One Empty Space

Epilogue

In the end, it had never been them.

It had always been me. My birth.

The fog in the frosty night was set ablaze by the street lamps. Their orange-yellow light flickered over the empty streets, interrupted by the occasional skeletal tree, bare and black branches like dark omens cutting through the light.

I saw it all as through a filter. My legs would carry on, relentlessly. Thank God. If my mind had won the battle, they would have caved a long time ago, given in, crumbled, as my world had.

„It’s your fault,“ a voice whispered in my left ear. The hair on my skin stood up straight, but my legs carried on, still. So did the voice. My guilt.

For 20 long years, I had curated the perfect charade. Everything was just fine. Almost perfect, but nothing ever really is, so I had to be contented with just fine. And I was okay with that. There was no need for actual change, as long as everyone played their part. The delicate balance was not easy to maintain, but it was worth it.

Or so I told myself.

No one ever needed to know I knew.

No one needed to know I knew why there was an empty room.

But now… there was a before, and an after.

Day One, After

I woke up in a tangled mess of pillows and duvets. Things needed to come out of my body, and apparently they had tried to escape at night. My left leg had scrunched up one of the two duvets and wrapped it around itself twice. My mouth was dry, my lips cracking. I tried to close it, but it wouldn’t salivate properly, so I had to get up, into the small bathroom, and hang my face under the faucet. The cold water hurt my teeth, but finally brought relieve on my tongue. The first sip tasted sour. I remained in the position for a while, even after I stopped drinking. My hand did not turn off the faucet, my spine wouldn’t lift my body. I just stood their, crouched, in my tiny bathroom. Eventuelly I realized, I would have to do something. Whatever that meant. Doing stuff follows a purpose. I didn’t have any. Not anymore. I couldn’t exactly say, the memory of last night came back to me. In my mind, I still stood there. Frozen in time, listening to my sister scream.

Her shrieking voice summoned the demons we had collectively banned to a different place, a different time. Now they were here. Appearing one by one in my parents’ living room.

They rose from the hardwood floors, seeped down from the ceiling, pressed through cracks in the walls. The room got crowded, but there was nowhere to flee to. The demons, now there in the open commanded us to be still and watch as they unfurled.

„The empty room!“, my mind gasped, exasperated. That’s where I need to go!

My mind was not wrong. The blank walls behind the thick door would be a true relieve compared to this overcrowded hell. Maybe I wouldn’t even be able to hear my sister’s voice there.

My neck started to hurt. I rose slowly from the sink, and looked at myself in the mirror. I was not a dignified pale as one would expect, no, I was purple and red around the eyes, bright red where my fingers, I apparently slept on, printed onto one side of my face. Only the cracked skin on my lips appeared grey as ash. Ready to shed.

I was ready to shed. Shed what?

Now that would be a tough choice to make. I could shed the memory - or rather living through - last night. Or I could follow my sister and shed the life we had lived ever since we got old enough to understand the truth about the world around us.

The truth about the unloving, cold house we lived in. With parents, who sleepwalked through their own life not knowing how to wake up.

They came from a time, when things were done, they way there were done. Convention, social status and what the neighbors thought mattered more than anything. „Values“ were fraught, as they were only measured as far as they were visible. The problem with that is, well, that values are inherently intangible, invisible. There are visible things we attribute to certain values, but then, if you try to FEEL them in the way invisible, intangible things need to be felt, there is only emptiness.

I once heard the empty space of the universe smelled like bacon. This emptiness smells of despair.

Fact was, that my parents did not love each other. They were not even in love the idea of the life they would have. They were lead to believe this was the one life there was.

My mother was only 19 when my parents got married. My father 28. By then he had been in charge of the family business for ten years already. He followed the dynastic plan, a child himself, who had just lived through World War II as a teenager. He was fourteen by it’s end, 15 when his father finally returned. My grandfather had been deployed in the Balkans, as some high-ranking SS-Officer’s Driver. No one really knows what he did. Before his deployment to the war, he had been a convinced member of the Nazi Party. When he returned in 1946 he did not seem to be convinced of anything, not even his own aliveness.

