Ballerina

by Jimmy Esmaeili

  Pain makes us who we are.

  It teaches us and tames us.

  It can destroy and save us.

  When it happens, it takes our breath away.

  I’ve learned that when it hurts too much inside your heart, it always has a way of showing. No matter how many masks you wear

  Memory is an abstract painting.

  It doesn’t present things as how they are, but rather as how they feel.

  Don’t look back and grieve over the past for it is gone, and don’t be troubled about the future for it has not come.

  “So, how did he get in contact with you”? She said. “You remember my father had a pager? Well after he’s dead, I took it over. I loved that pager. That night while I was sitting here and watching TV, I heard my pager beep. I checked the number and I was so curious who could be! I called the number after five minutes. He wanted to talk to my dad and when I found out who was him I told him I wanted to meet him. After meeting him I talked to him about my plan”. In this time Sandra took a double shot of whisky and down it with one gulp. I was watching her poor Sandra trembling fingers pull out a pack of cigarettes and drop them on the floor. Motionless I took in the fumbling of her fingers to grasp the carton and her several shaky attempts to pull out a stem. She lit it and took her first drag. She took a deep breath without shaking. Gray smoke drifted from her nose as her hair spilled forward covering from her view. She drew deep on the cigarette, her body calming to the nicotine that invaded her blood. “You mean, He just accepted with no consequences”? She said with a firm voice. “No, he said he owned my father a huge favor, and he told me he does anything I wanted in the world under any circumstances. I told him about Ray and this way to get my revenge on him. He said he’ll do it just for me. He’ll make him to kneel in front of me”. “If he (I mean Ray), finds out you were behind all those incidents and killed, he will kill you in one minute. He is mentally unstable and his threats could become violent. He should being descriptive about how he wants to harm us. He is wildly interested in ingratiating himself with anyone. He is very protective of his crew. So, why you suddenly became so fascinated to revenge on him? You think you are better than law to take care of the criminals! Listen honey, Jennifer- in this world, many people are criminals. Even you or me! You might seem perplexed by this question, what I mean. I want to ask you personally some questions; “Haven’t you ever smoked pot? Didn’t you ever drink underage, don’t you sometimes speed on the freeway, haven’t you gotten behind the wheel after having a couple of drinks? Haven’t you broken the law? And probably if I ask the same questions of people, they should say; well, yes. But we are not criminals. Yes we are criminals, which mean we are not better than many of those who’ve been branded felons for life! Perhaps there should be a box on the census from that says, “I am a criminal”. Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it. If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons”. “Mom, now I have to interrupt you and telling, that means we should let all criminals got second chances! Does that include violent bank robbers, rapists, and criminals? People who con innocent people out of their life savings? And you think we should let these people vote, own guns and allow them to go Unpunished”? “No, I mean, yes. We have all broken the law, and I know, that doesn’t make someone a criminal as I would understand the term”. She said. “But still, someone who drinks underage is not in the same league as a bank robber or murder and that is where their arguments break down”. I said. “Nope, that is where your arguments break down and they are rights on the mark. Under current law, a felon is a felon, is the felon. There are bunch of them and even Ray Dillon, all the same as far as collateral consequences. No one advocating reform is saying «Let all criminals get second chances”. “But if you consider someone like that filthy, son of the bitch, Ray Dillon to be a threat to society or someone who must be prohibited from firearms ownership then, mom, you have a serious problem”.

