"Stood trying to remember what I look like in the mirror
What does real life really feel like?
I don't remember what I'm supposed to feel
Am I dead?
Or am I in a dream?
Am I a ghost watching what my life would of been?"
BAMBI BAKER, Derealization, 2023.
With her fingers glued to the balcony railing and an uninterested gaze beyond the view of the rooftops, Melissa stared into the heart of the night. The rain continued to fall.
She sighed, feeling relief for the first time in a long while. It would all be over soon. The small raindrops, accomplices to her melancholy, caressed her naked body as a consolation for her memories. She was no longer the medical student or Dona Tereza's only daughter. She wasn't even the shop assistant in a big bookshop, Felipe's ex-girlfriend, Cecília's friend or Pamela's cousin. Personally, she didn't think she was anything anymore. She probably wasn't even real.
Perhaps, in the end, none of us are real and are merely thoughts of the prisoners of the illusions we affectionately call memories, controlled by others who live in the dark void pretending to be ourselves and who control all the strings of this fantasy called life. A small smile formed on her face. From the fifteenth floor of an apartment building, the young woman leaned against the parapet and looked down at the street. The strings of the marionette were pulled, images appeared in her mind, bringing the past to life, and she remembered the first time she had died.
The sun had not yet risen and Melissa hurried to the bus stop. The smells of burnt oil, urine - both human and canine - and smoke mingled with the sound of car horns. She felt nauseous and her stomach churned with every step she took in her worn-out shoes. She didn't know if she was going to vomit or defecate, maybe both at the same time, but she didn't slow down at all.
She arrived at the bus stop just in time to see the overcrowded bus pull away. She felt like crying, but instead a smile appeared on her lips. The stop was packed with people of all colours and sizes. Mostly stern, sad faces, and a few with smiles similar to Melissa's. She waited. She waited and waited. Her calluses were killing her, and her stomach was churning even more. Her legs were shaking and shards of glass seemed to slide down her dry throat, tearing at it. Her nose, so affected by the mixture of odours, felt nothing. A sharp pain in her stomach, followed by another, made her break into a cold sweat. She would soon lose her mind. Her bus turned the corner and slowly, with as many creaks as only an old bus could make, made its way to her stop. A sea of people in front of her, a sea of people behind her. She wanted to cry, but there were no tears. The crowded bus stopped at the bus stop.
No one got off and many got on. She walked slowly to the door. She felt something sticky and viscous on her shoes, but no more pain. Her feet were probably bleeding. Two more steps and she would be on the bus. Another sharp pain in her stomach. One more step and she would be on the bus. A bit of black vomit trickled through her lips and faeces ran down her legs. She got on.
A dark abyss filled them. There was no more ground, no more sky. There were no more people, but she felt - and above all knew - that she was in the bus. A feeling of joy and surprise filled her chest, as if she had woken from a long sleep with tears in her eyes. She had the feeling that everything she had just experienced was just a thought. Little by little, coloured lights appeared around her. Dark blue. Dull white. And most of all, intense red. The colours became more and more vivid, to the point where Melissa thought she was breathing them, devouring them. She felt her teeth grinding the white, her throat drinking the red and her nose breathing the blue. Gradually, distant sounds began to fill her surroundings as well. At first they sounded like screams and cries of agony, then they changed to moans and whispers, and little by little the voices joined in unison to form a chorus. Deep, high, full of tenors and baritones, but above all the sopranos stood out - she had wanted to be a singer as a child. The lights began to form the most beautiful, extremely beautiful church she had ever seen. It had something Byzantine and Gothic in its architecture, full of vaults and towers, crosses and five-pointed stars. A golden aura came from the hundreds of windows, huge and tiny, and it was so dense that it seemed more like a golden mist.
Huge white marble doors, filled with symbols she had no idea what they meant (but strangely she had the impression she had seen them before) stood in front of her. Somehow she knew that someone... No, that could not be defined as someone or something, and even the word 'that' would not make sense. Nothing made sense in the face of 'that'. Laughter erupted from her chest and from the church. Both laughed, both shed tears, and then everything disappeared.
When she realised, Melissa stepped out of her bus and could see the company where she worked through all the black and miasmic smoke coming from the exhausts of cars, motorbikes and buses. She was clean, without nausea or a dry throat... It was the first time she had died.
Other times it happened. Talking to a colleague, looking after a client, paying attention in class, it didn't matter where, more and more often the same sensations came over her and the same church with the marble door appeared. And with each new visit to the church, her memories disappeared. Her father's heart attack, her first doll, boat trips on holiday, fights with Pamela, her first kiss. Everything faded away, and gradually emotions lost the colour of life. Monotonously, the young student moved forward day by day in her peaceful solitude, but a strange feeling of restlessness began to grow in her mind. Until she noticed that something was wrong with the people she was watching.
