Broken

Can a human being be irretrievably broken?

From a physical perspective, doctors often talk about the point of no return. Regardless of the original pathology or the timeline of disease progression, there is usually some intangible point at which one stands before the very reality of death. This is the very last point where medical intervention may save life. Going beyond it is like being on an escalator to heaven with no stop points to get off.

What about psychological brokenness? I have often wondered how patients came to be so terribly broken. Stories of abuse, maltreatment and horrible relationships are incredibly heartbreaking, and it never fails to amaze me how human beings can hurt each other so much. Some people get into a rut, an endless cycle of self hatred and harm, followed by some completely unrelated intervention (an ICU stay, anyone?), some other random "treatments" and then back to it. Some people spend their entire lives on psychotropic medications, trying to "control" their mental illness which is a manifestation of all the problems they have had in their lives. A few manage to escape the cycle and lead a seemingly normal life, but how normal are they really? How can one heal from being battered and bruised? Is there a threshold beyond which it is not possible to heal again?

It's like a vase that has been broken into a thousand pieces. With some sort of roadmap, one can try to put the pieces together. External help like counselling, loved ones, and (maybe) drugs can behave like glue that allows you to stick the pieces together. It takes a numbingly long time. The end result is infinitely more fragile than the original thing, and it is never ever the same. Can it still function? maybe, in the rare occasions that people manage the impossible feat of putting it back into a normal shape. Otherwise you live with a pile of broken pieces for the rest of your life... 

Dream: the end of Ramadan

I had this dream on the night of Eid.

I am married to an older man who has quite an angry disposition. He never speaks during the whole dream, but his dark mood is evident from his body language and deeply knitted eyebrows. The angry man and I live in a large house, which has a front door not dissimilar to the house where I grew up. Inside there are lots of empty rooms with scattered bits of furniture, like they have been forgotten there long ago. The whole house feels dusty and repressive, as if it needs a really good airing-out.

In the morning the angry man leaves to go to work and I stay at home alone. Before he leaves, he hangs a black flag with a split down the middle on the front door, which looks like those curtains hanging in front of onsens in Japan. After he gets home, the first thing he does is paint a white stripe along the split, carefully making sure the white paint is even on both sides. The next morning he takes the old flag down and a new all-black one is placed on the door. I don't understand the significance of the flag, but it seems like some sort of ominous warning against venturing outside.

One day, the angry man comes home with a young girl. She looks 14, maybe 15, with an air of shy innocence. Her head is covered in a beautifully embroidered blue headscarf, and intricate henna graces both her hands. She wears a long black abaya which looks exactly like what I am wearing, but I have no way to see my own headscarf because there are no mirrors in the house.

The angry man doesn't talk to her or to me. We all sleep in separate rooms and the next day he leaves for work as usual, hanging the black curtain in front of the house. The young girl lies on an ottoman in the living room and weeps incessantly. She says she was forcibly taken from her parents' house and arranged to become this angry man's second wife. She cries about being abandoned by all her loved ones, and protests that she would rather die than marry this man. Somehow she knows that the date of the impending consummation of the marriage is the end of Ramadan, and she pleads with me to help her.

We talk about how much time we have, and neither of us know where we are up to in the month of Ramadan. We are completely helpless as we have no one to reach out to. Days go past in the musty house, the angry man going to work and coming home to paint the white stripe on the black flag. Until one morning, he does not remove the old flag but instead leaves it there and goes to work.

We stand at the front door, seeing the sun stream through the part in the black flag with the white stripe. The paint is rough and speckles are shining in the sun. It must be today, I say to the young girl, today must be the end of Ramadan. She suddenly mentions how she had a lover prior to coming to the musty house. A lover? I stare at her and wonder. She is but a child, how could she have a lover?

We huddle around the phone and call him. An older man picks up the phone, and I have palpitations so bad I thought my heart was going to stop. We speak in some code that I can no longer remember, something like, have you forgotten your baklava? it must be picked up at this address today. Then we wait by the front door, with the flag billowing in the wind.

The sun has crossed the middle of the sky, and we know it is after midday. Time is running out, and the girl resumes crying on the ottoman. I sit, squinting into the horizon, hoping that someone will come to rescue this little girl from her fate.

Then a man shows up in a big dark car with tinted windows, and the girl runs towards him. He is incredibly old, maybe in his late 70s, and the contrast is stark when she falls into his arms. I feel violently ill as I look at the man - he has an evil glint in his eyes that is far worse than the sheer whiteness of the anger in the angry man's eyes. She gets into his car, urging him to leave quickly. They pull out of the driveway but she jumps out of the car and runs back towards me.

You must come with us, she clutches my hands and pleads. When he finds out I am gone, he will kill you.

I realise that what she is saying is utterly true, and I am frozen with fear. My mind is totally blank as I look around to see if there is some solution to this. I see some car keys and wonder how it can be possible that the angry man went to work without his car keys. I take them and run to the garage, and his car is parked right there. It seems impossible, but I jump in the car immediately and drive away, not even bothering to close the garage door. The girl had told me that we will meet in Brisbane, so I switch on the GPS system and enter Brisbane into the destination.

Some moments later, I realise that this whole thing must be a trap. He must have left his car there so that he could find me, exactly where I go. I am driving along some road with mindless radio music blaring when I realise this, and a cold sweat runs down my back.

Then I wake up.