  The time I got back home

  I found a fountain filled

  with blood Drawn

  from my baby’s veins

  I felt guilty and

  I felt sinner

  On the floor filled

  with Her blood stains

  She committed suicide

  Wrote a letter

  Then I found it beneath

  That flood of her blood stain

  Dear my dead baby

  Your precious blood

  Shall never lose its power

  The letter was plunged

  And has mixed Into the

  blood of my baby’s veins

  Stung and tuned

  For endless years

  I lost my baby,

  My eyes, filled with

  Guilty tears

  She said my redeeming

  Love has been my theme

  And today is my last day

  I don’t want to live,

  I want to die and then

  My blood will form

  By power divine

  Sing a song for my soul

  In a nobler, sweetest song

  I want you wash my blood

  Into the wine

  Then I began to sing for her

  To power myself and,

  To make me save

  When this poor lisping,

  Stammering tongue

  Lies silent in the grave

  I drove into a gas station on my way back home after visiting Sandra. It took almost 15 minutes to fill up my tank. I noticed a white or silverfish van, (couldn’t really tell what color it was dark) looping around there. I saw two black men sitting in the front seats of the van and one behind them. They started slowly trailing behind me. The one behind them messing with something that looked like rope. But then suddenly they stopped and ended right in front of me. The man behind the van grabbed me and tightened the rope around my waist and dragged me. I just remember seeing his other hand and being lifted up and something smelly on my face then I saw the van door pass as I was pulled inside and then I blacked out. Holly shit, but that was awful. It made me wanted to pop my eyes out with a melon-baller, If only so I never see anything like that again. I know I’ll have nightmares about waking up in some dank basement tied to a chair and that was the first thing I barely could see when I squinted my eyes. That was some kind of scary. I came too groggily, unable to open my eyes right away. I was aware of the fact I was tied up. My arms were bound behind my back. My feet bound together. I should squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, trying to wake up. I managed to lift my head a little and look around. I was in a dark room. It had one small window toward the top of the wall. The window had bars on it. The room appeared empty except for me. The walls were made of cinder block, the floors of concrete. It seems to me as I was in a basement somewhere. I squinted, straining to see in the darkness. I smelled the smell of putrefaction and rotten flash. A figured moved on the other side of the room. It stood up and shuffled over to me. As the figure got closer, I could make out features. It was Ray that scum back, motherfucker creature. He really freaked me out. I began to fear the worst. I see the feet of the other man who emerged and Ray shouted at him with a kind of fear sound; “Turn that fucking light on”. As they brought me here, I could feel an awful smell whole the time. I was wondering where that fucking smell came from! Fuck! There I see a fucking dead body right in front of me stained with blood. The blood on his face had dried. There was scabrous blood dried on his eyelids, sealing them shut. He wiped it away with his gloves. He grabbed his head by his hair and he said in a harsh voice as he lifted up to show me his face; “Do you recognize him”? Then he spat at his face. I just screamed and began to cry. “You’re crying? You fucking bitch, asshole! You’re going to pay for that, do you hear me?
He just banged and dropped the head on the floor and came towards me at full force (Kind of like what a vulture does when it comes to eat its prey). He was really mad. He stands in front of me with a finger pointed in my face. “Now you don’t have that guts to do whatever you had in your fucking head! You need people like me. You need people like me, so you can point your fucking finger and say, that’s the bad guy. So…what that makes you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. I, I always say the truth. Even when I lie! I’m not going to kill you, because that, it’s not my way. I’m going to make you a good star. A big ballerina! Was it your dreamt to be one of the best like your mother! You see that piece of shit lying there on the floor with a face covered in blood? I sent him to jail and your fucking, perverted father put up a bail-bond and got him out. Now he’s lying there. I’m not going to kill you, but I inject you sweetly. I let you bleed through your veins. I want to see you, wake up in the morning and I cook you on a spoon till your all brunt. I fill you up in a needle, so brown. The color of you will breathe taking. You will need it. I will yearn for you and then you tie off and shoot up. You count till you feel the rush. Sometimes it hits sooner than other times. It just that one perfect moment you don’t care about life. (He was pretending talk like a priest read the gospel), you see, you will put