Previous part: PAST FORWARD
“PUSH!”
Oh, I am pushing, alright! Spread on the table, with hospital staff peeking between my legs, while something, someone, is tearing my vagina open, more open than it ever was, than I ever thought possible.
Oh, the pain! The terrible, terrible pain, yet it feels better than multiple orgasms. My body giving everything into this birth, knowing that I won’t need it anymore. I’m getting out, out with my daughter, into her life, out of mine. She’s fighting for her first breath, I’m fighting for my last, out of me now, but we are still as one being, I have to show her, I have to teach her, that’s the only thing left for me to do.
Like this, child! We inhale together, strongly, sharply. First time together baby, for the rest you’re on your own. Our shared breath leaves her crying, while it leaves me floating, looking her and myself from the above.
Oh god, how long has it been? Thirty three years? Thirty four? Counting age, such an important thing for the living, so hard to remember outside the body.
Oh how good, how grand, how pure, how awesome is death!
“Is this what you really want?”
The voice. Not a voice. More like a thought. But it’s not a thought. I look around to see where it’s coming from, if you can call that “looking”… Words of the living are not adequate to describe experiences of the dead.
It’s the glowing woman, completely naked, with hair made of pure green light, not just the hair on her head, but also her pubic hair, her unshaved legs… The most beautiful being I’ve ever seen!
“Hi,” I say, looking at her amazed.
“You can still go back, you know,” she says gently.
“Back where?” I ask, confused.
“Back to your life,” she explains: “Death is just a choice. Your choice.”
“No,” I answer quickly, suddenly afraid: “Don’t send me back! I want to go to the light!”
She stays quiet for a while and I begin to wonder what the hell I am talking about. What light? Why do I have such a burning desire to go to… light? What is that light I feel so drawn to?
How long have I been floating here, staring at this glowing female shape, anyway? It’s like I can’t feel time anymore, but I’m so used to living according to the passage of time that it’s absence makes me really confused.
I’m actually not sure if I ever did experience time. Why do I feel like something like that even exists? How is it supposed to feel, passing through time?
She wants me to go back to life. Well, there’s a problem with that, I don’t remember my life anymore. I know I had one, but that’s all. Or did I?
“Focus, Maja,” the female shape tells me and suddenly I am again aware of the hospital room and my bleeding body surrounded by doctors.
Maja. That is my name. That was my name but for some reason it terrifies me to hear it.
“Don’t call me that,” I cry out: “I am not her anymore! She finally died. I am not going back! Don’t make me go back!”
“It’s ok,” she says: “You are allowed to stay here. However, you can not move forward before you bring your life to a closure. You need to understand what you did and why, you need to be aware of the consequences.”
“I… I don’t remember,” I whisper.
“Try,” she gently insists.
I try to look. The body is lying under me, I think I was in my thirties, but I look older. I try to listen. There is a baby crying. My baby. I just gave birth.
“I died giving birth,” I say with a sigh.
“Very good,” the shape says. I feel enormous love for that shape and I wonder briefly where that could come from. Never mind. It feels too damn good to wonder about it.
“Why are you leaving your baby?” she is talking again.
My baby? Right. Alive people are supposed to stay and take care of their children. I have a few problems with that: I am not alive and I don’t have children!
But that crying piece of meat? Oh, yeah, I just gave birth, why do I keep forgetting it?
“Why did I want a child so much?” I ask, confused, remembering that I really truly honestly wanted that baby. It was my life’s biggest dream, but I am not alive anymore and it doesn’t sound appealing at all now. It’s certainly not something worth living again for!
“Yes, Maja,” glowing woman sounds pleased: “That is one of the questions you need to answer before you can move forward.”
“How do I do it? Where can I find the answer?”
“You need to remember. Maybe it will be easier if you start from the beginning.”
Beginning? Yes! Beginning! I remember! I remember! My mother’s warm womb and comforting heartbeats; my father’s voice and occasional visits during their love making… I was there but at the same time I was here, in this place in-between, this gate between life and death. It was easy, it was peaceful. Warm… And wet… In a womb never inhabited before…. A female… A girl… A woman… I liked to die as a woman, but I had to be born as a woman first.
