The woman's grave

Whatever they say, nothing could hurt more. It wasn’t for nothing that Achilles, the one with a lifetime of scars and a chest of arrows, felled by the most infamous break of the flesh , and his heel remained in history with the fall of Troy. However, in high school, her psychology teacher had mistaken him for Icarus and had tactically popped her gum when she had corrected her. And maybe it's in the human essence to yearn for tragedy or to become addicted to dreams beyond ourselves. Both truly believed they could pierce fatality and sat at the same table as death, laughing at the outcome. The boot! At the beginning of the day it didn't gnaw on her skin, it sat quietly, perfectly straight, just like at the store fitting. What if they wanted to touch two impossibles at once? Achilles to conquer Troy and create a family, Icarus to touch the sun and be a ruler of his lands. Two attempts, two deaths, but one body to slumber in, forever. Where's that story? It was frightening how she felt no fear, how lucid she was about everything. Had Icarus been like that when he felt his skin begin to burn, digging his nails into the flesh to gather the last sprinkles of life? But still, where is the obnoxious Andrada? With her leather-bound notebook in which she writes down all her assignments, with her unfurled hair, her stilettos and too-strident lipstick. It's just known that everyone with ambition is split in two categories, like the obsession with knowledge and their irresistibility in the face of the truth, like any inconvenient nuance which would be easier to turn into black and white. The rebellious ones, who fight society with the ferocity of a wronged being, and the ones who have never been given water, so started drinking the essences of souls, to climb over others in parallel with social values. And in her black and white, Andrada was charcoal dust ash. How hypocritical of society to worship fiction and history, though they aren’t much too different, the rebels. When she was born, before the umbilical cord was cut, her mother saw her face and named her after her idol, the Virgin Maria, convinced by her innocent face that her daughter deserved the name. This is how Maria Magdalene came into the world, the name of a pure and saintly girl, replaced by the nickname of Mary, both a ghost and a bloody queen. The tactful new identity had not been enough to ever rid her of the Maria Magdalene who followed her at the crossroads and watched her from behind, eye to eye through mirrors and window reflections. It was then that she discovered for the first time that it's not so easy to break away from who you were and be reborn. So she dissociated into two. Into what could she have been and what she was, which one should she beg for mercy? And her fear began to gnaw at her, for she suddenly realized that she could not remove her own boot. That she would not be able to do anything from then on, and that the control she had when she had arranged the codes in an ideal string was gone. In the language of silence, Andrade's knees probably sank into the soft earth, the fondant into which her body sank each morning lacking the dirt from arched fingers. Mary had no way of knowing all this, but she hoped for a scene of overwhelming drama emanating from a being that should have long been devoid of the capacity for expression. Mary wished she had known that blood was seeping from Andrade's fingers through the splinters. That, one way or another, her pain was showing. That, one way or another, others could understand her. She would not end up like Mary, Andrade's body would rot in the street until some worker decided to dump some dirt on her. But Mary knew that in hundreds of years, from those bones would sprout trees gifted with leaves that would delight. She would be among them all, never alone, and maybe that could be scary if she didn't discover the melody in the noises. Stories may romanticize her, under a different name, with a different face and different principles, but she will still be her. How Andrada would hate, as much as she could, those who would do so, and how she would smile, as much as she could, when she knew how Mary hated them. And how ridiculous it would seem to them both, how someone dead could feel more than a living person.

