The silence was so dense that it could be sliced with a knife. A girl was hanging suspended in a syrupy purple space. An orange golden glow surrounded her. She felt both at peace and in agony. Around her were the reflections of millions of images of herself, all different with different facial expressions, looking at her intensely. Some shy but accusative, others begging for mercy, a few tormented, but most with vicious intentions in different aggressive poses of raging anger. Who was she? An overwhelming flood of tragic feelings and sorrow pulled her soul down, she was deeply hurt to the core of her essence but didn’t know why or what had happened. A moment of silence and a glitchy change of light brought her to the surface again. Gradually the noise of existence started swelling to a deafening cacophony of life. She slowly woke up and recognized it as the recurrent dream that has tortured her since childhood. It never concluded and always new intricate details leaked into the story. She felt depressed, moved out of bed, and made herself a coffee. Outside a drizzling rain from charcoal colored metal clouds hovering above the city spreading its darkness while painted the world a pathetic grey, rendering the city dull and gloomy. She knew the coming days will be a hell again as it always was after she dreamed that forsaken dream, like a forebode of things to come. Too real to be just imagination and too crazy to be reality. Who would she turn into this time? All she could think of was the fear and pain accompanying this state of being of what would come to her in the following days… Who would be her victim this time that she inflict her rage on? Her cat abruptly woke up and skittishly moved away from her as fast as he could while trying to make himself unobtrusively invisible, as he always did after this dream. Like he didn’t want to know her anymore and was deeply afraid of her… Like she instantly became a monster to him…
The descending sun was cast behind a translucent wall of clouds, and a warm glow started to paint the outlines with a golden ribbon on fire. There was hardly any wind and the gloomy drizzling rain from earlier rendered the air crisp and clean, while the smoggy fog from earlier had vanished completely.
I wore my old red stilettos, never particularly my favorite and slightly stained, but they were comfortable and will do the job. I was taking an elevator to the top of a famous luxury hotel in Amsterdam, the highest building in town. Nobody noticed me, which was an advantage and would make everything smoother, as I was not intending to explain myself to anybody. Struggling to keep myself unnoticed, while dragging a large heavy cardboard pack on my shoulder and a small black cotton backpack with duct tape, a small cutter, and a bundle of rope on my back. I didn’t feel the pain in my shoulders as the adrenaline was hitting me. Wearing an off-white light lace dress, even though it is getting colder, wasn’t exactly ideal, but I wanted to look good for the occasion. Ultimately, this will be the last time that I would shine brightly as a star. I prepped it for months, and this final performance must be amazing. Nothing should or will go wrong now. I was weirdly confident, content and finally at ease. I felt satisfied and was in a good spirits.
Despite my sunny thoughts that afternoon, demons were plaguing me. The questions of doubt had already left me months ago and I was certain that this was the way to move forward, and nothing could stop me now. However, oddly a cold shivering was traversing my body. It crept up my spine, but I knew that there was no way out. Fragments of memories were passing my mental eye, and these were giving me both courage to continue and despair to abduct this crazy plan. But I shouldn’t weasel out now, that is for losers. I was split in two, but that was not something new. I have always existed in the wasteland between two extremes. My mind was like two people, or two extremes on a continuum of one complex existence, which always felt utterly incomplete when experiencing it. But when I moved from one persona to another, a similar feeling of incompleteness took hostage of me, and I remembered the eternal desire to be whole and to fuse these two disparate and seemingly irreconcilable and discordant existences. Dark, sharp, and violent contrasted to bright, light, and peaceably soft, would make me grey and dull and perhaps conventional, and this would feel like utopia, if it was possible. I gave up the hope for that long time ago since he left. Knowing that these useless ruminations were futile, and it was too late for that now anyways. The burning flames of desire to become insignificantly ordinary have been died long ago, and even the pity spark of hope was a pathetic little streak of smoke now evaporating in the light of events to unfold in front of me. Will I have an audience? Will they give a standing ovation or despise my performance and booing my existence? Will it matter?