the heroine in the needle, the needle going into your arm pull back a little to make sure you hit the vein and blood rushes in and you push the plunger down and it feels like everything in the world doesn’t matter so numb then that does away and it is time for more and more and more”. Then he called the guy into the room and told him to bring a needle. He came back with a needle and then Ray told him in a voice that sounds like thunder; “Put that spike into her vein. Shoot it up. Let her feel the rush”. He ripped off my shirt. I was begging him with a tear-chocked voice; “Please forgive me. Don’t let him do that…please…please. Then he looked at me out the corner of his eye and reached into his pocket and pulled out a dime of coke. He wet his mouth and I crusty watched as he dropped a mound of spit into the spoon. Pouring a quarter of the bag of coke into the watery reservoir he created. He sucked the concoction into the syringe and looked to my hand for a useable vein. There she is. He spotted the bulging vein and it looked like porn. Then he sticks the needle through my epidermis, piercing the outer layer of the vein. He pushed it all the way from other side. Slowly he moved the needle back into the heart of the vein and pulled the plunger back. A red ribbon of blood shot through the milky brown fluid in the syringe. He pushed off. Holly shit, there she is. Then Ray told him that he can untie my hands and my feet. He said, let her enjoy. Ignore her. Now she’s going to feel the real life what she was looking for! I leaned back with the syringe still in my hand. My toes curled up in my boots and I grabbed the side of chair. Suddenly, my breathing gets faster as to my heart begins to pump faster too. I remember when I sniffed this shit I didn’t have the same reaction that I feel it now. It is way difference. I had a feeling of calm and warmth spread through my body. Ray turned his face back to me while they were about to leave the room. I could see some tears running down on his cheeks. Anyways, I looked up at the ceiling and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t support the weight of my head any longer. My neck buckled, causing my head to roll to the side. I tried to gather myself and sit up. I used my shoulder blades to push off the back of the chair. I could see my mother’s face glaring at me. She was furious, trembling with anger. When I stare deep into her eyes, she started to cry. I could hear it but I couldn’t feel it. A dead and a decomposing body smells like nothing else in this world. It is a rank smell that is just tinged with sweetness. Try to imagine a piece of rotting meat over which someone has sprinkled a few drops of some cheap perfume. I seem to remember being told that it is something in the blood that adds the sweetish tinges to the rotting smell. It is not something that, once smelled, you can never forget. It’s not just the dead body smells here; there are lots of mice too. I can hear them late at night when all is quiet; the patting of their tiny feet, the scratching and scurrying noises overhead and in the walls. Mice will make their homes anywhere that is warm with an available food supply. The basement door hung a little out of skew, and it always made a loud creaking sound when they opened it. Two huge men pulled it open as quietly as they could, but it still screeched horribly and then they dragged the poor Turbos’ body out of the here. Those morons could at least show some respect to a dead person and lift him up instead of to drag him all the way out! They were torturing me endlessly, nearly every day stacking a needle into my vein. The hours felt like days and the days felt like months. I was trying to keep myself busy because the alternative was lonely. At times I would find tears on my cheeks without even realizing I had been crying. Ray kept Turbo away from me. Unfortunately, my thoughts to do something is not creative and all the images inside my head look more like a shabby-chic collection from a design catalogue. Other times, I would lie on the floor and try to remember my mother’s (Sandra) voice. Although I doubt I was remembering it accurately. It had been such a long time since I had heard anything. I was doing just that, while staring at the ceiling, locked in the basement. One of the gangs’ members, a shorty guy stayed true to his word and kept the others from me. For a few days at least! On the days when Ray and his gangs left the house, He would keep the basement door open. I was free to roam around the main floor, and used the bathroom as I pleased. I looked forward to those days. But on days when they were all away, or on days when all stayed in the house, the basement door would remain locked and I had nothing but myself and broken furniture to keep me entertainment. Often, I try to imagine the furniture in its prime, what it looked like! Where it was kept, what was stored in the drawers or beneath table legs! Unfortunately, my imagination was not very creative and all the images inside my head looked like a