A Woman Without A Uterus

- A Woman Without A Uterus -

We say nothing for a long time. There's nothing we can say. We both know there's too much to say and words would do no justice like watering a dead shriveled up plant. I simply hold her tight and her fingers dig into my clothes and skin.

I can't see her, but I know it's her. This is not an illusion, I convince myself again and again. This is not a psychological game. But it's hard to grasp on to consciousness in the dark. Eventually, the warmth and the weight of her body on mine, our limbs tangled together, fuses like melting plastic. She feels like an extension of myself and I start to lose all understanding of the situation. Where my hand is, where my head is, where my leg is. All I feel is a bleeding, sagging mass of emotion.

I can't imagine what had happened to her. Had she been in here the whole time? Perhaps since she had disappeared. Things come rushing back slowly, dripping in from a leaky tap.

What had they done to her?

I trace my fingers up to her neck and her cheek and I lift her chin and she presses her face against my chest.

"Are you okay?" I say.

She's still shaking.

"I'm sorry." My voice breaks. My tears are drawing my skin tight like dry, cracking ground. Sorry for what exactly, I'm not sure.

She says nothing.

If she would blame me and say something, it might have been better.

But she doesn't speak.

There's the sound of darkness. Like a subtle whisper that fades in and out, and surely is my imagination. But no longer could I tell what actually exists or not.

"They've been tapping, I don't know when it will come back," I say to break the quiet. "What have they done to you?"

"Have you ever skipped a rock over a pond?" Her voice is barely a whisper. She doesn't move. I wonder why that is something worth mentioning. Surely everyone has had done that before.

She doesn't bother to wait for my reply. "No matter how many times it skips, it'll sink and disappear beneath the surface and become nothing. Along with all the innumerable amount of rocks, eroded into firm little round shapes, blending with the riverbed dirt."

"Even if you sink, you're not nothing. I know you." I say.

"You don't know me," she says.

I shake my head with as much conviction as I can, rocking her against me. "I know you, Shizuka Kaneko. I know you. I've known you for many years. I remember. I know you. I know you now." But it all sounds frail, like the fantasies of a small child.

She exhales as if in scorning laughter. "You. You don't know what they can do yet. You'll have your turn."

I squeeze her tighter against me. Her body is limp and in complete surrender such that I can't tell if I'm only holding a corpse. "Do you remember anything?"

My question hangs invisible on my breath. It doesn't travel through the Stygian ink.

Then she says: "It's all like a grainy film now. Something far away. About someone else. If it had been any longer, I would've lost it all, completely. I wouldn't know your name. But yes I remember still, at the moment. For now."

I don't speak yet.

"I had held on to it for so long. I fought for so long. Do you have any idea how much it hurts to hold on to something you could never attain again and would never see again? How much it hurts to feel your heart splitting open, two sides of your soul in opposition? And both gets torn apart. How much it hurts to -" she's crying. I hold her. "see you, who I would never see again, killed over and over again. It became reality. You were dead over and over again in my mind. I watched it over and over. But I tried to hold on. I tried to tell myself it's only an illusion, but eventually, you give in. You can't keep it up for long, not when there's no other possibility. If there's no other possibility to confirm, it is the only reality you come to know. Once you're here, there's no getting out."

I say nothing and hug her and kiss her forehead and press her closer, as if it would help.

After a while I speak again, "how did you get here?"

"I couldn't turn you in to them. I debated for the longest time. I watched you for the longest time. You had completely forgotten me, all your memories and emotions were drained at the time. So it wouldn't have made a difference. I was just doing my job, but no, I couldn't. So I," she pauses, "I walked into the coffee shop that day."

"And they were after you because of that."

"They must have changed an entire configuration in the system to isolate me and take me in. I hadn't expected such an extent. It was beyond my calculations."

"The time and seasons completely distorted," I say.

"Yes, they have that kind of power. I don't know why this was so important to them. There had been a contract in place, it should've guaranteed asylum - though it doesn't prevent them from affecting things around you. You do know about that by now right?"

"Yes I do. Do you know what I did with it?"

"I felt something severing, but I must have been unconscious. It was so distant I couldn't tell if it was real. Why did you have to do that?" She sounds resigned.

"I had to. They can't have you and turn you into data. A part of the very digital bloodstream that we detest, yet let run our lives. The fabrication of existence, out of nothing but binaries, numbers and letters, deciding what should be reality and what should be fantasy. We're living comic book fantasies right now, between the crevasses of society where no one would bother to look. But fantasy is better than lifeless reality-"

"But this way they will eliminate all possibilities of fantasy. I will lose everything and eventually become nothing. Even now, I'm closer. And they had sped up the process by a significant margin. I can feel it creeping up on me. Every so often, my mind is blank, and I try to recall things but there's nothing that comes. I try to remember how I used to feel but there's nothing. At least all these things could have lived on somewhere."

"You'll live on in me." It sounds like a desperate plea than my conviction and determination.

"You don't know what they will do yet."

"I won't let them take everything away that easily."

"Everything, everything, nothing. What's this everything for you? What do you even remember? How can you be sure you aren't missing some vital pieces already?"

I stop. "You can't read my mind." It sounds more like a statement than a question.

She shudders in reply.

She can't.

"They took it away," she says. "They stripped me naked; it's like they removed my uterus."

I struggle with my words.

"A woman without a uterus is really no longer a woman," she says but doesn't move. Not one bit.

She goes on. "Sometimes if they can't do it through conventional means, they will do it manually. They're going to do that you. They're going to take away everything from you. You can't escape it. I should've just let them take you away in the beginning. Now the both of us are in here."

"I'm sorry." I finally say, but it doesn't sound genuine enough. I could apologize thousands of times and it wouldn't be enough.

"There's no escape."

"There is, there has to be. I did it once before, that time seven years ago. It was the only way but there was."

"You lost half of your soul. That didn't put an end to anything."

"No but there are constant changes, even to the universe and to the System. Nothing remains static, there are things that even they can't anticipate."

She says nothing.

"I grew a coffee plant."

"You grew a coffee plant. And?"

"I was told to. That it might be important if I do. I think it has some deeper meaning. Like a symbol of hope. So long as it's still there out in the woods, growing, there has to be a way."

"What if it's dead? What if they took it away?"

"It's some sort of magical plant, it can't just die."

"Are you listening to yourself? It's magical. Magical? Naoki-"

"I believe now."

"But I don't anymore. They took it away."

"All we have to do is go back to that hill, the place where the coffee plant is-"

"You're not going to get out-"

"I will take you there."

She grows silent. My arms and legs are numb, asleep from her weight. They eat at my nerves like a million electrodes and ants. But it's better than feeling nothing.

"I love you, Shizuka."

She doesn't respond.

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