Hidden in the mind of every human being is a strange feeling of unease. A malaise fuelled by the fear of the other and the instinct for self-preservation, which, like a great, menacing bird, hovers above life alongside the angels of pain. This burning sensation watches over the human mind, waiting for the right moment to plunge everyone into the cave of emptiness.
Some time later, a time she couldn't measure, she began to see something she hadn't seen before. She began to see not only the physical appearance of people, but also their intentions. Joy, sadness, lies, love, despair, anger, everything was extremely clear and extremely mixed. She could see that there was a strange feeling of unease hidden in the mind of each person. An unease fuelled by the fear of the other and the instinct for self-preservation.
This instinct grew quickly in the grey city, turning grey to red and then black. It stemmed from popular discontent with increasingly corrupt governments and was exacerbated by yet another economic crisis rooted in a civil war in the Middle East. Irresponsibility on the part of the property sector and the banks led to inflation of over eight hundred per cent in several countries, and despair spread to all levels of society. People took to the streets to protest and demand their rights. Protests turned to vandalism, vandalism turned to looting, and violence erupted. A world war had begun, not with atomic bombs and countries against countries, but the people against their rulers.
Murder, blood, sweat, disease, hunger and fire spread to all the great cosmopolitan centres, turning them into vast, silent, open-air catacombs. Ten thousand years collapsed in ten months. In the end, civilisation was nothing more than a conspiracy of noises designed to cover up uncomfortable silences.
The wind howled in the distance, dissipating the memories and bringing the image of her street to the surface. Three lampposts were still stubbornly working, miraculously illuminating the rotting corpses thrown into the gutter. At the end of the street, six men armed with sticks, iron pipes and knives approached Melissa's building. The building was virtually unoccupied as most of the residents had decided to flee in search of friends or family to help them.
The young woman watched the approaching group with curiosity. Looters who, in search of food or clothing, would kill anyone in their path. One of them shouted. They spotted the young woman. In an instant she was captured, beaten, raped and killed. Melissa sighed and smiled. The gate to the building had just been forced open.
The rain fell softly, the wind whispered a cold melody as if saying goodbye to the young woman. The debate about which floor Melissa should be on began as they climbed the stairs from the first floor.
Some said it was the fourteenth, others the fifteenth. When they reached the fifth floor, they all agreed that they would first go to the fourteenth and then to the fifteenth. The memories that had recently taken them on a journey inside themselves began to fade. Names, friends, family, everything disappeared into a silent darkness.
One floor below, the screams of the looters could be heard.
Resigned to her inexorable fate and filled with a serene emptiness, she let herself fall slowly to the stone floor. The door was broken. The darkness was complete.
Holding a torch, Clovis entered Melissa's apartment. In his forties, his face was stern and his gaze restless, all his cheerful features, along with his ethics and morals as a prosecutor, had been destroyed by hard times. Now he was nothing more than a bloodthirsty predator who plundered everything in his path, using the welfare of his wife and daughter, who were slowly withering from malnutrition, as an excuse.
But deep down he knew he was doing it all for himself. In the end, all the men in the apartment were the same. Pedro, an engineer. Rafael, a shopkeeper. Paulo, a bus driver. Henrique, a doctor, and Manoel, a lawyer like Clovis. They were once good-hearted people, consumed by the madness of the new times and united by the vagaries of fate. Once pillars, now ruins.
A strange smell of ash permeated the stuffy air of the apartment. The torch went out and fear grew in the looters' hearts. A horrible feeling overcame their minds; gradually the shadows grew longer, filling the looters' vision with blackness.
Clovis fell to his knees in tears and cried out in horror. Something was taking shape in the shadows, a reddish cyclopean spot writhing and pulsing. A red tree with a crown of babies' heads from different ethnic groups stood before the invaders. Stunned, Paulo and Pedro lost all the pigment in their skin, which turned from brown to a shapeless grey. Their hair fell from their heads, but before it could touch the ground, it disappeared.
Rafael and Henrique disappeared into the darkness, left to sleep forever shrouded.
All that remained of Manoel was a small handful of dark dust, consumed by the flames of his own fear.
A crack opened in the trunk of the tree, spewing a blue goo that formed a puddle in front of the desperate remnants of the gang.
In a sweet lullaby, without middle or beginning, lying in the arms of the Eternal, the tortured soul of a woman finally found rest in the sacrifice, giving rise to the nocturnal spirit that rejoices to the hissing of snakes and the barking of dogs. Pilgrim of the Thorns, intoxicated by spilled blood and resting on the shadows of tombs, yearning for terror among mortals, the Thirteen-Faced Moon, messenger of the hosts. Magically assembled and anointed four times in a row, the key that unlocks all doors and the prostitute queen, mother of all poets, had awakened. Slowly emerging from the blue pool, the figure of a thousand women personified in one body took shape.
The minds of the three marauders merged to protect the essence of their souls. Through their eyes, a message was sent to all the survivors of this world.
The Goddess had returned.