Mirrors are not just reflecting a mirrored image, but within them hides an intention of potentials. Some good, some bad. But when I direct my gaze long enough at the mirror deep into my own reflected eyes, I do not recognize the person I see, and the person who is looking back slowly start taking control over my mind. I become her, and then I see the person in the mirror as the person she left behind, trapped, in the mirror world, shredded and scattered in pieces and when these parts of myself are looking in the mirror, they all see a different reflection, a different persona, who in turn are taking stage, further scattering my existence in thousands of little pieces, ostensibly insignificant but insidious in leaving small traces, like breadcrumbs to find its way back through that cruel relentless incessantly changing labyrinth. In retrospect, when competing with all those characters that the self represents, evil ones always win, and the good ones always got assassinated. I derive a perverted feeling of pleasure of this destruction of the good and kind aspects of my mind. Darkness engulfed my soul if there is even something like that. A soul is just a collection of potentialities of who I could have been, in an eternal fight for dominance who I am. But the question is not that, it is more the uncertainty of who I could be or of who I have been, ultimately what controlled me to become that what I am right now. Black and white, good, or evil. Did I became my mother who destroyed her daughter by pure hate and envy of youth, beauty and potential. Am I the person who would love to have a child but know instinctively that I would destroy and torture her into a person who would ask these questions herself when she will be my age. Obliterating her as I was shattered myself by the immutable algorithms of experiencing bequeathed trauma imposed by my own kinship of a mother from hell. She probably just mindlessly, unaware of her acts, but sadistically driven by hate, carried on and gifted me her own inflicted burden though ways how she systematically crashed my innocence and my future happiness. If something is pure evil, it is personified through her actions by the absurd character that she pretends to be, loveless and without a shred of humanity or kindness.
The girl avoided the elevator and its bellboy. It was quiet on the stairs, and she met nobody, reaching the door that gave access to the roof, which had neither an alarm nor was locked. The girl knew that there would be easy access, as she had come here several times before to check the venue. She had been visiting locations for months and had picked this one as the best, most suitable and easiest location imaginable. She was lucky again, as there was no one on the roof and she was alone with her thoughts. Her light dress was certainly too cold for the time of the year, but she didn’t feel the temperature. She was in a Zen-like meditative state and was about to start the preparations. She had rehearsed to dress herself with the mirrors at home, but here in the open it seems to be more cumbersome than she expected. She hoped she wouldn’t break any of them.
Her thoughts meandered through her memories again. She hated it, as this was the perpetual torture she experienced most of her time. She could not silence her inner voice and shut up her thoughts.
What was his role in all of this, for he was the only person she idolized in this life, who used to be her savior. He was both good and evil. I could be with him in both ways in both dimensions. We were a cluster of multiple people together, tightly connected in a strong bond that appeared powerful enough to hold on forever. A city of us, living in a dimension that only to us existed. After he disappeared, I searched for him everywhere as I search for myself. But searching for him was easier as it gave meaning and a clear task for that day, an excuse not to think about myself or the ghosts that were devouring my soul. For months being lost into losing the only person that could give meaning in this meaningless world who was protecting me from myself. But when I found him, he was not there anymore. A shadow of the god he once was to me, a potential confirmation of my own mental reality, but the cracks in the balance between us was obliterating our solid scaffolding that held everything together and had destroyed mine and his existence. Instead, I faced crumbling ruins of our togetherness in a sad reunion the last time we met and talked. It was the last memory that I saw him, and our last talk we ever had, that concluded in a two-hour silent hug. This hug, as a final goodbye from which I didn’t want to let him go anymore but had no choice other than to leave