But Andrada was no longer her friend. And she probably wasn't kneeling by her grave, a table of Dark Angels looming in the distance. In death, as she had been all her life, Mary was alone. No one loved her anymore, did she love? She now had to lay and rinse the dust off her body in a darkness she could only feel. How glad she was that someone had been so merciful as to close her eyelids so that she could not see how the planks enclosed her body, how she stretched with her whole being covered in black clothes down to the toes and heels that surrounded her, stretching herself out over the whole world as she had once wanted. Once she had thought death was poetic, like in books; to feel that you belong to the earth, that its soft structure surrounds you, while nature breaks you down and reshapes you into something you neither wanted nor ever were, perhaps into stardust, with a light for all to admire, but too far away not to feel abandoned; just as she had, once upon a time, thought solitude belonged to books. But now she realized that authors only capture the surface, those five seconds of sublime stillness she had felt with the death of Achilles or Icarus, that even the most talented capture only a few milliseconds more than the ordinary. Now she realized that all she felt was a damp earthy-smelling fear and a cold wood beneath her back which her fingers were firmly touching. She had slept for a while but had woken up between the boards, missing the whole ritual and burial. She hadn't gotten to see the sunny skies, unlike the torrential downpours from books. At least now she could finally admit to herself that she loved to read books, having had to lie to herself and others for so long. It had never been enough for Mary to just hide from her peers, she had had to convince herself that her being was the perfection she craved and from which her parents and everyone else expected remarkable results. She wondered, regretting that of all the moments she could have missed, she had missed her funeral, not even getting to mentally say goodbye to everyone else, left only with her imagination in the end, wondering whether her mother regretted for a second that her only daughter had died without securing her honor through marriage and life as a housewife. Had the computer science professor been there and wondered why his favorite student had passed away without any accomplishments? Did everyone mourn twice: once for the person and once for what they might have been? For what they had lost and for what they might have had? 

She would never see the twelve black angels again. Now she realized, only now, that when she had first told herself this it might not have been the end. But here it was definitive. Death gives endings to what might have been. And if she had achieved nothing, did she still have the right to live? Every moment of her life had not been an attempt to reach her limits, to become her best self, but to prove to herself that she deserved to live. Just as her mother had taught her how to make it to heaven. But she was in a hard place with the realization that her soul wasn't going anywhere, that she had been dedicating her whole life to a goal that didn't really exist. And it was almost as frightening as when she had gone out into the world and realized she didn't miss what she had once called home. She could feel the grave, as she would never see it, only feel its pungent smell and stinging coldness through the black dress in which she would forever lie. Mary had always hated dresses like that, ankle-length, meant to cover her whole body, but as her family decided her clothing, even in death, she was forced to take on a different identity than who she was. Surprisingly, she felt nothing in her honey nectar hair, no handkerchief to permanently erase her identity as her mother and grandmother wore. It had started at a time when she didn't exist, and her grandmother had had an emotional breakdown that had landed her in the hospital with a faded memory. One look into her own daughter's eyes and she wondered who she was as she had been wondering again and again in front of the mirror for weeks until she turned her head to the right and touched her own truth. Turning to religion, she came back from oblivion, but never became the person she was before, and taught her child at a young age the mysteries of the universe through her own eyes, giving her her soul and becoming the same entity in the same world, shaping her gaze to be fluent in black and white as they could not be fluent in color for a lifetime. In an attempt to give Him all her belongings, she gave her child religious names, wanting to make it have the same soul as the other two, a whole of three beings, not realizing that her own child did not belong to her. Thus she became that baby with the sign of nostalgia marked on its forehead. Later she was nicknamed Mary by her high school classmates for the bloodiness of her calculated words, a name that stuck with her in college, and she learned to assume both names as she assumed all identities given to her by others. This is how we can imagine Mary, an entity of many ghosts created by the principles of others, just as in forgotten cultures one person is believed to have many souls. But the concept of the split spirit is based on the idea that one soul flies free, discovering the world. And Mary had no dream of a free soul or longing for a lost one. Then there are the Chinese, who believe that one soul leaves at death and another remains with the body. Is that what's happening to her now? And if so, did a spirit of memories remain, shattering only in its apparent fragility that exudes indestructibility, when the other had gone perhaps to reincarnation, perhaps to Hell? Yes, as her mother had defined sinners, she was certainly one of them. Where did that fine line blur, between what gets us to Heaven and what gets us to Hell, between family and one's own life, between faith and desire? She had long ago defined, she once thought she created that definition during her birth, just before she cried, that the opposite of the believing spirit is the desiring spirit. Likewise, she once realized that the Romanian language has too few words, or more precisely, one word to define too many, just as ,,dorință”, ,,lăcomie” and ,,egoism” as words can cover all seven deadly sins. "Lust", "Greed", "Gluttony", "Despair", "Wrath", "Sloth", "Vanity" and "Pride", the English were good at inventing words that conveyed only one meaning, being more impactful. There she had begun the rebellion that would take her to Hell, split in two as her whole being was, between thought and deed. In her English-working mind, she stopped calling people "people", choosing "humans" instead. There, too, she was skimming the pages of books or opening a pdf on her computer in which the ideas of each religion were framed. 

