t realize what happened to me, the anterograde amnesia after this change to my body, this act of violence against my existence without ever seeing this appearing, not even in my nightmares, has created a big hole in my soul. I am calm, the thoughts are moving much slower, so slow that they make me weak, and slowly absorb the energy from my limbs, so absorbing that I feel I am entering a coma, without being able to help myself in any way. The door closes violently, the black curtains covers totally the windows and the darkness in the room creates a total silence, which does separate me from the outside world. In this dark room, a tiny hole in the edge of the door let a small ray of sun enter and make a shape on the wall just above my head. From time to time I would raise my head to get this tiny sunray hit on my face, sometimes it hit my eyes and then made my eyes get blinded, for some moments I could just see a very bright light and nothing else. That is the only moment that I could forget that I am in this dark room.
I dreamed that,
I a butterfly,
Sitting,
on a white rose,
flapping,
shouting,
flying,
all round this white rose
putting my wings
one after the other
kissing softly
the wings of this one rose
softly caressing the softness
admiring,
the beauty, of this one rose
then winter came ,
one day
and I
hastily,
unwillingly,
froze to death
on this white rose
Hawar Moradi is a medical doctor currently living in Norway.