His mother, my grandmother, had lead the family factory through the war, using forced labour and serving the war machine by delivering whatever kind of metal parts the Wehrmacht needed to have galvanized. When my grandfather returned, he was unable to take over again. He was broken beyond repair. I wondered whether the trauma the perpetrators of those horrors was different in such ways from the trauma of the victims, that the perpetrators knew, deep inside, what they were capable of, they they did it all once, and thus, could do it again. I wondered, whether that „It’s simply what we had to do“ fed into the societal conventions forcing my parents together in the decades that followed. Mass Murderers can’t find redemption, and how could anyone ever heal the trauma of knowing one’s darkest self - not having to act to survive, but simply because? I fully understand why my grandfather fell into a stupor, why his brain refused to acknowledge he would be able to fulfill any actions at all. Not eating, not sleeping, not getting up to pee. As long as his brain did not allow for any such action to take place, he would also not be able to commit anything terrible.

The cruelty my grandfather uncovered in himself and he now so desperately tried to suppress moved a found a proxy: My father.

My mother had been his secretary at the time of their meeting. At 19 years old, she had left school 5 years before and started to work in the local factory my fathers family owned as an assistant, and working her way up to a secretary. What she lacked in formal education, she made good in social graces. Her rise to the anterooms of the important offices of the factory was paid in smiles and gentle flirtation, rather than actual skill. Born towards the end of the war, her demeanor was not shadowed by memories and loss. Though nicknamed „Bunkerschreier“ („bunker screamer“) as a baby, she was blissfully unaware of the true horrors that had happened around her for the first two years of her life.

Young as my father was, he would still hang out with his friends at the usual hang out spots of youngsters in the small town: a small rising, just out of town, with a humble view over the roofs. From here you could see the chimneys of my fathers smaller factory, and further away, the humongous versions of the large metal smelting factory in the centre of the town.

When my mother was only 16, she started to go here regularly. She had once caught the eye of my father at work, and immediately took note. She chose him as her way out: Out of the small home of her parents, a simple working class couple, that had not exactly welcomed their new arrival warmly at those war times. Her next older sibling was ten years her senior. My father would socially and economically be significant step up: Something she could only achieve through marriage, not merit.

After ogling each other for years on the hill and in the office, one day my father - rather clumsily - tried to initiate a conversation with my mother. For that exact purpose she had stayed longer in the factory - far longer than she would have needed. By the time my father finally came out of his office, she had retyped the same notes no less than eleven times.

It wasn’t my mothers first time having sex. She had wanted to be prepared for the moment, to she would be collected and knew how to act.

And an act it was. Despite their frequent encounters over so many years, their attempt at sex was as awkward as you can imagine. To rise to the responsibility of the family business at 18, my father had repressed anything that could come in it’s way, especially feelings. His body was merely a vessel, an object, and so was my mothers.

For my mother, getting pregnant immediately might have been a blessing. Her plan unfolded quickly, they got married, and suddenly she was woman with a good name, money, her own proud household.

It was everything she thought worth wanting. Until she could feel it more and more: her marriage, her life - all were an object to her husband. Something you needed to have, like pants and a dress shirt. Love, as she had told herself would come sooner or later, never came. Instead: Coldness, and eventually, cruelty.

My father wanted to an heir, someone he could bestow his own fate upon, unlucky as it might have been.

I have three younger sisters. With every girl, who busted her way out of my mother, my father grew colder and colder. Sex - though hypothetically consensual - become an increasingly violent character, as if men needed violence to be brought into the world.

Nothing worked, and with my third little sister, my mother needed a caesarean. Out of medical necessity or out of kindness, I don’t know, but the doctor in the hospital removed my mothers womb. She was free.