Die… This place, this tiny line between life and death, the only place where you can be both at the same time, the only place that ever felt like home…
“Time of birth: three sixteen,” says the doctor next to my baby.
“You need to focus, Maja,” says the glowing lady.
“Time of death: three sixteen,” says the doctor next to my body.
“Focus,” repeats the glowing one.
I’m too happy to focus. My body looks so much better dead. My soul feels so much lighter dead. If only this glowing thing would go away so I could float to the light. Wait, what light? Why am I thinking about light again?
Why is she glowing?
“Who are you?” I ask her.
“You know who I am,” she tells me.
“I do?”
“Yes,” she smiles, tiny hair above her mouth glistening: “You just have to remember.”
Remember. That word again. That thought again. How do I remember this woman?
A woman. I was a woman too, wasn’t I? Yeah, I think this time I was.
And I died giving birth. Awesome! I’m dead!
Light.
Focus.
Focus?
Suddenly I’m on the meadow, running through the grass. I am eight years old. It’s not a memory, it’s really happening again in front of me. I am fully present in that moment, this time as an observer, but I can observe different things than I could while I was a living girl. I see the energy around things, around grass and flowers, I smell emotions, I sense life in everything that surrounds me.
A bee talks to me. “I am going to sting her so that you could understand,” she tells me and goes over to the childhood me and stings her in the arm. She cries from the pain, hurt and confused from seemingly undeserved sting, unaware that she will be back in that scene after her death and experience it in a completely different way. She is unaware that she is even going to die, that people she loves the most are also going to die, long before her.
There is a boy, a year younger than her, he runs to her side and inspects the wound, then he finds some healing grass to put on it and hugs me, her.
“Do you remember?” the bee asks me and I nod telepathically. I do remember, he was my best friend, my only friend, so close that we never needed anybody else, not that our small village had much more kids of our age that weren’t mean to us.
I don’t remember his name. I feel, though, that he is more than just a friend, that our connection goes further than this last life, that I know him from before. I can’t remember before, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s the connection that matters.
“It hurts, Milan,” I cried in his embrace and he took my arm in his and kissed it. It always hurt less when he kissed me. That’s what I remember now, as clearly as I did while I was still alive. I watch the scene and remember at the same time. Of course I know his name, of course his name was Milan! He held me until I stopped crying, ignoring mean kids that gathered and started to tease us.
“Kissy, kissy!”
“Milan and Maja, a couple in love!”
“When they get married they will get a present!”
“They sleep together, like mum and dad! It’s gross!”
It went on and on, but we didn’t care. We cared for each other and helping each other was always more important than what others thought about us.
“You are just jealous because we are best friends ever!” Milan yelled at them.
“Yes, you will never have a better friend than my Milan!” I joined him, forgetting about the pain. We didn’t consider each other as boyfriend and girlfriend, but we already talked about getting married to each other if we are still single by the age of twenty. Twenty seemed so old in those days and we wanted to find a true love, get married and have children one day, but if it didn’t happen by the time we are twenty it seemed we shouldn’t waste any more time but get married to each other instead, before we are too old.
Little did we know that we will soon become enemies and be forbidden to hang out with each other, for reasons neither of us will ever fully understand.
Yes, I remembered that too. I remember his blood on my hands, a blood of my only friend and only enemy, killed by my only father. When I had to choose, I chose my father over him, but they both died in front of me, in the same day.
“Tunnels from Visoko?” I ask the glowing lady.
“Yes, Maja,” she says: “That place allowed you to access your repressed memories, while you were still alive, it allowed you to experience it in a similar way that we do it after we die. You were ready and you were willing. It’s always better to come to realizations while you are still alive. Your courage to do that was rewarded and your daughter was your reward. She was conceived in those tunnels.”
“But I didn’t have sex in the tunnels,” I remark, confused.
“No, but you had it the night before,” she smiles, obviously pleased with my memory improvement: “The conception doesn’t happen immediately.”
“Why wasn’t I allowed to get pregnant before then?”
“You need to remember why. You already figured out some of the reasons, but you still didn’t bring the main one into your awareness.”
“How do I do that?”
“Focus, Maja. Don’t worry, you are doing great.”