and let him be. He seemed more resilient to grab the shards and continue to puzzle together, that what he wants to be, into something congruent with a potency to grow and develop. I knew he had this quality of always bouncing back after a defeat, a survivor who never gave up. Only he could make me whole as he existed in many dimensions and understood me as no one else would ever do. He chooses the mundane everyday existence for now knowing this was the most trivial for him and his increased despondency and torment inflicted by my newborn personas had dragged him from one hell into another. At last period we were together, he accepted his predicament creatively and tried to get stronger through surviving his turbulent experiences with me. He was not in love with any of my characters anymore, but of the madness that he allowed to manifest, that he cultivated and loved, and constructed it as a genius madman into that complex realm of pure insanity. This hell was his confined but preferred domain, which he tried to escape from, by ejecting me from his life. When he looked in the mirror, he saw the constructive potential of humanity contrary that when I looked in the mirror, I became the fragmented reflection of all humanity’s flaws. Good and evil became one and as this took more time reconciling these billions of selves traveled light years to find solace and always failed to do so. Time was not healing any wounds anymore, but amplified the causes that continuously stabbed my proverbial hearth and filled it with hate and agony. Was it self-pity, or just a defense mechanism to become ultra-violent and sharp like a razor when I started cutting his mental foundations away? I never wanted to hurt him, as he was my everything, but the hate I developed for myself, generated this character that took a sadistic pleasure in destroying that, what I loved the most. And I loved him to smithereens, to the moon and back. Inconsolably, I was left the leftovers of a hollowed out mental existence after the break, and his desolate wasteland turned into my hell devoid of substance or meaning and became my realm where I learned to dwell in my self-inflicted agony of my incomplete existence. I finally killed the idolization of the only person who managed to make me whole, who kept me together for so long, but now I was left shallow, utterly empty, and shattered to infinitesimal torn shreds. Gradually turning me into a huge pile of garbage from those billions of selves that questioned and demanded paradoxical explanations from each act I did to justify my weakness and broken purpose, preventing me from even tolerating my own existence. The realization of losing him, sliced too deep of a wound that never healed and from where a mental stench crept that enveloped and contaminated my spiritual being, constantly reminding me of the origin of my desperate despair. Mirroring my rotten and vile intentionality within my actions. Ultimately, I forged my new persona that was incomplete, deeply broken, into a soulless shell, refrained from substance or agency, like a philosophical zombie. Living a life without agency. Numbed and unhappy about existence, and no means to reconstruct the billions of fragments that once formed my existence as a whole and unified person. A puzzle too complex and incomplete to ever be reconstructed and finished as a whole. Just a giant pile of trash, disposable content, wasted as collateral damage in the debris of a ruined mind.
Psychological research showed that almost everyone who survived and could tell the tale regretted to jump at two/third of the distance down. It appears it is a golden moment when nothing of the origins of torment prevails and renders every rationale or reason to end life insignificant. So, none of the reasons to jump seem to be important enough and even utterly futile in the light of imminent death and the force to live is clearer and stronger at that precise moment than ever. Like how life manifests itself the most prominent at that precise moment of ending. Oh, if we could have a second chance in life, what would I give for that, but MM was certain that she was the exception in this, as she was feeling the lightness of escaping something that no one should ever endure. Not even her enemies. A life of reflections showing her fragmented self gradually mutating in those monsters that had made her hate herself. The fear and anxiety to lose herself made her lose herself deeper and deeper until there was no one or nothing left to derive identity from. The mirrors represented these shards of splitting personalities, of incumbent potentialities lacking to reconstruct the little girl that was lost for so long. Where the hell was she?
