Neon Blood Memory

There’s a room

beneath the club

beneath the city

beneath the good intentions I peeled off weeks ago.

A cage dressed like a set -

fake dungeon bars, red-green lighting like Christmas in hell,

and me

barefoot and bare-boned in a pink tutu

sitting on a bench that smells like bleach, sex, and decisions made too late.

They said it was for a shoot.

A movie.

Porn, but artsy, you know?

Like Eyes Wide Shut fucked Hostel and left the fetus in Berlin.

I said yes because I was too tired to say anything else.

Too many parties.

Too many hands.

Too much coke disguised as confidence.

Besides -

summer in Germany, and I was already knee-deep in hedonistic,

self-abusing

whoring anyway.

Might as well get paid for it this time.

____________________________________

He tells me to wait here,

voice like too much cologne and failed startup pitches.

"I’ll go grab the gear," he says,

like he means lighting or chains

and not

men.

____________________________________

The room pulses.

It’s probably the Venus Drop melting out of my spine—

the tail end of the trip where everything softens and curdles,

where the high stops being fun

and starts muttering secrets in the corners.

The shadows grow teeth.

The colors separate like oil in a dead man’s bath.

And in the far corner—

just to the left of the mirror they cracked for “ambience”—

there’s something moving.

No, not moving—

insisting.

A ripple in the darkness like a girl shaped out of smoke,

or grief,

or an unfinished version of me.

She stands beneath the ceiling fan,

its slow mechanical breath turning her into choreography.

Black drapery flutters behind her—

a curtain someone forgot to pin, maybe—

but it moves just so.

Back and forth.

Side to side.

Shaking her head.

No.

No.

No.

She doesn’t speak.

She doesn’t have to.

Because I know what she means.

Because it’s me,

or it was.

The girl I would’ve been

if I hadn’t learned to say yes to everything that hurt.

____________________________________

It’s not a horror movie jump scare.

It’s worse.

It’s subtle.

It’s intimate.

It’s true.

I blink.

She’s still there.

I blink again.

Gone.

But the shape of her no

still flutters in my ribcage

like a moth I swallowed when I was trying to look brave.

____________________________________

The room pulses one more time.

I pulse with it.

My skin itches where my pride used to live.

My stomach does that little drunk shiver

you get when you start to remember

your name, for a start,

just enough to wish you didn’t.

And that’s when I see them.

The dots.

Tiny red constellations scattered on the tile wall beside the door.

Blood.

Definitely blood.

Could be fake.

Could be ketchup.

Could be a Jackson Pollock fan with a nosebleed.

But my gut—the last part of me that hasn’t been numbed or rented out—

knows.

I stare.

I try to think of anything else.

____________________________________

Memory is a cruel little bitch.

Suddenly, I’m seven again.

Primary school.

Mediterranean autumn, slippery floors,

and a panic about missing the service bus

because Mum and Dad are working overtime again

and I am the youngest kid allowed to ride alone.

Independence tastes like sour milk when your baby teeth are still loose.

I run too fast.

Wet floor.

Slip, slide, fall, slide again—

forehead meets concrete wall corner

with a sound like someone biting a peach.

Blood.

So much blood.

It pours down my face, into my uniform, into the floor tiles,

like I am leaking childhood.

Like my brain wants out.

The teacher gasps, swears in whispers,

drags me to the emergency room

and leaves me there

because she has to pick up her own kid.

“You’re brave,” she says.

Like that helps.

Like bravery keeps you warm

when your skull is cracked open and your parents aren’t there.

____________________________________

I wait alone.

The nurses don’t look me in the eye.

They had another case just before me—a car crash, I think—

and haven’t cleaned the wall yet.

So when I sit in that shadowy hallway,

dripping blood and snot and confusion,

I stare at someone else’s gore on the wall.

And it stares back.

Bloody Pollock.

____________________________________

Flash forward.

Neon,

droplets on the wall.

Dungeon dress-up.

Same girl, older knees.

I run my fingers across the tile,

and they smear the red.

Still wet?

What kind of movie is this?

And what kind of idiot am I?

____________________________________

I had been saying yes too long.

To men who asked.

To men who didn’t.

To men who took,

then smiled like I should thank them for it.

To clubs.

To substances.

To gods I didn’t believe in but whispered to anyway

between orgasms and overdoses.

There were rules in my head once.

Lines I wouldn’t cross.

Now I could barely see the floor through the smear of them all.

____________________________________

But here’s the thing about trauma—it doesn’t knock.

It doesn’t wait.

It just opens the door,

lights a cigarette in your living room,

and pisses on the carpet.

And right then,

in that fake dungeon,

with the pink fluff dress crawling up my thighs like regret with claws—

I remember the operating room.

____________________________________

They stitch me without sedation.

Say I am too young.

Too small.

Too brave.

I remember the doctor saying after,

to my mortified mother,

“She didn’t cry once.”

as if that was a good thing.

As if silence was strength.

As if the ability to go numb was a compliment.

____________________________________

Lessons learned the bloody way,

are engraved the deepest.

So, here's mine from that ER:

Silence gets rewarded.

