the prostitute who rescued a cat

There was a woman at the time of the prophet who was a prostitute…

That was always how the story began to a group of women who were never taught about sex but who, in the cage of religion class, can hear the word prostitute said to them without shame, spilled each year into their ears with the tone of a veiled woman who believes her own fate is as far from this prostitute as we were from being good.

The absurdity of their storytelling. There was a woman at the time of the prophet who was a prostitute. She was doomed for hell. (Maybe this part wasn’t even said out loud in the story. The audience knew. We all knew a woman was doomed, prostitute or not).

One day, this woman comes across a cat in the desert. The cat is thirsty, maybe even near its end from thirst. And this woman goes to the well, and pours water for the cat into her shoe. And god, their hypocritical, unreliable god, changes his mind about her, takes his pencil, and erases the word “hell” and replaces it with “heaven.” And that was that.

An hour later, I am being told to stay behind in class. I’ve done something wrong, again. Like the prostitute, I am doomed. Except there is no prophet to tell lies of the women like me who were fated for hell, and spared. In this world, god writes with pen, and it is permanent. There is no animal crossing the desert of this school, nothing alive that I could water. There were only white faces melting into black fabric, and my own shame turning from their black thumbs on the trigger of my life.

the time of no prophets

In the end, who is stronger? The past, or our will to emerge from it? The wild woman says, “You cannot leave and stay.” You must choose. But that is exactly where I am. Leaving and staying, going and returning.. I can’t win. I can’t accept the loss either.

There was a story about a Syrian prisoner who made it out. In Syria, most prisoners enter through a one-way door. To leave is nearly impossible. A miracle. And in our naive minds, we forge paintings of what we imagine freedom to look like: a kneeling body, recently freed, kissing the earth, drinking madly from the life it was denied. Being wild. Forever, in its wild. Doing everything forbidden. Going everywhere to avenge the days when there was nowhere to go. To be free. Paint it. Add all your colors, expand it onto a larger canvas. Create a series. Exhibit it around the world. Then, I want you to throw it all away. Toss it to the waves. Let it sink. Let it burn. Because I’m about to replace your paintings with the truth.

This prisoner emerges, crosses the world. Lands in a country that is safe. Far. There are white faces that smile at you in your walks. Silence replaces echoes of life ending in the hallways. There is space for the body to lay when it sleeps. There are people who listen, some even cry with you. And you think, maybe I’ll be all right. You migrate from one project to another; speaking wherever someone will allow you the time and audience to speak. You take the bad days with the hope that time will settle the memories. You allow life to be the mess you swore it’d never be if you made it out because you are young, and there is still time. But the prison has found you. On a quiet street, eating breakfast, planning your day, your place a mess. She watches you from the window, and it isn’t long before you feel her. She starts to live with you. She keeps you in bed far longer than you’re used to. She makes you forget to eat, then eat too much. She watches you clean for hours, then never for weeks. The faces of the people around you begin to disappear until it is just her.

And she lures you back. All your efforts, your long walks, your promises, your resolve to tell the world, to fight for those still in the fire, all of it goes. You start to leave your hair uncombed. Your clothes no longer matter. Forget about eating well, or at all. You were doomed, and this is the world of no erasers and no prophets. You were on your way to hell, and the thirsty cat was only a mirage from a future you meant to enter.

You return. You take buses, cars, planes. You are at the border. There is still time. But no, you decide to submit.

Our prisoner disappears. The past was that strong, that haunting. This time, the door will close behind him, and it will never open again.

There are permanent migrations, and permanent returns. I am a woman with a knife in her belly, wondering why the pain…breathing my way out of what hurts while the blood runs thick down my legs. I am a woman standing in fire, reading a book that is telling me everything I have ever wanted to learn, and wondering why I can’t get the burning to settle long enough for me to walk those lessons. I am in my hell, ignoring my thirst and the thirst all the ones who have passed my well. From this familiar cell, I wonder why I can still hear screams in sound baths and dad’s voice in the music. I migrated. I tried. But I couldn’t learn the language, and my walks were lonely. So I returned to my first exile, where I could understand what was spoken, and where there was no room to walk at all.

in a world without fairytales

Fairytales have brutal endings. A woman has her foot cut off when she can’t get her red shoes to stop dancing. A little boy loses his mother when she returns to her sealskin and her home in the ocean. A mother is fated to search through a dirty river for eternity for killing her children in grief.

The endings are meant to cut through us because of the severity of the message. It is begging for our attention. The seal skin, the dirty river, the red shoes, they are all symbols, waiting on us to hold them up to our lives as mirrors and see what reflects. Except those who spill stories of religion. They must have grown up in a world without fairytales. They missed knowing that nothing is what it seems, and stories are teachers for those with none. A woman who gives a thirsty animal water enters heaven not because charity works as an eraser and we are spared our past. No. The woman enters heaven because in that moment she has watered something that is not herself. Maybe she was prostituting her soul to what was hurting her. Maybe, between the hunger to survive, the money needed for food, the days that gave her no respite, she forgot to step outside of her body and serve something outside of her. The passing cat was her chance. It was her heaven. Something she can step into, on her own will, erase and rewrite for as many times as she pleased. She was as much a writer of her life as god was for his.

Two writers. A well. And a dry tongue landing in the very thing it has spent so, so long searching for.