:for all we know…

She dances in the rain, the silver droplets running down her slender body as she frolics across the green lawn. She throws her arms out, skittering all across the vicinity. She goes around the trees and plucks green leaves and tiny blossoms off the bushes. She looks up at the sky with a smile, raindrops falling down her cheeks like teardrops.

Tear drops.

For all we know, maybe she’s not smiling for the sky. Maybe it’s the sky crying with her.

She’s built those walls around herself, the kind of walls an old man builds when he’s tired of the neighbor’s kids stomping over his petunias and shattering his windows. She built those walls around herself and measured her safety within their boundaries. Not a door neither a window, just a blank expanse of colorless wall.

They say “She’d never find true love like this.”

But for all we know, maybe what she first thought was her true love forced her to shut herself within these walls. For all we know, maybe her unprotected heart was the reason why she ended up protecting herself in the first place.

“Hurry Up, little girl, look your uncle’s here,” her mother calls for her as she cowers in the darkest possible corner of her room, hoping against hope, for the darkness to engulf her, to hide her from that piercing wolfish gaze.

“Honey, look I brought you candies,” he called. She knew what he was talking about. She knew what the candies meant. She doesn’t like candies. She doesn’t want candies. Just a year away from her first year as a teen, she already knew the horrors of life. Downstairs, she hears the door shut.

“Mom, no, please,” she whispers. The footsteps come thundering up, her door bursts open. “Honey, candies.” He grins.

“She brought it upon herself. She wanted it. She never called for help.” That is what hey say. For all we know, maybe all her screams were silenced by the penetrating gaze of the society.

She takes off her clothes and snakes around a pole. Her body twirls to the beat, but all she wants is to combust in a ball of flame, away from here. She plucks a dollar bill from between his fingers and holds it between her teeth. She walks back to the stage, gives a final performance and then disappears.

They say, “She chose it. She could have done so much more.” Maybe not. For all we know, maybe she was here because there was nothing more she could do. For all we know, maybe she was as helpless at the hands of her circumstances as we are at the hands of our judgmental existence.

“Daddy, where’s mommy?” “That bed-breaker ran away from life, dear. She was dirty, honey.”

“No daddy, that can’t be my mommy,”

“That was your mommy. She was dirty,” he says that to the nine year old.

She thinks. She contemplates. Her mother’s screams ringing in her ears, she holds her head. That can’t be her mommy. Her mommy was nice. She cooked for daddy. She loved them all.

“Why did she go, daddy?”

“Because she didn’t love you, that’s why”.

Everyone told her that her mommy took her own life. For all we know, for all she knew, maybe her last breath was stolen from her.