October 21, 2010

In My Head

Salam.. hahaha.. ehem.. finally I'm posting another one.. Fuhhh.. This narrative is actually my answer to SPM Kedah Trial 2010. SPM Trial?? "Why the hell are you answering SPM trial papers??" you might ask me - and the answer is NOT "I'm repeating SPM" but because I've been working as a temporary tuition teacher at SMK Tunku Abd Aziz for the past 2 weeks.. And today is my last day.. So I try to provide a sample answer by answering the paper on my own.. Forgive me if there are some grammatical mistakes in the following narrative - I was in a rush =,= Oh yaa.. How the hell dis I come up with this story? Well, a few months ago, I met my English teacher, Teacher Ju in fb.. We were talking about a story I wrote when I was her student and I promised to rewrite it. Although the story is not the same, the idea came from that story. So, here it is :D




I was forgiven for my mistake but I know that I should not have been forgiven for what I did. Laws and order may have given me clemency on my so-called ‘mistake’ but I know better – it was not a slip-up – it was my own sinful acts of surrendering myself to the demons of rancour and grudge. Of course, no one knows this ugly truth; no one who still has their blood flowing in their veins knows what happened that night, no one except ‘her’- only ‘her’.

“Miss Emily, are you alright?” my psychoanalyst who is sitting across the table enquires me – noticing that I have been staring into the void of utter nothingness for quite some times. I remain silenced – ignoring the infamous I-care-about-you question.

“Miss Emily? I hope you are ready for this final session because if you…” before he even finishes his good-guy sentence, I interrupt him with a firm yes.

Although my heart is screaming a ‘no’ in silent at that time, I had to answer yes – I had to answer yes to finally be free from this place. However, for me to survive this ‘final session’, to finally conclude this horrific chapter of my life, to break free from the enchainment of my sinful history, I have to continue lying to ensure the truth that no one believes stays entombed and that the lies that everyone seems to believe stays unearthed. Yet, I am in doubt. Can I really ‘live’ again? – knowing the fact that I will live because of lies. I will be able to breathe again, but of course, with the dagger of life stabbed deep in my throat. No, I cannot do it! I cannot lie anymore! I have to tell him the truth! I have to tell him what really happened that dark night – the night of my father’s death. Of course, to tell him that story, I have to start from an even darker night – the night I found my mother’s body ripped in half in front of the mirror, and yes; it was the very same night that I met ‘her’.

“Miss Emily, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad or anything. I was just trying to…” my psychoanalyst tries to console me – seeing streams of tears flowing down my cheeks – tears of which I myself do not even realize that I am subconsciously producing.

I wipe off my tears and signal to him that I need some more time to start the final session. The melancholic reminiscence of that lugubrious night is just too intense for me to ignore. The sight of my own mother’s body brutishly murdered and left to putrefy in ‘that room’ is unbearable for me to remember – her head was cut off, her body was torn apart in half. I can still remember myself holding her head in my arms that night; just her head – drenched with her blood, soaked by my tears. The memory starts to tear me up again. I have fallen so deep into the abyss of sadness and horror that haunting apparition of my mother start to appear in front of me. Without even realizing, I am screaming – screaming like a mad woman who has seen a banshee.

“Miss Emily! Miss Emily! Calm down! Calm down!” my psychoanalyst shouts at me – seeing my rather unusual behaviour. As he is about to call for the nurses, I stop him – I beg him not to and he answers my plea. I let out a big sigh of relief.

“Miss Emily, if you continue to behave like this, it means that you are not well yet and if that’s so, I will not be able to allow you to leave just yet. So please, gather yourself. You have improved a lot since you first came here. Don’t forget what I’ve told you before – just accept what happened because you are not to blame for what happened. You were just not well”, he tries to comfort me with his usual ‘therapy’ talk and smiles at me – I smile back for his effort even though it is not really that comforting.

“Beep! Beep! Beep!”, it was his PDA.

“Forgive me miss but I think I’ll have to leave you alone for a while. Just a while. I’ll be back in just five minutes. Please try to remember the progress we have made since you came here, okay? If you need anything, the nurses are just outside the room. If you’ll excuse me miss,” he says and leaves the room in a rush – I am alone.

