You don’t have to speak any longer about my father’s head that was blown off by the grenade. I have that splinter inside me, it is tearing me up inside. I don’t want to talk about what happened to my father, it is so terrible, but you force me to with your words. You speak so much I have started hating all the words. I don’t know what they mean any more, do they mean anything? If I ask you something you start speaking about something completely different. I get no answers and I don’t know what you are talking about, but the worst thing is that even you don’t understand all the words coming out of your mouth. It is making me crazy, all the words coming out of your mouth are beginning to stink and if you don’t shut up my nails will stop growing. It’s true, you talk so much my body is going to stop working.
I know you don’t like it when I talk about these things but I need you to know how it is. I can hardly piss any more, even if we’re not supposed to talk about that, it is something so natural it has become unnatural, when I was little I was made to understand that it was as shameful as lying. I never dared tell you when I wet my pants even though it was perfectly natural, all children wet their pants. Have you ever been a child? Perhaps you deny that you were once a child too, that it is something your parents lie about. Is that how it is? And that is why you torment me?
The other place we won’t even talk about, it hurts all the time and the stuff that comes out is green like sticky seaweed and it’s so disgusting it makes me vomit. Gall and shit is what it is. And my periods aren’t regular any more; blood gushes out at any time without warning — haven’t you wondered why I’m always washing myself? But I don’t care any more. Nothing you say is of any importance.
My toenails are growing, but not the nails on my fingers — well, my thumbnails are but not on the other fingers. The nails are curling over and growing crooked. They don’t look like nails any more, they look like fish scales. All of me is turning into a lizard — you are turning me into a cave lizard. That’s a species that only exists among people like me, people who are chased in and out of trucks and containers and don’t know if they’re alive or if they’re dead and lying at the bottom of the sea. I look in the mirror in the morning and I don’t believe what I see there, I try not to but I can’t help it and I look in the mirror and I think I see an old hag staring back at me.