Focus. That word again!
Focus on WHAT?
What do I remember about that day? I was meditating with my one-night-stand guy, instead of celebrating my sister’s birthday…
Hans! Father of my baby!
Lee! My sister! I was in Visoko because it was her birthday wish. She was in Bosnia because it was my birthday wish.
Bosnia! That’s it! I remember where I am from!
“Tell him,” the voice in the tunnels said. I didn’t know what to tell him. There was nothing I wanted to tell him. I just wanted to get away from him.
My sister cried in my arms and we slept in the same bed that night…
I lived in Canada. I was born in Bosnia. Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Hans was from Germany. We just wanted to have sex, we didn’t want to make a baby. I told him I couldn’t conceive, he told me he was healthy so we didn’t use protection.
“Tell him,” the voice said.
“Tell him,” Lee said when I told her I was pregnant.
I never told him.
Focus. Focus. Focus.
Focus on what? Being a mother? Post-mortem mother? Never being a mother? My mother?
I never felt connected to my mother. When I learned that I am a Croat and she is not, I hated her. When she took me to Canada and burned all the pictures of my father, I hated her more. When she remarried to a Serb, I hated her the most.
When I returned home from Bosnia, my hearth finally emptied of hate, it was too late to try to connect with her. She was a stranger to me for more years than I could remember, a stranger damaged by years of suffering, numbed by countless antidepressants, a shell of a woman. She had nothing more to give me and I had nothing to give her. After giving up hate I found myself aching with huge emptiness. Hate wasn’t replaced with love, it wasn’t replaced with anything, it just left a huge, deep, dark hole.
When I found out I’m pregnant I lived for that pregnancy. I lived for my child. In reality, I was already dead…
“I remember everything,” I finally say: “I understand everything.”
And I do. My life flashed before me and looking at it from many different angles gave everything a deeper perspective. Everything fell into place, my choices, my actions, my beliefs… Things like choosing a job, working in a butchery, because I needed to feel blood on my hands, ever since that day that Serbian and Croatian blood mixed on my hands and I didn’t wash them until some neighbors held me tight and washed them for me, all the while I kicked and screamed, because they weren’t just washing my hands, they were washing away most important people in my life, they were washing away my childhood and huge pieces of my soul.
“Can I go now?” I ask, still staring at my dead body.
“Not yet,” is her only response and I don’t have to ask why, I already know why.
“The people I am leaving behind?” I ask, somehow remembering that it’s what you are supposed to do after dying, you need to face what you are leaving behind. The problem is, I am not leaving anybody behind. My relationships didn’t work. Finding close friends in Canada didn’t work. I could never connect to anybody in that cold foreign country. Nothing worked, not since that blood was forcefully washed off my hands.
Without saying anything I get pulled somewhere else, some time else, to my crying sister. Oh, come on! Don’t tell me she’s the one I am leaving behind! She is the last person that would ever miss me. Ok, she is crying, but she’s been crying all the time since we left Bosnia. She can’t be crying for me! We were never close, we were never friendly to each other. Sure, we slept in the same bed in Bosnia, but that was after we both went through very strange events. We knew each other’s secrets, but it was because of spending Christmases with our mother’s new family that hated us as much as we hated them. My mother was Muslim, her husband Orthodox Christian, so Catholic Christmas was celebrated only for the sake of me and my sister. United around the same enemy, two of us would retrieve to our room early and often spend the whole night talking. It would start with talking shit about our so called step-father and his children, but would often end with us sharing our deepest secrets with each other. In the morning we would go home and loose contact, usually until the next Christmas. Like secret lovers, we where secret sisters, trusting each other only in the deep night before the dawn and forgetting all about it in the light of the day.
Yes, she is crying for me and I know it. Self deception becomes much harder as you die.
“Three sixteen, March sixteenth,” she is repeating, rocking herself back and forth on the hospital chair: “Three sixteen, three sixteen, two thousand sixteen…”
I don’t remember, numbers mean nothing to me anymore, but I can feel in her energy that she is reciting date and time of my death. She takes comfort in numbers, always had, thinking they have deeper meanings than pure coincidences. She was born on summer’s solstice, her son on winter’s. I reach to her, giving her goose bumps, but she just hugs herself tight, tighter and keeps rocking, refusing to feel me, to feel anything besides her desperation. Somehow, though, I know it’s not me she is so desperate about.
