5Until We Bleed
Okay guys, I know, I know, too many band of brothers stories, but this just came to me, sort of like an epiphany, while I was listening to Lykke Li's Until We Bleed song.
It's about prostitution, so viewers of a nervous and prude disposition, don't read it, because there's bound to be some full on mentions or allusions to sex. There, I did warn you. A'thank you.
I am just a whore. Nothing more nothing less. I am unfeeling and unthinking. I am naked. I am numb. I am stupid. My heart is barren, neglected, withered away to nothing on the time I've burned with the wrong ones. There's been so many wrong ones now, I've lost count. I don't know their names, and they don't know mine. I'm any one to them.
They're drunk, they need it. Fake love is what I give to them. Nothing more, nothing less.
My body is a shell. Cold to the touch, like ice, white and gaunt like a porcelain doll, fractured and cracked like glass.
I am bound to linger in the world of horrors. Normal girls my age are married, or chasing men. I chase men too, but not in the right way.
I have to be needed, I need to be needed. There's no point to me if I'm not needed. Sometimes I am thankful I am needed. Most times I'm not.
There's no waves of pleasure that drift over me, just the rank stench of beer or whiskey. I drown in the numb sensation, dragged down by weights of disgust. My days of wishing for someone to pull me out of this sinful water are long gone. I've grown up since then. My time of innocence is far behind this unhealthily thin alien form of mine. I drank my share of the fatal drop so long ago, it's like I have lived forever since then.
Opiates, alcohol, mind numbing drugs are all taken. They don't make me feel better, like he says they should. My skin crawls on top of me with the mere mention, but I take them anyway. He'll get mad if I don't.
I get no wiser.
I return again and again to the hand that strikes. The pain is the only thing I feel, but I come back each and every time. I am burnt, bruised, broken. I take my unfair share of hard hits and violent kicks. It makes me feel human. To be human is to feel, and if pain is the only thing I can feel, I'll take it to feel normal.
I love until I bleed. It's not real love. There's not a butterfly in sight, no warm hearts. No fluttering heartbeats. Mine doesn't skip for anyone. It doesn't know how. I know it wants to learn. It's had it's false moments, when people were kind, when I was new.
I'm like an old doll now. I get discarded even before they're breathing normally again. My earnings are left in a small pile on my mantle piece in the tiny room I call 'home'. There is a bed, but no true love could ever blossom in it. A chair sits in the corner, with no other purpose other than to fill the room, set clothes upon and hold up Hamish, when he wants me to show him how I earn his money. There are no mirrors, nor will there ever be. I can't bare to face the deathly creature I have become in 2 years.
1940 is the last time I saw the day light and looked alive. I had a heart then. I had innocence. I had love and family. Now I have nothing. Pamela asks why I stay, when I sit in her room, bloodied and bruised from Hamish's fierce fists. Peddling my body is all I have. Max has more than once offered me a job behind the bar of my home town. I decline. We whores have to stick together.
I know they wish we didn't. We push one another to leave every opportunity we get, but we don't leave each other. There's four of us and if one leaves, that's one less to save you from the beatings when you've been short changed.
Some people imagine life for us to be decadent, like the prostitutes of Paris, wrapped in gold finery and fine silk sheets, luxurious bedrooms, handsome men. They wouldn't know an ice cold bedroom, with thin lace curtains, scratchy cotton bedsheets. No fancy clothes to reel the fish in with. There's no shilly shallying with fancy knickers. What you see is what you get and if you don't like it, there's nothing more, nothing less.
Most men stay gone. They stay clean away after one night with us. But not this time. My whole world has collapsed. 3 times now. The start of the war, the death of my brother and now.
I stand at the bridge, in the icy cold darkness, like I usually do when I can escape for a few hours. I contemplate it. I contemplate everything; my life, my choices, where I could go from there. I climb on to the stone wall. No one will see me. It will be slow, but I'll have time to change my mind, if I like.
But someone does see. They call to me, pull me roughly off the wall. They stand and stare angrily at me, ask me what I was thinking. But I don't think. I am unfeeling. I am unthinking. I brush past him. No one saves whores. I want to scream that at him, while he complains I haven't thanked him for saving my miserable life.
"I'm just a whore, sir. No one saves whores."
"I guess I must be a no one then."