It's terrifying when you don't have a choice, but it is even more terrifying when your only choice is wrong. That's what Mary felt in the early days when she embraced computers, technology and all that encompassed it. With the fantasy of typewritten letters, could she ever forgive herself for that one choice? Romania had built her, just as that divided country had been built on the ruins of communism, also with communism, by taking the choice from her. Mary had given up many parts of herself by eighth grade, for her mother's sake, but nothing had hurt her like when she knew she could only read in secret, that she had to forget the antiquity of letters and the melody of poems, that this class built stars of STEM in the most advanced high schools, but there was no advanced high school for philology. And she knew, too, that if she got lost in the mediocrity of the middle, she would never return. The first realization of the heart had come with the taste of blood when she bit her cheek, the salty taste of mortals losing who they are. That country took away what she had been as a child, had taken away her first love, literature, giving her computer science, which she liked but didn't love. She had modeled herself on safety, not letting the unknown and the risky tear her apart. Having everything under control. Always. 

What can destroy you more than when you understand the illusion of control? 

Amid the smell of wet roots, she remembered the steam of the mash in the pot over which the cream and cheese was left, next to the Easter sausage. In the first year of her life, her grandmother had bought her a gold cross with some savings gathered here and there, because her grandmother never accepted offerings from her children, being a proud woman, marked with the vehement sign of religion. Her mother had kept it well until the child reached an age when both responsibility and conscience would prevent her from losing the cross, for her mother did not know what more to expect from her own daughter. Mary remembered how, as a six-year-old, she had been entrusted with that jewel, and with it she became forever Maria Magdalene, as Mary in equal measure, but never what she would have even wanted to be. She often wondered if she had a will of her own, as she looked at everyone else, or if she was guided by puppet strings through the penumbras of unelected life. She shuddered, her face unchanging, at that thought of not having her own hands to direct the world, so she denied it with rare fervor. True, Mary had never had an impulsive nature, she even walked in the most calculated way and looked like a baroness in her own kingdom. In solitude, winning, after all, is the most important. She had heard often, even from her father, of the idea of joy in battle, not of winning or losing, but how can you have joy if losing means death? But does Mary fight more for her own victory, or because she has never known anything but the battlefield? Either way, to her it's as insignificant as her whole being. But now she did not feel the cold metal beneath her coat on her lightly browned skin, and she remembered how long ago she had lost her golden cross. The smell of alcohol vapors, she could still feel it unfolding from her lips like the continuous, endless melody of a broken megaphone. She’d probably lost it on a late-night getaway when pride didn't outweigh the need for pleasure. Some beggar had probably thrown himself on it, and hands with hardened mud on them had almost broken the gold from the ecstasy their whole body felt. Known to patriots and dreamers as Little Paris, this city had neither the lights of hope that cover the stars that never fulfilled our desires anyway, nor the heroism of a successful revolution. Bucharest, with its trickles of hidden communism, held the skeletons of sacrifices and murders just as Paris held its catacombs, deeds that still gnawed at the insides of newborns. This is how we Romanians were born with the nostalgia of what we could have been. If in the case of wars, we do not know who fired first, our sin is that we understand what happened. And, like Mary, we probably couldn't have changed anything. That's how she came to feel her roots trapped in that land we thought of as of the Romans', teaching the children their language in school, not the Dacians'. As humanity pays in God's eyes for the sins of Eve and Adam, so shall we pay forever for the sins of our ancestors in these lands. And Mary stubbornly understood these, as it could not have been otherwise, so the world is guided by religion not only in deeds but also in nostalgia. But how can we speak of this phantasmagorical country, in which all mourn what the ones before them could not have, and in which we sink into the mediocrity on which we have built ourselves since the days of rulers when we only defended, never on the offensive, how could we speak of bowed heads that swords do not cut, about the whimpering with which we kissed icons in identical churches with which we tried to boast on tours also made by us, how we could hand over a document by Romanians for Romanians, when we did not know how Mary ended up sunk in the pit where she was to spend eternity and where she always dared to hope that Andrada would appear, without having a clock to measure her life and stop hoping for her. The truth remained the same and it was not that in this world those who die remain conscious in the body. No, Mary was now where she had always known she would end up. In her own hell.