Work Text:
If there are sores that slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker, then Faruzan’s was scarcely better than a singleminded machine. It was a laughable paradox, that she was destroying herself solving a problem that few others could begin to make heads or tails of, simulating entire languages inside her head only to discard them when she foresaw their failure, yet beyond the impenetrable myriads of brilliant, systematic, algorithmic machinations, there was simply nothing, a lack of any possible substance, which she could not even guess existed. No room or capacity or desire for long-suspended bodily processes, long-dissipated dreams and longings, or long-instinctualized regrets, frustrations, and sorrows. She had long come to the inescapable conclusion of death, the understanding of the impossibility of making amends, and the necessary abandonment of superfluous hope. Spite, the need to spit in the face of whichever wicked architect of this trapped chamber devised this sentence of death; stubbornness, the refusal to admit that she was at her wit’s end and the baseless faith that continued effort would spare whichever next unfortunate soul a few fewer dead ends or wasted years; and simple necessity, the lack of anything else she could do even if she gave up, formed a single driving instruction, axiomatic and instinctual, to persevere. Manuscript papers with barely a blank spot showing, smooth tiles turned into crowded mosaics of symbols and deductions, even skin dyed black with ink that did not fade all attested to the work of she who had been eroded to a mere mechanism.
It was too late. Bitterness had welled up inside her. No more could she step through the door beyond which the fragrance of ink and curry wafted and shamefully bask in the relief of her parents’ embrace. No more could she prove to her teachers and mentors that she was different from Tamimi, that there was more to her than someone who would merely return to deposit a few coldly functional and academic words before lapsing into silence again. No more could she make Farah beam again with a concession, however begrudging, to roam the stalls of the Grand Bazaar with their friends. But now there was no more bitterness; it had already been diffused, saturating her, animating her hands as they wove speculations that only her delirious eyes could see.
Her knuckles, bloody and refusing to heal, waved through the air in front of her. A souvenir of when she had flown into a rage during a futile attempt to break out by force. It was futile, because she was clearly powerless to force her way out. It was futile, because she was too cowardly and too smart to break. It was futile, because the deal to trade her current flesh-vessel for her previous existence existed only in her head. She could live with the torturous compulsion to rip out root by bloody root the twisted joke of her birth, until her testicles dangled like crimson fruits from the still-pulsing branches of a blood-stiffened trunk, but she could not choose to live with irredeemable, unforgivable failure. But the gods had long fallen silent, though the supplicants’ cries still rang.
There are sores that slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker. And they would be all that remained after the sands of time had weathered her to dust.