shabby-chic collection from a design catalogue. By the time I see the dust falling from the beams overhead and I knew they were here. A week, maybe months, who knows maybe year had passed since they brought me here. I knew Ray was getting anxious. He would stare at me for literally hours on end when I was so high. Trying to figure out what would be his next plan to do with me! His gaze bothered me at first but, like the silence, I learned to get to use to it. I felt the vibration before I realized what it was. I saw the pitch black interior before I realized where I was. And I felt a body, cold as ice, laid front of me before I remembered who he was. i almost gagged at the strong smell of blood. Something thick and crusty was smeared across my cheek and forehead. I scratched my fingernails over it and it crumbled away in flakes. I saw him when he showed me how to use the syringe before I realized the pain. With my head dizzy from confusion and nausea, I slowly raised my eyes to view a face. A tall, glaring man stood over me with a look of predator eyeing its prey. The tall man’s lips moved slowly. He was thinking as he spoke. “What are we supposed to do with her now”? The man on the right had turned his attention away from me, making it difficult to determine what he was saying. “Kill her”. There was no mistaking what he had said. I shook my head in panic. I looked back to the man on the right, perhaps he would disagree with him. His eyes returned to me without a trace of remorse for what he was about to do. “No, we can’t kill her, beside; she’s already dead. Look at her face with that clenched jaw, wide-eye, dilated pupils! Suddenly the tall man grabbed me by the shoulders and threw me on the floor. Excruciating pain shot up my body as he dragged me off the chair and then over the rough ground. I felt horrible. I felt more dead than alive and I was as trembling as I wrapped myself in pain. My clothes ripped and I kicked my legs furiously, trying to find my footing so I could stand. As soon as I was on my feet, I felt a hard body press against my back, holding me up and pinning my arms in front of my chest, with one strong hand around my wrist. Is other hand fingered the material of my shirt, flipping the ends of my hair, and pointing to my shoes. I couldn’t see the man who was holding me. His grip was firm yet his rough fingers held me gently. That was Ray. He
stared at me for some minutes. He nodded at the man behind me; “I want you get her hair cut, buy new clothes and let her go. She is free. Then He returned his face to me and said; “you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire. You are free. Now get the fuck out of here”. A scene flashed through my mind. One day your life will flash before your eyes, make sure it’s worth watching! My life was less than an infinitely divided fraction of a blink an eye. The opposite sex is the dangerous and most addictive drug out there but the high is unlike anything else. He said I am free, but guess, I just lost my freedom. What is my freedom! Where should I go! Where I’m coming from? Where I want to go to? He opened the back door of his car. Lifted me by my hair and the waist of my pants and throw me onto the back seat. He slammed the back door, opened his own, and slammed it shut. I lost a lot of weight and I assumed I should be so light that he could lift me so easily! He turned on the ignition and floored the gas. He jerked the car into gear with the engine still roaring. The car’s tire spun on the mud, and then caught. Then car moved wildly, unevenly, accelerating too fast. One of the tires thumped over something solid. As though, it had run over something fairly big, like a curb, or a rock or a man’s leg. I didn’t know what! All I could see was the ceiling of the car. I pictured a junkie’s legs like me which crushed by car’s tire! Suddenly, I burst into tears. I was going to cry but I just didn’t have the strength to cry. He shifted gears, the car accelerated again and swerved even more wildly. My head rocked on the seat and bounced against the seat back. I must have hit some lump on my head. Because after that I blacked out, and when I woke I was in a place I’d never been before. He opened the door and grabbed my hair and lifted my head up so he could see into my eyes that I’m still alive! He brought his right fist down into my belly, punched me so hard that I felt my heart pressed up into my ribs. Then his left fist came down from over his head and pounded into my shoulders. He was failing, punching me again, again, and again. All I felt of it was the strange pressing of my muscles against my bones—that and the vibrations of my bones against themselves. Instead of placing me back on the ground, he put me in a municipal trash barrel, up to my neck. I couldn’t get out. People turned, pointed and laughed. He laughed. I yelled at him to let me out. Finally, I threw myself and the barrel onto the pavement and climbed out. All I could see absolute the painful look. All I could hear was a high pitched screech. All I could