It’s not only the time of my death. It’s the birthday of her niece too, her niece who was conceived at her birthday.
I don’t know how to make this right for her. I don’t know why I’m stuck with her, when all I want is to leave these lame leftovers of my life and move forward. I died all right, so why can’t I rest in piece?
Just show me my funeral and get me out of here!
“Focus Maja,” my glowing friend repeats, for who knows what time…
So I focus. I drift back to the hospital, to my sister, who is not crying anymore and is wearing different clothes. How long was I out? How much time passed? She is talking to someone, but I can’t see who, I can’t hear what about. It’s getting harder to connect to the world of living. It all became foggier, less believable. I start to wonder if there really is life before death or was it all just a dream, hallucination, imagination…?
Focus Maja!
It’s a man, a young man asking her if he could see the baby. I look at him closely, trying to figure out if I should know him. I don’t think so. What does this stranger want to do with my baby? Is it my sister’s new boyfriend? They look like a nice couple and I’m happy for her. Can I go now?
“I call her Hannah,” my sister tells him: “But she doesn’t have official name yet. You can change it.”
“Hannah is good,” he says: “I like it.”
Is she giving my child up for adoption? To a single father?
Suddenly I’m pulled back in the past, to the Bosnian tunnels, with the guy from the hospital - who I had sex with! – who I made a baby with! – who I totally forgot all about!
“Tell him,” I heard the voice of my just conceived daughter and I ignored it because I didn’t know what to tell him and even months later when I found out about my pregnancy and remembered that voice, I still didn’t obey it. I never told him.
“But we still found each other,” the glowing woman whispers to me.
“It was you!” I gasp, recognizing her at last. “My daughter. My child. You talked to me in the tunnels and you are guiding me in my death.”
“I’m still too young to be fully embraced by life,” she tells me: “I am still very present in this place in-between, just like you are.”
“Just like I wanted,” I whisper, remembering everything. I died giving birth so many times! I was always sensitive to the thin line between life and death, I was always so drawn to those doors from which a newborn comes into the life and nothing could ever keep me from going through them once they opened. Nothing, but infertility.
“I wanted to die giving birth,” I repeat, letting that fact sink deep into my soul. I never wanted a baby, I never desired for motherhood, my yearnings were much deeper, much darker than that. I wanted out. Of course I misunderstood it while I was still alive! How could a living person identify its desire to die while giving birth? Not in my culture at least, where people are completely brainwashed to cling to life and avoid death at any cost, except for the meaningless concepts of their countries. You are considered a hero if you want to die defending your country, but a psycho if you want to die giving birth. Killing others is an honorable way to die, not giving birth to them!
Why did I ever decide to come to life in a culture like that, in a place like that? What was the point? Apparently, I wasn’t meant to find romantic love and have a career or even close friends. I wasn’t meant to raise a child. What was I meant for? To stop the war? To save Milan? To do everything different than I did? To change the world? Maybe some of us were meant to suffer. Maybe some of us were meant to be alone.
“Maybe you were meant to understand,” my glowing daughter tells me.
“Hannah?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she smiles.
“That’s not how I would have called you,” I admit.
“You were not meant to name me,” she tells me.
“I was meant to die,” I nod.
“You were ready to die. I came to you because you were ready. You were not allowed to get pregnant before you were ready to go.”
“How did you know I was ready?” I ask her.
“You understood,” she explains to me: “That day in the tunnels you opened yourself up and you understood. You allowed yourself to understand and it allowed me to come to you, to give you the option to die the way you always wanted to.”
“Hannah…”
“You were meant to understand. And you did. You changed the world by changing yourself. It’s all that it takes.”
“Hannah…” I whisper again, my soul full of gratitude for her words. My life wasn’t a failure. My life had a meaning, and the reward is this beautiful glowing soul that is entering her life through the same doors that I left mine, to live as my child.
“And you were meant to be with him,” I nod, understanding everything.
