The Grass Lady

  She sits motionless in her armchair. She hears her neighbors shouting, and laughing, simply alive. She stares at her book of Virginia Woolf’s The Room of One’s Own and never turns the page over for the last hour. Is she reading? Is she pretending reading? Is it just an escape from her reality? Is it just fantasy?

    She is half dead, half alive. She remembers that she has been in this room for 2 years now and has never been out. Her room is familiar to you as if it were the real version of Vincent Van Gough’s The Bedroom. Like a weary creature, she looks like a soldier who lost her war that she has been continuously and silently fighting. Her silent war never comes to an end. Her mind is a state of everlasting, brutal, and invisible war. She is a captive in the lands of self-loathing and self-denial. She fights her war alone. She is silent, but her silence is a sense of anger, a sense of despair, and a sense of loneliness. She never knows the reason for all of that.

  Out of the blue, the wind gives her a kiss of life. There the smell of grass gently whispers to her soul. This smell is a reminder of her lost soul. This smell is the memory of her happy days. Back then, she was familiar to herself. Now she is a stranger like an elf. Once, she was cheerful soul, like a singing nightingale. Her presence was with at most delight.

   From the very beginning of her understanding of life, she could not handle it. She was living in a spacious house with her husband and her four loving children. Samy, the elder, is like his mother an artist and his soul is as white as Snow White. Jody and Nora are always the trouble- makers. The youngest, Joseph, is the most cheerful soul that you can ever find.  Each one of them is a part of her character.

    She used to smell the scent of the grass in her garden, when she calls her children for lunch. She always takes pictures to save these lovely moments forever. They are always priceless to her. She wishes if she could pause this moment forever. She remembers the smell of the Turkey in their wonderful garden mixed with the smell of grass. She keeps telling Judy and Nora "stop making this noise while eating" or "behave like young ladies." They always turn a deaf ear to her words. She remembers how she is vexed with them, yet she always enjoys their nonsensical arguments. These little fights are always her delight.

      Winter is coming along with the bloody war. Once she wakes up and she gets the smell of burnt grass. Her window that used to overlook her used-to-be-green garden now overlooks the grey ashes of her happy days. There is a voice in her mind tells her "Beware, Beware, the ides of November!" Awake from her shock, she rushes into her children like a tiger fighting in vain the invisible hand of fate. She finds her husband with his torn battle dress. His face is like a zombie or as if his soul has escaped his body. He tells her "hurry up, we will escape from here through the sea."

       These words are her doom. The word "escape" keeps ringing in her mind. Escape from what! Her life! Her home! Her self! Her memories! From what! What war! Why the fight?! She gazes at her garden, her bed, her room, her shattered home. Each inch here has a memory. Leaving all of that behind! She is lost in her thoughts and has lost her sense of time and the world.

   Walking further to her doom, she is now in an old Jeep. Each second, checks if her children are safe and sound. How fool she is! The word “safe” never collocates with the word “war.” They stop at a place that people used to call it a school. The ruins of the school make her sick. She starts imagining as if her children were studying there at the time of the school's bombardment. How she could ever handle that. The loss of her children, or any children. Her heart starts aching of such thoughts. "Enough! Your children are with you, they are still breathing! Be strong and be the source of safety here. Your husband also needs you."

     Her husband brings some food from the Jeep. He finds old half-ruined desks, a half tank of a tree and a broken blackboard on which he puts the food. Is it the Last Supper? No! They will be fine. She keeps getting these unpleasant thoughts away. There is an inner war inside her and she cannot even reveal it. She needs to wear the mask of strength and mighty. Yet her eyes sometimes fail her. A sense of terror and fear escapes from her trembling voice. However, she quickly fixes that with a tender look or a loving word.

   "Hurry up, we need to catch the boat before dawn, to run away to Peaceina. There we will be safe!" said the husband. She passively follows his orders. She does not have any other choice. She does not have the authority to question his plan. She feels like a scapegoat driven blindly to her doom. She hurries to the Jeep holding Samy and Joseph while her husband holding Nora and Judy. They drive in complete darkness except for the lightening of the fire in the moonless sky. Finally, they reach the harbor. There is a small boat which is never enough of the 40 desperate souls.

     She feels her doom approaching her further and further. The boat is their only chance of survival. It is their only hope. She steps into the shaking boat. Her heart is beating faster and louder as if it were about to explode in her body. Her hands become colder. She could not feel the streaming sweat. It has been a great strain on her nerves. "Be brave! Be strong! Everything will be ok. It is just a bad day and it will come to an end." These words keep ringing in her mind. An hour of an intense war of nerves has passed. An hour! No, it is a year. No, a decade. No, a century. No, it is eternal. She never escapes this night, it keeps playing over and over and over with no pause. Her mind is just a video tape which has only this memory recorded. Everything else is erased.

      How strange is the human mind! It erases some memories and keeps others with no logical explanation. It plays its game like fate plays with man’s life.  Sitting in her chair, she tries in vain to remember what happened. Her memories vanished into the thin air except for the pictures of the garden with her family. She only remembers the smell of grass. It is really painful when you look at the mirror and you do not remember yourself. She lost the battle of life by losing herself, her identity, her children. Maybe her brain tries to be merciful to her. Her memory is tabula rasa, as white as clean sheets.

     She has the pictures of her children hanging on the wall. Rarely, one of her neighbors visit her. She is always absent-minded, yet she tries to be alive again. She always feels that she lost something. A heart. Maybe. Her soul. Perhaps. Her life. Not exactly. She never manages to know herself. One thing that she fails to understand is the reason why people stare at the pictures of her children, the only memory that she has, and start crying. They never tell her the reason. Too much knowledge is painful and dreadful. She never remembers that they found her on the shore with the corpses of her children lying around her motionless, lifeless in the deep silence of the sea of death. Her room is a room in the hospital.