Compliance gets you a sticker and a pat on the head.

And the lesson stays.

All the way to this basement in Berlin.

____________________________________

He still hasn’t come back.

And I’m starting to think

maybe he’s not coming.

Maybe he didn’t have gear.

Maybe he had plans.

Maybe those blood droplets were a not merely aesthetic.

So I move.

Too fast.

My head spins.

The drugs whimper.

My shoes are gone.

My dignity’s in the corner, curled up like a used condom.

I bolt anyway.

____________________________________

I run through the narrow hall, up the vomit-slick stairs,

into the insane light of the club above.

Nobody notices me.

Nobody ever does.

I get outside.

Bare feet on dirty cobblestone.

Berlin breathes like a beast behind me,

steam and bass and second chances.

I slow down to a brisk walk.

Focus on trying to avoid stepping on broken glass,

instead of judging stares from late-night shoppers.

I don’t cry.

I never do.

____________________________________

So I walk.

Not away—from.

To.

Through the city’s small intestines—

cracked pavement, blinking lights, piss-slick alleys.

Past a tram that moans like an abuse victim

and into Görli—

where the grass is scorched from too many fires,

the swings are tagged with Nazi slurs and queer anarchy signs alike,

and the art installation's just a piss-stained mattress

someone spray-painted "FREIHEIT" on in '97.

A pack of skinheads loiters by the rusted rail,

leaning into the stink of it all,

all shaved skulls and leathers cracked from too many bad nights.

They see me.

Of course they do.

Every cell in me screams not Aryan enough.

Angles too exotic, skin too pale,

and what about that non-German hair,

framing the kind of face they want to fuck or fight or both?

“Ey, was bist du denn, halbe Zigeunerin?” one hisses—

What are you, half-gypsy?

Says it like he’s naming a disease.

Another whistles through his teeth like I’m livestock.

“Schöne Titten, südländische Nutte—komm mal rüber.”

Nice tits, southern slut—come over here.

That laugh, that laugh,

is the kind that ends in bruises if you answer wrong,

or at all.

One of them barks out a ha!—

not like a joke,

like a challenge,

like he’s daring me to flinch.

I don’t flinch.

I don’t speed up.

I head straight for the underpass,

bare feet slapping out a rhythm that’s part rage, part ritual.

I see it—

that twitch in their boots, the animal jolt of pack-instinct kicking in.

Bravado curdling into intention.

They’re rising,

one by one,

like meat being lifted off hooks.

Eyes glassy, mouths wet—

grinning that particular grin men wear

right before they try something they’ll pretend was a joke if you survive it.

Their bodies lean toward mine,

a slant of threat so familiar it tastes like old metal in my mouth.

They’re not coming for conversation.

They don’t know what they’re coming for—

but their cocks and fists are voting,

and whatever it is,

they’ve already decided I don’t need to say yes.

Inside the underpass, the dark opens like a wound.

Cold stone.

Faint echoes.

And then—

The energy won't keep contained anymore.

And there's nowhere thermodynamics can sink it inside my body,

it must escape,

simple, pure physics,

and my mouth is the most convenient orifice.

I brace for the exothermics, and—

S—

CC—

RRR—

EEE—

AA—

M!

Not a polite scream.

Not a cute scream.

Not a scream for help.

A fucking murder howl.

Full lungs.

Ripped throat.

A scream so wide it makes room for the child,

the slut, the shadow, the stitch.

____________________________________

Like a pack of street mutts clocking the dogcatcher’s net,

the skinheads bolt—

all piss-bladder panic and steel-toe bravado evaporating mid-sneer.

One shrieks something in Deutsch,

voice cracking like a pubescent ghost

as he stumbles over his own boots trying to unsee me.

Good.

Let them run.

Let them shit themselves in the retelling.

Let them whisper about the thing in the tunnel,

the barefoot banshee with lungs full of knives,

the cunt-shaped curse that screamed like war and wouldn’t stop.

Let them build myth from my mouth.

Let them remember that me—

the one they didn’t touch,

because she unmade them first.

That felt good.

Better than yes.

Better than silence.

Better than being brave.

Mine.

____________________________________

And now, the epilogue:

Did I stop?

Of course not.

That night didn’t transform me—not like in the movies.

Sorry—No. True change does not happen like that.

There were more nights.

More scripts.

More mistakes.

But something—somewhere—shifted.

Like a hairline fracture in a cracked tooth.

Thereafter,

it hurt when I chewed.

____________________________________

Two decades later,

when I look back,

I find myself carrying too many rooms inside me.

The ER and the dungeon.

The underpass.

Too many discreet occupants—

the little girl and the party slut.

And later—others,

stitched together in grotesque mockeries of me.

____________________________________

So—

What if I had cried that day?

The ER, I mean.

Would they have taken better care of me?

Would I have?

I don’t have the answers.

Only the neon.

Only the blood.

And the memory of leaving

while I still could.

Resilience—

if you’ve ever had to wear it—

doesn’t look like closure.

It looks like stumbling out barefoot, eyes stinging,

before the next curtain call.