“It would be easier if you agreed to tell him,” she smiles: “But at least your sister did. I came through you, but I came for him. We would end up together anyway, one way or another. Everything is the way it’s supposed to be.”
With those words she slips away from me. I don’t feel sad because I know I will see her again soon. Any time is soon from this place without time. My soul fills with joy as I look at her being fed by her father, on her aunt’s couch.
Her aunt, my sister, is crying again. Surprise, surprise!
“It’s so hard being a single mother,” she is telling to Hans: “My mother’s husband had a stroke three months ago and he needs a constant care. She can’t help me anymore. She wasn’t much of a help before anyway. I don’t have anybody in the whole world! I couldn’t possibly take care of another child.”
“Don’t worry,” Hans is trying to assure her: “I will take care of her.”
“I know you will,” she tells him: “I just feel so bad for giving her to a stranger.”
“I am not a stranger, Lee. I am her father.”
“The tests are not done yet…”
“I don’t care about the tests! I know she’s mine! I am surer of this than I ever was of anything. From the moment you told me about her I knew she was what I’ve been waiting for. I would come here to take her even if I wasn’t her biological father.”
“You are a much better person than I am,” Lee is now crying harder: “All my life I tried to do everything right, but it never works. Protection didn’t work, I stayed pregnant. Love didn’t work, Johnny’s father left me and he’s never even seen him. I never had sex again, but that didn’t work either! There is another child anyway!”
“This child is not you responsibility,” Hans tells her gently: “It’s mine. You did nothing wrong.”
Lee just sits there in tears, drowning in her own silly, unreasonable guilt. I showed her Hans on Facebook, last Christmas. At least I did something right. She would’ve never been able to find him otherwise. I wish I could tell her that I don’t blame her for it. I’m grateful that she did what I was too much of a coward to do.
“Why did you keep the baby?” Hans is asking her now.
“It was the only thing I had left from Jonathan,” Lee answers: “I loved him so much. Maybe I still do.”
But I hear something else too, something coming deep from her subconscious mind, the answer she can’t hear or become aware of.
Because the killing stops with me…
I thought nothing could shock me in my death, but I was wrong. My sister’s soul is whispering those words: the killing stops with me. It’s the real reason why she never even considered abortion or why she keeps trying to become a vegetarian. She is trying to stop something that started with her birth, but something that she never participated in, she never caused, she never knew… How could she be driven by something she has no hope of ever understanding, at least not until she dies?
Then again, how could I have ever understood my desire to die during childbirth while I was still alive? And what would be the point if I did? Some truths are not meant for the living.
Hans sent Lee to sleep and now he is walking with Hannah in his arms, smiling and talking to her in a soothing voice.
“Sleep now, baby,” he whispers to our daughter: “We have a long journey ahead of us. I am taking you home tomorrow, I am taking you to my Germany. You have another aunt there, and you have another cousin! They can’t wait to meet you! You know, Hannah, I was always jealous of the relationship my father has with my sister. He loves me too, just as much as her, but what he has with her was always a more special relationship. You know what, kid? Thanks to you I am not jealous anymore. I finally have that myself. I have it with you.”
When I reach to him, he feels me. He recognizes me. He kisses the baby for me and I kiss her through him. She looks right at me and her sweet gaze tells me goodbye.
“I think your mum is here with us,” Hans whispers to Hannah: “You can feel her too, can’t you?”
I smile to her, acknowledging her goodbye with my own. It’s not goodbye forever, it could never be, not in this place in-between that we are both leaving now, the place we will both return to. I will always be with her and she will always be with me, as it always was. But now it’s time for her to live, and for me it’s time to move on.
I float to my sister again, just briefly, I reach her in her dream, a dream she will never remember having, but hopefully her subconscious will, hopefully my message will find a piece of soil on which it can grow and maybe, just maybe, one day it will ease her guilt and she will understand something that she never had, never felt, but my daughter will as much as I did. My message is simple: a daughter belongs with her father.
I turn around while the world of the living disappears underneath me, to face my father and Milan coming to greet me. Our souls blend together as they always did in countless lives we shared together, and they take me out of this place in-between, into the light.
Post je objavljen 26.12.2015. u 22:34 sati.