The Girl Without A Name
TALIA
I stare inside my aunt's car and two little faces poke their tongues out at me.
I try to pull the door handle again, but it doesn’t budge. I know that they did not mean anything by it, but somehow that makes it worse. I thought leaving my home country would bring me relief, but sometimes I feel like I’ve traded one straightjacket for another. This one has a deep colour that washes over me, but it’s still restrictive, suffocating me until I threaten to burst.
“Vera, I need some time to myself,” I say suddenly.
I have to raise my voice to get her attention, and when I have it, Vera stares at me.
“What do you mean?” she asks, perplexed.
I’ve always wanted to experience this country not through my parents’ lens, but through my own. The people here are different from the people back home. Because the people here are so vivacious and alive, their aliveness seeps into your skin like salt rubs into a wound. Intense and sharp, but without the pain. And I’m looking for something. There’s a house in the city that takes in travellers for free, with shared dorms and an optional donation. But I don’t care where I am, as long as I am away from the city I grew up in. I start to explain this to her, and as I do she slowly starts nodding with understanding.
“Where do you want me to take you?”
She drops me off in the city. And this is how I end up with no mobile, no plan and no idea where to go. So I begin to walk. The walls are beautiful, made from stone and slathered unevenly. I feel the cool roughness of it with my fingertips. The cobblestone path is a similar sandy shade to the walls, and I watch the ground as I pass people by. I soon make it to a distinctive gate. The crowd of people expands as I get nearer, and they are people of all different religions, wearing their distinct necklaces and headwear, their clothing a form of individual expression, but paradoxically a form of conformity. And among the crowd stands a young man. He notices me.
“Hello,” the young man says.
“Hello,” I say.
“Can I help you?”
“Actually yes,” I begin.
“I’m looking for this house. It’s a house that takes in travellers for free, with an optional donation box. Can you help me find it?”
The man smiles. “Yes, I can. I will take you there.”
And so we walk side by side. And it isn’t long before the man suddenly stops.
“Here we are,” he says, smiling.
“Good luck with the rest of your trip,” he adds.
I smile. As I walk inside, I see many nameless faces with their backpacks and luggage. Travellers just like me who found this place either out of luck or knowledge. I realise I should find a way to contact my parents. I know most people would find it irresponsible and reckless to leave your phone behind, but for me it’s the one decision I’ve always remained sure about. No way to be contacted from the outside world. Only on my terms. I ask a lean man with thick toffee curls if I can borrow his phone and I make the call. I dread making the call. I would do anything not to make the call. And the reasons for that are so deep inside of me, that when I think about the kind of dissociated person I’ve become, it scares me. It’s a feeling that can’t be described with words. When I get off the call and hand the curly toffee man his phone, I get this overwhelming feeling in the pit of my stomach and make my way towards a door with a feminine figure located above it. An attractive blonde woman is sitting on the floor of the bathroom, her finger pressing into the floor tile, her eyes fixed on an engraved text. She looks up as I enter, and grins.
“I don’t suppose you can read this, can you?” There’s a glint in her eye.
“I guess I could try.” I smile back.
I come around to the corner where she is sitting and crouch down next to her. I can make out a few of the letters, but the words don’t seem to come together in my head. My dad never taught me his mother tongue. My aunt told me he tried to when I was a baby, but because my mum spoke only English to me, and bilingual children usually learn to speak later, he became afraid that I would never speak at all.
“It’s messed up.” My aunt laughed when she told me.
Now, looking down at the text, I can’t help but feel disconnected from something intrinsically tied to my identity.
“Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know the meaning of these words even if I knew all of the letters,” I say, smiling.
The girl looks at me intently. She angles her head upwards and I follow her gaze to see a skylight above us. I gaze at the creamy mashed potato clouds before she suddenly speaks.
“I wish I was floating away like that. Looks peaceful.”
I stay silent for a moment, letting her words soak into my brain. She stands up from the floor and holds out her hand. I take it, and when she lifts me up it feels like for just a second I was as weightless as those mashed potatoes in the sky, like my body could gently push off the ground and move through the air particles and wither and float away like a flower. And then she lets go. With both of us standing, I take a proper look at her. She is wearing a sticker on the corner of her top with the name ‘Tash’ spelt out in big bubbly handwriting.
“Have you ever heard of this place?” She spells something out that sounds familiar to me.
