A Broken Song

I woke up to the strangest sound. It had been raining heavily since midnight and the sound of the thunder which had engulfed me like a warm blanket through the night was being interrupted by a bird. Maybe it was a pigeon, maybe it was a parrot. I don't know, I don't know many birds. It wasn't an ordinary song that she sang, it sounded like she had been electrocuted and the chirping which is normally bright and annoying, sounded like a malfunctioning transistor radio. She was suffering, but it was clearly an issue in her mind, because her voice was still strong and it lacked the urgency of physical injury, it was just scrambled, like someone had messed with the encryption system and nothing made sense anymore. She was a bird, so she sang for it was all she knew, but she sang a broken song. I wonder if she even knew it was broken, for she sang so persistently you'd have thought she really believed it sounded sweet.

It was an odd note on which to start my day, and I carried that broken song with me wherever I went. It was stuck in my head, like a fork scrambling eggs way past the point to which it was necessary, and I felt like my day had lost its rhythm. Poetry felt like it has lost its music and music felt like it had lost its melody. I felt like I was using the brake too much while I drove and there were too many commas in everything I wrote. By the time evening came the storm was still raging, but intermittently, for an hour it would rain, and then for another there would be silent recovery. My neighbour came upstairs to see me. She was wearing a light pink jacket and grey sweatpants. She's a nice woman, much older than I am, but I enjoy her company very much. There is a rare honesty to her, and a little bit of madness. We sat on the balcony and she told me she had been cheating on her husband for twenty-years. I don't know what it is about me, but people tell me secrets even when I don't solicit them in any way. Before you judge her please understand that arranged marriages in India are a trap sealed by a lock forged out of the difficulty of procuring divorces. She loves her husband, I really believe that she does, but she is just fundamentally promiscuous. In an ideal world she would have had the option to choose a partner who was open to her having multiple-lovers, but it's not an ideal world, in this one she cannot even choose which mental health professional to see without her entire family deciding on her behalf.

She told me who she has been fucking, and I get it, I would have fucked him too. He's a fun guy who drinks way too much. He's in a truly terrible marriage, unlike her, but he wears the agony well. It becomes him like a well-cut suit conceived by an Italian designer and stitched by a nameless young boy in a sweatshop. She cried for a bit and despite myself I held her hand, I do not believe the guilt is what made her cry, I believe she enjoys the guilt and doing the wrong things, but she cannot accept that she enjoys them. She wants to resist against the image that is thrust on her, the role of a perfect wife and mother and daughter-in-law, but the resistance is putting so much pressure on her, even in articulately-woven sentences it sounds like she is screeching. I offered her a drink but she said she was on medication that disallowed her from drinking. I offered her some pot but she said her mother-in-law would smell it on her when she went back to her home. She went back home as sober as she had been when she arrived, which if you ask me, wasn't very sober at all.

I came to bed later than usual, I didn't realise how much time had passed on the balcony, my husband was waiting for me, and the child was probably pretending to sleep in the other room but really playing with the cats by flashlight.

"You were gone a long time," he said sitting up straighter and looking straight at me with his dead, beautiful eyes.

"She had a lot to say today," I told him as I undressed, "Some of it made sense."

"I have a lot to say too," he said, walking over to me, "So much it's going to destroy your frail little heart."

He's awful, but he is perfect. He likes to tell me what he is going to do, and you'd think that would take the element of surprise out of it, but even when he tells me in painful detail exactly what he intends to do, each step is like a revelation when it happens.

"Talk to me then," I said sinking down to my knees on the rug I bought two-months ago.

"No, I don't want to talk to you," he said stepping on my back and pushing my face onto the floor, "I want to talk at you."

That seemed like enough of a cue to stop talking. I love how easy everything is with him, I never have to use my brain, just follow the direction he takes and be quiet. I can stop performing and just be a spectacle in a cage that is enough of performance just for existing. I don't have to orchestrate this show at all, I'm an actor, every movement and every word has already been charted, scripted and taught to me. He's the only person in the world with whom I know exactly how to behave, because he is the only person in the world who can just tell me exactly how to behave. He walked over to the back of me and pushed me over until my ass hung so obscenely in the air I had to close my eyes. I hate having my insides so out in the open, it interrupts the symphonic description of it in my head. As outrightly filthy as I like things to be when it comes to my body, in my head I prefer a version painted in pain and blacks, not vulgarity and cunt. My head doesn't matter though, which all things considered, is a kindness.

"This hole is fucking disgusting," he said pushing his toe inside my cunt, "The ugliest fucking thing I may have ever seen, it takes everything in me not to spit at it the moment I lay my eyes on it."

There never was a blessing as immense as a man who understands how to humiliate me. It's been too long now to explain why not only do I wish to be degraded, I also wish for it to be directed at specific parts of my body. I'm just glad he understands that, and desires it as much as I do. The words that he was saying were interrupted by the smack of his foot kicking against my cunt, I fell over a little bit, but I pulled myself back up almost immediately. There's no room to cheat with him, and my shackles are bound much tighter than the ones that enslave my neighbour, when everything is so brazenly out in the open, there is no way to hide. I wouldn't even try. It would serve no purpose. There is no joy for me in secrets and lies. There is no pleasure in deception with him. Especially when so much more lies in the promise of searing exposure. There isn't enough of a private-self left of me for there to be any secrets.

"How pathetic that you wet my foot even as I kick you," he said still kicking more heavily to the right than the left, "I should have to bleach my foot just for being in contact with your filth."

How powerful it is to feel so dirty, and how freeing to accept that is who you are. All filth and passion. All garbage and emotion. The next blow didn't come from his foot but from his belt, it was loud. Way too loud. In my head a song was playing and the leather was distorting just the right notes, in just the moments when I was about to get up and dance. He was hurting me, much more than I could utter, but something about my voice was stuck. Even the sighs came out wrong and broken. The moans got lost against the thundering of the belt. The screams, never conceived, lay wrapped in plastic underneath the tailor's table forever.

"I can smell you better than I can see you," he said raining down blows on my cunt as if it were a practise pillow, "You smell as terrible as you look, barely a woman, almost a beast."

That one was harsh, and wrong, but I have no problem admitting how much I love the wrong. I don't need someone to hold my hand on a balcony to make me feel less immoral, it doesn't matter to me, I have nothing to learn morality for. Even if I have sinned, I atone so persistently, I have been punished for seven lifetimes already. He stopped suddenly, almost as suddenly as he began, and I heard the sound of his belt landing in the trash can on the side of the room. The noise startled me, it broke the spell of the pain, and I turned around to look.

"It's too dirty for me to wear now," he said, "I can't use it."

"I can clean it," I said in the most pathetic rendition of my voice that I could muster.

"It's permanently tainted, slave," he said, "Permanently tainted."

I started to let out of cry but his foot landed against my jaw and by the time I hit the floor, the cry had been muffled and muddled into a sound never heard before on this earth. I still cried because it's all I know, but it was wrong. It sounded wrong.  It was broken.

My broken song.