smell was waste, rubbish and garbage. I was totally devastated. But I am free. Have mercy on me. I feel he held me down in the dream lose its grip in me and shattered in million tiny flecks of obsidian sand. I could still feel its touch inside my mind, but I could also feel that it had no power over me. I am free; I can open my eyes and wake up now. I know this moment I will wake up and it will be gone from inside me, and it will never be able to force its way around inside me again. Fortunately the sound of distant traffic becomes audible. I had to hitch-hike home. I was so broke, I had no money. The moment I stuck out my thumb a grey Toyota came to a halt. This scrawny little guy about 50 picked me up. He looked harmless enough. I don’t know how he suddenly started talking about weed, and then he said as I was half dozing that he was the first person to smoke marijuana in America when he was a kid and other tall tales. They said; to avoid hazardous situations or miscommunications it is advisable to be able to communicate properly with the person who offering you a ride. Needless to say, hitchhiking might be a very slow means of travelling. But if you are in a hurry you might run the risk of accepting a ride from someone, even though you feel you shouldn’t. For now, I have a ride to go home. I don’t know who he is or why he is driving me home! I only know that for the moment, he is getting me home and that’s good enough! Anyways, while he was driving I had my eyes on the road and looking around. Those times of terror and darkness still fogged my head, making it difficult for me to breathe, difficult to think. It was difficult to concentrate and not to throw myself back to my seat. New tears fell from my eyes but I was determined to stay strong. Finally, he drove me home and we parked on my driveway, just talking for a little while. He wanted to know that everything was ok with me! I said with a sleepy voice that I really appreciate you to get me home. By the time I got off the car, he just kept staring at my ridiculous appearance and then he just shakes his head and drove away. I walked up slowly the stairs and peered up, surprised to find the door had been left open. Waiting for one of the trembling boards to crack under my feet! I stepped hesitantly into the bright living room, unsure of whom I would find. What do you know, after all of those nasty times spending in that darkness basement, I would lost my all senses and left me in this fear and paranoid situation. I felt sick when I looked at my face in the mirror. My face became solemn and I looked away. My already bruised and beaten face was now swollen around my eyes. I stripped my clothes off and turned on the water in the shower. I lathered my body with soap, washed my hair repeatedly, and lathered my body again. But nothing could wash away the bruise of Ray’s hands on my skin or his fists on my face. There would be always going to be one thing that I wished for and I’m not going to give it up! Then I started talking to myself in the mirror. That mistake I did, I wish I could erase it and never take it back! That revenge that I would do anything for, just to have it back again. The ones depressed don’t dress in black. The ones scared don’t scream. The ones struggling don’t show their scars. The ones hurting the most are the ones hidden. I’m really feeling messed up. I’ve always been in some kind of state I don’t let the world crash me down, freak me out. Then I burst into tears again and this time I started talking loud and crying. There was time I’ve been hided at the onset of entanglement! I wrapped myself into a knot, and huddled, brooding, in a cage deep beneath my ribs. But the knot frayed and now, after years of trembling exertion, I have come forth, loosened, exhausted. And today, I realize softly in that darkness. I am transparent. I feel someone is in front of my face and I’m talking to him! It tends to make me hallucinate. “The mass of my back as I lie facing away from you—always away, though I feel your breath on my neck and ache for it. Should not hide me from you any longer! You can see through it even in the night, to my pulse. The layers of knots I’ve added under the shoulder blades, tied to my spine, are nodules of pain, but nevertheless translucent, I think. And the silence of me in these of my unconscious hours is immaterial in the face of my heartbeat like summer lightning on our skin. In shadows and closed bedroom like to feel heavy, my hands are cinderblocks on the matrass, but made, I suppose of glass. My feet, icy pendulums sinking to earth through the empty space below me, are massive. I have always craved weight, substance, bulk to back up my ambitions, words, convictions, and when I feel your breath steady in sleep, I imagine myself swelling into a behemoth. My spine stretches into train tracks. My pulse is thunder on the horizon. I wonder you feel the same terror, when you are alone in the night, of weightlessness. Mortality is to me horrifying lightness, the fragility of a dried leaf before the immensity of the wind. Like the wind, I am invisible, undeniable. I lay awake, eyes wide, stretching my leaden, monstrous toes. I want to turn to you and dig my swollen fingers into your flash—rip you from impermanent dreams, and burry myself in you. Show you I am more than your sleep. Bigger than my body! Heavier than life! I stayed on Narcotic for a long time. I can’t get off of it. Nauseated, feet hot and tingly, teeth jangled, skin hurt, joints hurt, ears ringing, hot and cold, cold sensitivity, sounds hurt. While in withdrawal I could not sleep, and lost 20 pounds. I wish I could repeat the weight loss without the addiction and side effects. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I shrink within myself and I have pain throughout my body. It’s pretty stressful, and I scared myself half to death because I got horrible thoughts about it might be my last night. I had hallucinations that I’m dying tonight, here in this bed. Well, I was happy at least to die in my own bed not in that fucking basement. But die is dying, what it makes difference wherever you die, you will die. I wish Sandra was been here and saved me from this hell of a lot of pain. She is the only one who ma
kes me survive. My experience weird thoughts that I know are unreasonable and extreme (I know!). But I just can’t shake them. That vary, and I’m not completely aware of them (Like they are subconscious). I feel I’m having kind of hypnagogic hallucinations. I’m rolling in bed, excessive sweating in my palms of my hand, soles of my feet. What circumstances cause these withdrawal pains? I just put some clothes on and walked down the streets in the rain to get some drugs. My tears are mixed through the raindrops. I can’t stand the pain; I have to get some drugs. I’m retracing my steps one by one, by walking this street for so long. My tears and the rain will keep falling till I find what I’m running for! When I reached the park I saw some sketchy junkies searching the ground as if some magical crack fairy dropped some crack rocks for them. I had no choice to involve with one of them to steal that syringe from him. As fast as I could, I ran towards him and grabbed the syringe. As I took his syringe he fell to his knees and I could see his eyes began to fade. I ran like the wind up the side walk and bolted into my house. It was horrible. My lips parted slightly and I was barely breathing. Soon I realized this person who I desperate stole his syringe, in actually was not different from me either! Anyways, I got home and trying to concentrate to inject the needle into my vein. So, I stuck the needle in, drew up some blood to make sure I was in a vein but when I tried to loosen the tourniquet I bumped my syringe and lost my position. I actually did this a few times so now I have some syringes with blood mixed in with the shit. Like a lot of blood that everything is red and would have a hard time seeing blood if I tried to draw back again. I thought for a second and I figured, probably I would loosen the tourniquet, and nock the syringe out my vein. It was for sure; I should use a belt, and keep the end in my teeth, but feed it a little slack once blood was registered, and keep the end in my mouth so it wouldn’t flop down and nock the syringe. Fucking A, such a hard job to go through though! I felt nauseated and very relaxed. I leaned back on my comfy couch and allowed my consciousness to separate from my body. I looked disoriented around the room and my eyes rested on me. What I glimpsed was indeed some vision of a severe hallucination. All I knew was that it felt realer than my reality. I was leaned back on the couch but not down yet, still tingly (That word is a gross understatement) and enjoying the body stone. I began to laugh. I could feel a red line divided me vertically, trying pull the back half of me back into the trip. As I put my head on the back of sofa, I went to sleep………The next morning was a hustle, running along the house, cleaning the mess I created last night in the living room. I cursed myself every time because I picked things up and put them in unlikely places. Well, last night…was past, tomorrow is future but today, today is a gift, that’s why we call it present. In the eyes of the public, the word addict stirs up a negative image: a person of a low moral character who willfully chooses to engage in questionable behavior. I have fallen prey to what I feel to be the beginning of cocaine addiction. I was baffled by the craving and submission aspect of this drug and my struggle with my lack of power over it. Can you believe it, stealing a needle from a junkie addicted! I don’t want to be a goon to the streets. These feelings of nausea and vomiting, in the morning will swell and sometimes pain in legs and the areola. The color of the face beginning darker than usual; pain in the lower part of back; and, occasionally, a good deal of spitting of a frothy, cotton like, substance. These symptoms and feelings are more or less severe in different cases, and under different circumstances.