Carefully she unpacked the card box pack, it was heavy. She wondered how she could have carried this with her skinny 41 kilos weakened body for her 167 cm height, all the way from home. Her thoughts pulled the word willpower, but irony decided that it was exactly that, what was missing in her life to fix things. A paradox the moment of truth appeared, and it didn’t change her mindset, but reinforced her decision instead. Within that moment of introspection her thoughts drifted to what it means to be home. Especially the concept of home became increasingly a blatant offense to her own existence. She hasn’t felt home for a long time and could not even remember what it exactly was or meant, apart from him creating a haven. A sanctuary, for where she could feel something that provoked her a slight reminiscence of at least feeling something that could be interpreted as home. But that was a riddle she will not solve anymore. Home was everywhere and nowhere. As fragmented as her mind. Inside the box she opened were numerous 3mm mirrors carefully cut in nice sharp triangles. She ordered to have holes drilled strategically positioned in them. She bought special ropes, soft enough to not hurt herself, strong enough to hold enough weight. Altogether there were 28 pieces of fragile glass mirrors, as many as the years she had physically lived into this world.
She folded her dress in a neat little package and placed it on a nice, protected covered spot on the roof. She placed her bra and underwear on top of it and in-between she placed her artist statement, a message to the world and to him, who disappeared from her life. In her mind she played “When Doves Cry” from Prince. A musician who always gave her hope and courage. She placed her little red stilettos next to it and started preparing the mirrors. She tried to avoid getting trapped by the reflections, but now she found that she was more resilient and that the faces that always gazed at her, looked timid and slightly panicking. It was as that the faces were feeling an ominous pressure of losing their power over her. She felt content that she finally conquered these demons who were always lurking at her. For a moment she thought back with a tinge of sadness at her cat. This morning, she had left him free in the rainy park, and he looked confused when she walked away. But she always believed that animals should not be kept caged, and freedom is all that matters. Now he is finally free and can make his own decisions. She hoped he would be alright, but deep inside her she knew that he would be wet, cold, confused, and afraid hiding and waiting somewhere for her to come back to pick him up, but she would not come back anymore.
She stood on the ledge of the roof, looking down. The stripped-on mirrors were heavy, and the ropes were cutting deep into her skin. There was not much meat left on her skinny body, to protect her bones from anything, and she could feel the pieces of glass bouncing against her frame. She experienced an unfamiliar feeling of pleasure from those last sensations of pain. She closed her eyes and tried in vain to switch of her thoughts and to just feel and experience the moment, but even now, just before the show would start, she could not escape her destructive flood of thoughts. Even now she could not just enjoy the silence before the storm. She looked up and saw in front of her the city. Shivering and trembling in the preparation of the evening, the roofs were glowing a soft warm hue of oranges and reds, alternated in a intricate pattern of visual rhythms of greys and blacks. Even the evening sun was deconstructing the urban landscape in a spectacle of colors and shapes, exploding in the approaching dusk, a scene prepared especially for her. Her show would be finished when darkness would be the final curtain to close her stage. She needed the last rays of the sun to shine. She looked down to her audience. A large crowd of cheering and happy faces waiting in anticipation for the show to come. Everyone dressed up for the occasion and a parade of musicians marched towards the square. The sweet sounds of a crazy symphony performed in an extravaganza of spectacular but oddly weird and psychedelic looking performers. Otherworldly playing a musical piece she had never heard before. Full of dissonances, in a carnivalesque parody of life, a masquerade that would conceal the mundane struggle of life in a grimace to celebrate the insanity of this show. Gold glitters were sprinkled from above and caught some of the luminescence of the last golden sun rays, generating a fiery cascade of gold gently gliding down towards the audience. The crowd got excited in a jubilant atmosphere of encouraging cheering. They were ready for the show. She could not remember the last time so many people would show up to see her. They all came for her. A blissful feeling of warmth got hold of her naked cold body. She was not aware that she was shivering from the fast-dropping temperature, but a tinkling sound produced by the mirrors in reaction to her trembling body created an atmosphere that alluded the spectacle to her show as a prelude of the symphony of life. Above her fireworks were coloring the sky in a kaleidoscopic explosion of intricate flowers and sea creatures, ascending, and descending the sky as the movements of the tides at sea. They never seemed to reach the ground as their existence was confined to the lower layers of the sky. She stared at it for a moment whilst Prince sang his final refrain: “How can you just leave me standing. Alone in a world so cold? Maybe I’m just too demanding. Maybe I’m just like my father: too bold. Maybe you’re just like my mother. She’s never satisfied. Why do we scream at each other? This is what it sounds like When doves cry…..”