To my horror, his ‘therapy’ talk has only made my mind even more troubled. The words, “You are not to blame for what happened” keep playing in my mind repeatedly and monotonously like a reel-to-reel tape recorder and it agonizes myself with the blending dark essences of guilt and anger for I know the ugly truth – I really am to blame for what happened. I hold myself from bursting in tears again and it is killing me. I have to think of a way to kill this immortal sadness if I want to be free from this place. When I almost start to tear up again, I hammer my hands on the table without even realizing it– I have subconsciously channeled my sadness into anger; and when anger starts to flow in my veins and arteries, memories of ‘her’ begin to haunt me.

‘She’ was so enticingly beautiful when I first met her – long black hair, mesmerizingly fair complexion, curved gorgeous body wrapped in a stunningly beautiful black dress; she looked just like me, only more beautiful, extremely more beautiful. I wanted to be her – I wanted to be her so badly.
“Bam!” suddenly the door slams open.

“Are you okay Miss? I heard loud noises coming from here just now”, a nurse comes in to check up on me.

I lie to her that I am fine and that the noise was just me falling off the chair. She closes the door. I take some deep breaths and try to clear my mind off but the melancholic atmosphere of that night would just not go away. There I was, crying over my mother’s dead body with blood smeared all over my hands when I saw ‘her’ in the mirror, smiling beautifully as if there was nothing wrong. Her beauty was so enticing, so mesmerizing, so intoxicating that I had forgotten all about my mother’s death for an instance. Consider the logic of it; I was holding my mother’s blood-bathed decapitated head and this young beautiful woman’s mere smile made me forget all about it. It came to a point that I put my mother down just to get closer to her but when I got nearer to the mirror, she vanished - only my reflection was there in the mirror.

Two days after the burial of my mother, I tried to be ‘her’ – I dyed my hair, powdered my face, thickened my eyeliner and slipped into my mother’s gorgeous black dress. I wanted to see how I look but no mirror was big enough – no mirror except the one that witnessed my mother’s death, the mirror of which I saw ‘her’. Hence, I stood there – in the middle of the room, in front of the mirror; contented, satisfied and pleased that I looked just like ‘her’. I smiled and laughed.

“Bam!” the door slams open again. It is that same nurse again.

“Miss, are you alright? Why are you laughing?” she asks in a cynical tone.

I do not realize that as I am reminiscing about my past, I am actually laughing along at present.

“I think I’ll page Mr. Charon to return right away”, she says before I even have the chance to explain and closes the door – it is not a riddle to anyone that at this point, I have no chance of passing this final session.

I am breathing sadness and fear in every gulp of air again – fully enshrouded in fulminating darkness. The prospect of having to stay here for a few more years is just too torturous for me to bear and it is all because of ‘her’ – it started with her and it is still because of her. She is the one who has driven me to do all that I did. She is the one who whispered words of lustrous temptations to my ears. She is the one who made me act as the Angel of Death to my father. Yes, maybe she is just as blameful as I am. Maybe I am not the only one responsible for my father’s death but it is all just a maybe – only a maybe.

I can still remember the day I met ‘her’ the second time – it was the day of my father’s utmost cruelty. He was drunk and violent – randomly rambling and shouting about my mother. I was hiding in fear in my mother’s ‘deathbed’ and that was when ‘she’ appeared in her usual incredibly beautiful self.
“Emily. Do you want to know who killed your mother?” she asked me with a blissfully beautiful smile.
I did not know what to answer – maybe because I was stunned by her beauty or maybe because I really do not want to know how my mother ended up like that. Either one of the possibilities, she does not care.

“It was your father Emily. I was there. It wasn’t you. It was him. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t you,” she said with a slightly evil yet beautiful smirk.

I was petrified in fear. My father was trying to bust the door open so I tried to find something in the room that could be used as a weapon; and I found an axe. I waited for the door to bust and let out a scream of anger and sadness.The door opens and my psychoanalyst enters with a team of nurses.

“Miss Emily, I’m sorry to have left you like that. I heard from one of the nurses that you acted strangely just now”, he says - holding a syringe in one of his hands. The event that follows is out of my consciousness.

5 comments: