The view below you is amazing. From the top of the highest hill on the island you can see for miles around. Towns rubbing shoulders with each other, barely distinct from one another. Malta is a small island, densely populated and notorious for its army of building contractors, forever encroaching on its diminishing countryside.
She had told you this. An avid nature-lover, she hated that Maltese countryside was being eroded by what she called greed.
"Always building new apartments, when the birthrate is going down.. And so many apartments standing empty. Why go on building? Greed, pure and simple" she'd huff.
You have been living here long enough to know she's right. Or..she was right. You don't think that she cares much about building contractors these days. She has bigger issues, much bigger problems to deal with.
You know because you were there. You saw the shock and denial and fear. You recognised the PTSD, because you've had it yourself. You still do. You recognised the signs. And you ran.
A droplet of sweat slides into your left eye, the good one. You swipe it away and reach for the bandana stuffed inside your back pocket. Funny, you think to yourself as you swipe at your forehead, and the back of your neck. You have no feeling at all around your bad eye, but one drop of sweat and it burns like fuck.
It is bloody hot for March. But then again, this is quite normal in Malta. You've been here long enough to know that it never gets really cold.
A muscle in your left thigh starts to twitch uncontrollably. Followed by pain down your shin bone. You limp over to the derelict chapel and ease your ass onto one of the fallen stones lying around.
In the shade of the chapel there is a light breeze, the wind a mere whisper through the carob tress growing nearby. Acid yellow cape sorrel blooms bob in the breeze. Their colour still takes you by surprise, even after all this time. So bright, so intense.
You shift around awkwardly. The pain in your leg is bad, but it is something else that is bothering you. It's the rot... Maybe it is time to leave the island, even if it has been your only real home in the past twenty-five years.
Memories hit your brain like burst shots on a camera. Smiles. Shared meals. Lazy love-making. Her wild, curly hair, her snorting laughter. The first time you heard her laugh, really laugh, you thought she was choking.
The memory of that day makes you smile. But the smile fades as other memories follow. Memories that hurt.
Her bruised, tear-stained face.. Her ripped shirt. The marks on her neck where he'd held a knife to her throat. Her screaming abuse at you. What you think of as the scars on her soul.
You know she needed you. You know you should have stayed. If for no other reason, to prove to her that not all men are selfish, arrogant pricks.
But you left. You ran. You told her you needed space. That you needed to process.
She had not argued or pleaded with you to stay. It was almost as if she knew that you weren't going back.. That you were unable to be what she needed you to be. As if...and it breaks your heart right now....she felt like she deserved to lose you .
Stomach acid burns the length of your oesophagus. Bloody heartburn!
The sweat from your climb has cooled off, leaving your skin clammy. This rocky hill had been a personal challenge, an act of defiance. You wanted to prove that you could still do it, shattered body and all. Even though she'd thought otherwise. Jesus Christ! Six weeks since you left, and you're still doing things because of something she said!
You stand up. And your left knee gives out under you. The pain makes your eyes water. Clumsily you lower yourself back onto the stone. Pain swarms up your side to your lower back. It feels like someone is stabbing you repeatedly, the whole length of your leg. Nothing you haven't felt before. In fact, you feel it every time the damaged nerves and muscles of your leg go into spasm. But damn, it's a bitch!
You massage your leg..sometimes, that helps... But you know that basically you must wait it out. Wait for the muscles to stop twitching. Wait for the needles of pain to stop stabbing at your pieced-together shin-bone.
Someone's coming. Voices. Girlish chatter coming up the path behind the abandoned chapel. Five young girls, about 18 years old, come round the chapel, giggling and talking animatedly. As they spot you, they lower their voices.
"Kif hasadni!" one of them says .. The wind carries her voice over to you. You know enough Maltese to realise that she wasn't expecting to find anyone up here.
The girls sit down on a ledge, legs dangling. For a few minutes, they chat amongst themselves, fiddling with their phones and taking a group selfie. Random words, voices now raised a little because they have already forgotten your presence, float over .. facebook, drinks, xoghol, assignments.
After a while, they get up and brush their skinny jeans with their manicured hands. One very blond girl applies sunscreen to her already pink nose.
Images ping into your head like messages in your inbox. Faces...and names... Afia, Ghazalah, Ameera, Shadha.... Names you wish you can forget. Faces your mind won't let you forget. The whores in the Afghanistan hadn't been much older than these girls. Neither had those in Iraq. They were the same, just a different colour.
As a soldier it had never bothered you that you sought out what comfort whores could provide. Whores were found everywhere, and were part of the territory. In the middle of all the lunacy, the touch of a woman helped keep you sane. Even if she touched and sucked in return for cash. Even if she was skinnier than an underfed dog, a woman's body could, for a few moments make you forget everything; your comrades who'd died, the explosions, the gruesome injuries, the misery. It was not something you did very often, but you did it.. And you thought it was okay, acceptable even...Those were extraordinary circumstances.
So why does it bother you so much now? Why do you feel like you're in the same category as that rapist piece of shit?
She said she felt dirtied, used. She was forever in the shower. Scrubbing her flesh under the hot water, until it was red and raw.
You'd watched all this..You watched her confusion, her hurt, her fear and her pain. And you were filled with self-loathing. You had done this. Not to her. Not with the same brutality. But you had. You had used women like that...like they were a commodity.
You'd watched her wide-eyed shock turn into stunned denial. Hell! You'd been in denial yourself. Unable to believe this had happened. To someone close to you. Here. On this sleepy, sunny island in the middle of a shimmering turquoise sea.
Then her denial gave way to rage. At everyone and everything that was within screaming distance. Including yourself. Especially yourself.
Consumed with inexplicable guilt over your past, you let her rage at you. Call you names. Throw things at you. You knew it wasn't you she was really mad at. And in any case, you deserved it, you thought
Until one day, you just needed out.
You couldn't bear to see her like that any more. To hear her crying at night, when she thought you were asleep. To wake up to her sobbing in her sleep. To watch her shrink back if you came too close. To watch her impotent rage at the bastard who hurt her. To live with a withdrawn, shattered shell instead of the confident, outgoing person she had once been.
It was just too much...this willful destruction of a person. Because that's what he'd done to her. More than just abusing her body, he'd destroyed her.
And you just cut and ran... Better this way, you told yourself. Better this way.
It's been six weeks since you left. You think about her every single day. Several times a day, to tell the truth. But you cannot bring yourself to call her, to drop in at the house you'd come to think of as your home.
You should be there. You know that.
You should be there.
But how can you give her what you don't have?
She needs comfort. She needs someone to tell her she'll be all right. And you cannot do that. Because you know that what he did to her changed everything. It cannot un-happen. And you know it. Same as your own shit cannot un-happen.
She needs someone to tell her that this is not forever, that things will look up again. And you cannot do that. How can you when you can still see the bodies piled in mass graves? When you can still hear the explosions, the agonised screams of wounded men?
You shake your head. No, she's better off without you. She needs someone less messed-up than you.
She's the first woman you've cared about in a long, long time. You desperately want to give her what she needs, but you don't have it.
How do you give what you do not have?
Even though you tell yourself that she is better off without you, you feel ashamed that you've run away. A soldier doesn't run away. A man doesn't run away, for fuck's sake.
And even now that you're no longer with her, you cannot stop thinking about her. You've lost a piece of yourself with her. Just like you lost something in every other place you've been.
A pebble rolls away from under your foot, throwing you momentarily off balance. Pain claws at your lower back again. Shit!! You are barely forty and your body's a fucking wreck.
YOU are a fucking wreck!
You lean against a tree, till you get your wind back. Your eyes fill suddenly, and it's not because of the pain. Something twists in your chest.
If only you could believe that the damage to her soul was reversible. If only you could genuinely utter the words you'd heard her girlfriends say to her. No that she'd told them what happened. But they are good friends, and they'd realised something was amiss, even when she tried her damnedest to act normally. They are good friends, and they are not being callous or selfish when they urge her to put it behind her and look forward. They genuinely believe that time can heal even the deepest of wounds.
But you know otherwise. You know that even when she looks forward, her vision will be tinted by what happened. Same as the IED which claimed your right eye will always be there, hovering on the edge of your consciousness. Her loss is no less real, although it is not visible.
You know because your own experience has taught you that. You understand the hopelessness, the fracturing of her soul, the never-ending darkness. You understand because you yourself feel the same.
But what use is understanding when she needs a ray of light? And you only have darkness. And pain. And nightmares.
She doesn't need those..she has enough of her own. What she needs are people who genuinely believe it can get better. The twisting in your chest increases as the regret wells up.
You have always believed things happen because they have to happen. Now you're not so sure. Why would this...this terrible thing...have to happen to someone you care about? Why would it have to happen at all? Why would you have to be so damned inadequate, right when she needs you so badly?
If only you weren't so fucked-up yourself. If only you could give her what she needs. If only all this had never happened.
If only....
(author's note -this is a piece I wrote for a writing competition I took part in some time ago. hope you like. please, please, please......write in and tell me what you think..even if you don't like it)
