Azarin Sadegh

For the writing Love Series:

One hot summer day, to be precise, on Friday the thirteenth of August 2009, at about a quarter to three in the afternoon, I fell in love with a ghost. Again.

Maybe because Tehran was so hot and burning or maybe it was just Taraneh’s fault.

The Friday Prayer had already ended and all my prisoners were enjoying this day, a day without a punishment. And I enjoyed it too since I didn’t have to pull another nail or to cut another finger or to whip one of those bare backs by duty, and somehow it had put me in a good mood. Open to empathy, and reverie.

The air was so dry that I decided to nap and to let my mind free. But I drifted from the prospect of a dreamy land toward the dark world of memories, like a sudden shortcut from the fairy tales of youth to bloody nightmares of adulthood. It was always like this. I always felt melancholic after praying to God and listening to the crowd in Tehran University, displaying their faith. “God is with me,” I thought, totally feeling it and knowing that even if I opened my eyes, or if I paid attention, at the ceiling or at my hands, I was going to find it somewhere deep down on my side. “Right?” I asked myself. “Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you. Today is my day off,” the voice in my head replied and strangely it sounded like me and not like the holy God.

I pressed my eyes to nostalgia, but the image from the past still emerged and I remembered Taraneh as if it was going to be the last time I could see her alive. As if it was the first time and I had never seen her before. I caught her green eyes watching me with a mysterious kind of emotion. My heartbeats accelerated and my chest tightened and my mind went crazy, like a man in love.

I tore apart her clothes and embraced her bare timidity and we trembled with simple pleasure and she panted and told me not to hurt her.

“It’s love,” I said. “Love always hurts.”

Startled, I jumped off the bed and wiped off the sweat running over my face, over my neck, dampening my back. I ran toward the shower and even if I was awake, I saw her phantom washing her body.

“Are you going to pray?” I asked. “Let me clean up your face.”

Her black makeup was rolling over her cheeks down to her thighs and toes, messing up the white mosaics of my new apartment and no matter how long I rubbed her skin, her eyes, her long eyelashes, still I couldn’t erase all the sinful color staining her innocent ghastly being. “You look like Mary the blessed virgin,” I whispered.

“I’m a virgin,” she said and I grabbed her waist and our naked bodies entangled.

“Not anymore,” I said.

It was 2:45 PM on this macabre Friday, when the ghost of Taraneh still looked alive and I, in my mind, wasn’t yet a murderer... But the time never stops in its endless flight, and so it was impossible to hold, or at least to escape, this moment. Each time I opened up to the reality, I discovered Taraneh’s burnt body and her pale gaze staring with wonder at a world within. A world I longed to know. And to forget. Forever.

It was how I fell in love with a corpse. It was how I fell for her every day, each time I slept and each time I woke up. Each time I dreamed and each time I made up the truth. Someone told me it was impossible to love the dead, but I laughed at him, telling that he was wrong and he couldn’t understand me or judge me and there is an exception in any rule, since she was the loveliest corpse I had ever seen in my whole life.