“Yes, I have. I was there years ago.” I say, pulling memories from the back of my mind.
The last time I was there, I was a student and the people teaching me told stories. Stories about love, life, death and life after death. Stories about what it means to be alive. I remember I once walked into a bookstore, and the man helping me decide which book to buy told me a story. He had gone to Vietnam, where he met a woman, and spent over two hours running around trying to find this book for her. I still remember having second thoughts about choosing it, when I was at the cash register and he smiled.
“I told you,” he began. “It took over two hours trying to find that book just to give it to her.” And that was enough.
“I’m fascinated by the place. And the stories,” Tash says, wide-eyed.
“It’s a place to go when you’re feeling lost.” I say quietly.
And Tash looks at me with such earnestness that I feel myself growing hot beneath my skin. She gets out her phone and taps a few times before showing me the screen. It was a bus timetable. But she points to a specific one.
“This bus will take me there. If you would like to join, meet me at the bus stop at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning.”
Later that night, when I had settled into my room with my three new roommates, I was having a lucid dream. I dreamt of a dark, crisp night with a glowing full moon, its rounded edges kissing the black sky in a blurry haze. The moonlight illuminated translucent, wispy clouds floating airily through the milky fog. And then I dreamt of a loud, ringing siren. And when I opened my eyes, I still heard the siren, only much clearer. It was an unmistakable sound that I had heard before, when missiles had floated above our heads, threatening to crash down. I pushed back my covers and shook my roommates awake, heart pounding. Blood was rushing through my ears. Someone banged on our door three times, and we were all wide awake now. We threw open our door and rushed downstairs, following all the other travellers. A dog barked from somewhere in the lobby and wouldn’t stop. When we got to the bottom of the stairs, I realised what the dog was barking at. A few people, who must have been neighbours from somewhere nearby, had come to stay in our shelter. The siren continued to blare, menacing and warning. It wasn’t until we were all crammed inside the shelter that the siren stilled. But the dog was in there with us, and she was vicious. A man was holding her back by her collar, but she had her teeth bared, her eyes blazing. She was hungry to kill. Suddenly, I realised something. I haven’t seen Tash at all tonight. Looking around the shelter, I see tired-looking faces, some with fear in their eyes, but most people have blank expressions. Desensitisation over trepidation. But no Tash. And just as quickly as it started, it was over and for a moment there was a deafening silence. Then somebody says, ‘Good night,’ in his native language. More people mutter it back, as we file out of the room. Back upstairs, I try to go back to sleep. But I still hear the siren screaming through my bloodstream, low and deep, rattling my bones.
The next day, I am up early. There is some talk among people about the events of last night and what could come next, but most of it is filled with uncertainty. And while some people who may have experienced last night for the first time are walking as if at any moment someone could come up behind them with a knife to their back, the majority of the citizens don't say a word about it, sitting on their balcony chairs and soaking up the sun, or singing songs to their children, or laughing with friends and eating freshly made breakfast, biting into cherry tomatoes that burst between their molars. I go outside, and I walk along the bus stands, and I find the correct place. The clock at the house read 8:55, and it was about a three-minute walk. That means Tash should be here any minute. So I sit on a bench and wait. And wait. And after what feels like an eternity, not only has Tash not arrived, but the bus never arrives either and it must be well past 9am by now. But I’m in no rush. I have nowhere to be, nor do I have anyone to report back to, and this feels freeing to me. And I realise I should contact my parents. I should make the call. But I don’t have to make the call. I don’t have to go back home. I don’t have to be in contact with anyone at all. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to stay.
“In war, when you give people something to be scared about, they will fight and they will lose all sense of morals.”
I look behind me, and there is Tash.
“It’s something someone once told me,” She says softly, sitting down next to me. We sit in silence. A memory emerges from my mind: years ago, my uncle telling me, “Never be afraid, because something can take your life away at any moment,”
And while this may scare some people, it made me feel the most alive knowing I was going to die one day.
“Oh look!” Tash says, glancing down at her phone.
“It says the bus will be here in one minute.”
I look over at her, her pale skin and thin pink lips stretched into a grin. And I look up into the sky.
And I smile.
Talia is often daydreaming, and has been called out for doing so instead of engaging with reality for as long as she can remember. She likes to write fiction including thrillers and mysteries, and is on a mission to read every single book in the universe.