The music from parade came to a climax, the fireworks in the sky made a conclusive series of big explosions of colorful flowers that gave birth to many new glamorous bright flowers which in turn produced more blinking and shiny flowers. The evening red, of the sky turned into a blood red, and the fireworks contrasted beautifully with this. The stage was ready, and it was almost time for her performance to start. Below her, the audience was in ecstasy and humming sound waves pulsated upwards and reached her which gave her more courage. She was so thankful for this support that was so rare for her in this lonely life. She was on top of her world, this was the moment of truth, she felt touched and happy, and tears fell from her cheeks. But this time they were tears of happiness. She took a deep breath. Uttered the words: “I love you” and took a leap forward, a gracious jump upward and forward embracing the gaping abyss with love. Like a bird that started its first flight. She felt free for the first time in her life. Her dreams came through and she felt a moment of bliss.
She hung still for a short moment, seemingly floating in the sky followed by her rapid descend towards the stage. At first, she fell fast, but very soon she started slowing down. As a matter of fact, the whole world slowed down to a perpetual slowness, and the air turned syrupy, and she knew she will never reach the stage. Her performance will be forever as she was trapped in that specific moment, reliving her dream, making it come true. She was frozen in time and space. But this time there will be no waking up anymore. She knew that eternity had grabbed her and the horrific realization that she would spend the rest of time hanging suspended in space while her anxious thoughts were her only companion left. She will be confined to have these thoughts of torment, in the self-constructed hell she has been living in for this life, into eternity. Perpetually reliving each of her experiences like a goddess version of Prometheus, punished to experience her own existence and everything that had happened to her in excruciating details into a perdurable repetition to the end of times. Replaying from all imaginable vistas, but without any power to change anything, echoing her thoughts in a deafening silence. Her imminent death will never happen for her, only for her audience who will witness with shocked disgust something so horrible which will mark them for the rest of their lives, trying to eliminate and forget this traumatizing image of the girl bursting in thousands of little fragments by mirrors which are scattering and spreading as they touched the ground in an explosion of red shapes and reflecting shards. The moment she touched the ground, a last ray of sunshine shone the scene and provided a light spectacle like the absurdity of the theater she had envisioned. A red glow was temporary emitted to all sides and for a small moment there was a serene peacefulness of this spectacle, followed by the commotion of chaos in horrendous disbelief by the ones who unexpectedly and involuntarily witnessed her final show.
This is a fictional story, but unfortunately based on real events somewhere in the mid ‘90s, and a very real person who was extremely close to me for 8 years. Three decades ago, a year after we saw each other for the last time, she ended her life in a provocative and brutal way. What did she had in mind in her (almost art-performative like) last action we shall never know, but I try to use all the shreds of information that my own fragmented memory can bring back to reconstruct a possible last experience in her mind. Long since the events took place, fleeting but not forgotten. As gradually to me she became universal and within other people, I still occasionally seek for her inside them. I know that I will never find her and that is also definitely not my intention, but sometimes a glimpse of her shines through others and often it is not the easiest, prettiest, or softest manifestations of her one of her multiple personas, but rather one of the most cruel and despicable ones. But even then, when I recognize a glimpse of her, my heart beats twice as fast as I project her existence through these new experiences. As such she never died and will live on for as long as I live in my predicament. This story is to honor MM’s short existence where she experienced and knew wonderful moments alternated by torture and pure hell. My thoughts occasionally travel to this dark past where she left an imminent mark and until today has a big influence on who I am now. I will never forget you, MM, even time and a seizure like brain collapse cannot erase your existence as it is burned in my mind and reality, I am deeply grateful to have met you and to have had a chance to know you and to love you. You never lived in vain.
March 10, 2024, Tony Maslić