Partially. She was free of my father physically. Without the ability to bear an heir, the object of her body lost all it’s worth to him. Yet, separating let alone divorce was never an option.

Both lived on duty. The show must go an. A happy, thriving family. We were four, well-behaved, demure girls. Tidy, good at school, well-liked. Hadn’t we been so far up the social ladder of the small town, we might have as well been invisible.

Invisible we hoped to be at home. Whoever fell out of alignment, failed to act our part, was punished. My father wouldn’t raise a hand against us, he would let mother do his bidding, his dirty work. She knew better how to punish us without leaving a mark.

So we all grew up. Now, we are scatted. My youngest sister lives in Berlin, she rarely calls. The only thing she and me share is the fact of having been alone with my parents for some years of our lives. Mine, when I was a very small and it was the early years. Hers, when my father grew more and more violent. I am not going to repeat his frequent words to you, dear reader. They were his, and I will not make them mine, too.

The two sisters in the middle went abroad. I stayed in our home town.

„We all knew,“ my sister screamed. I closed my eyes. Pressed them together until the black before my eyes turned red.

„You left every day to see him! How should we not have noticed?“

I had founder an answer to my sisters question a long time ago. Of course we all knew my mother had found a secret window out of our life, the life she created for her daughters. Everyone know. It was a small town, and her lover lived on the other side of town. My mother did not actually care whether anyone knew. It was never about the truth. It was about the charade. For herself, for father, for the town.

For society she was a woman with a name, with financial means, a successful husband and four tidy daughters. With a perfect household. Crystal glasses, antique furniture, polished silverware.

Nothing was wrong, ever. No crack could be shown. But when the curtain fell, there was what the human in her needed: True Love. For decades she carried on an affair.

I understood my sisters feeling of betrayal. We never had a way out. She had moved an ocean away, to New York, but still she could not find a way out of our childhood. Not they way mother had. Not without fully undoing herself, and then building herself again from nothing. If I was her, I would scream too. I imagines her swimming through the Atlantic, leaving behind pieces of herself with every stroke. She had to do it alone. Be nothing, become something.

I had accepted that I did not seem to be cut out for that a long time ago.

Shedding. I needed to chose what to shed. The life I knew, the charade?

There is a problem with that idea. You know that in Japan, crack porcelain is rebuild with gold filling the cracks. I don’t have gold in my cracks. If I were a broken vase, I would not only be incomplete, my cracks would be filled with tar, still hot, still sticky, still stinking.

I am already broken, and if a come undone, I will be a black, stinky sticky mess with spikes of broken porcelain sticking out, hurting anyone who tries to pick me up.

I cannot shed my life. I must shed last night.

Day 27, After the fact.

I walk the same way to my parents house I walked 27 days ago, at night. Now its the morning. It’s cold, but as I walked the fog cleared and gave way to a beautiful morning. The crips air fills my lungs, but instead creating a burning sensation, my lungs make space. I broke the vase, eventually. No suddenly there is space for me to breath.

I arrive at my parents door. Instead of ringing, I use my spare key and silently enter. I can hear the voices from the TV drift through the hallway from the living room. It’s early for the TV being on. I stand in the hallway, the door still open behind me. One last deep breath of fresh air before I close the door.

Instead of towards the living room, and turn towards the stairs and climd them up. I know where I am headed.

The empty room.

The hardwood floors on the first floor creak, I try to become lighter, invisible.

I open the door, enter, close. Walk towards the middle of the room. The is different in here.

I close my eyes.

A few moments I stand still. Then, the door opens and my mother enters without a word.

„That was the room is for,“ she says. „Being still. Shutting out the world. Not making it nice for anyone. Just being.“

I am surprised my mother was that aware of her circumstances, her life. If she knew - why didn't she change it?

„How are you feeling?“, she asks.

„Like fucking shit,“ I answer.

Honest for the first time.