POLLUTING

There was not one day that I was neglected. Just as I was a part of her, she was a part of me. Oh, how unworthy she would have been without such a flexible tongue and such precious, soft lips. How my voice enchanted her customers, and how they loved to see her smile. How I helped her so and yet she didn’t appreciate me; she left my arms dry and chapped in the mornings and wiped me with coarse paper towels after she ate. I often empathize with my neighbors, her eyes; we were both helpless and blinking coldly at this world. 

As always, that morning was cruel with coldness and I felt frost-bitten. I couldn’t identify where my body borders with her face anymore, and every inch of me was aching and bitter. She finally woke up to her alarm and I prayed that she wouldn’t yawn, but she did and just as I had expected, my skin finally ripped. How the wound throbbed with the cold air! I felt blood trickle down my side and was quickly wiped off by her hand. But that didn’t stop me from crying. I cried and cried until she sat up from her bed. 

“Dammit,” she said and started brushing her tongue up against my tears.
I felt violated.

She started brushing her teeth and water healed my sorrow for a while as it washed away my tears. Then, after she washed her face and put her contacts on, she started her daily routine of make-up. First foundation, then mascara, blush, and finally she smudged an oily stick on my body making it look unnaturally shiny. She then puckered at her reflection in the mirror and I knew she was once again showing off the best trait on her whole face – me. Although I was sickened by the foul smelling chemicals on my body, I was a bit proud of her favoring of me. She then started changing into her clothes, a sleeveless silk top with black laces on its trim and a black leather skirt short enough to reveal half her butt. She was wearing black lingerie on the inside and a fur trimmed petty coat on the outside. Finally, she put on high-heels pointy enough to kill someone and left the house. 

She drove to the hotel where she works and checked her schedule with her agent on the phone. Someone was due at 2pm, and she waited patiently on the couch in the lobby, constantly re-applying lipstick on me every time my tears had smeared it. Finally, a middle-aged man in a suit pushed open the hotel lobby door, and she signaled for him to check-in their room at reception. She never has any problem identifying her customers – they always got this look on them, no matter how old or young, how ugly or handsome they may be, their faces are always written with thirst and their eyes are always shifty. She followed the man inside the elevator and they were silent all the way up to the 12th floor. The elevator opened and the man graciously held the door open for her to walk out first, then he followed. All that was heard were the muffled footsteps upon the dense red carpet in the hallway. They turned into Room 1214. 

Right as they both stepped inside the room the man put up the “Do Not Disturb” sign and shut the door loudly. Before she even had a chance to make a sound, he pressed his dry lips against me and stuck his tongue inside my embrace. She returned the kiss passionately for that was her job, and I wept quietly and helplessly. I hated the man’s scent and I could almost taste his lunch. I hated how he smothered me without love and even bit me several times. I cannot stop myself from motion for she is my master and my tears seemed to only excite the man more. I could feel her eyes sad and helpless just like me, forced to peer upon this obscene creature. As she kneeled on the ground besides the standing man, I knew that the moment I dreaded the most was about to start again. I could not even bear to imagine what happens every time she forfeits me like that to strangers let alone reminiscing about it. I hate it so when my tears meet that of his; my entire vision is showered with his overwhelmingly disgusting tears. I can see but I cannot speak, and it hurts me so that I am but a puppet. My emotions gradually became numbed, and I obediently followed her orders. After a while she finally stopped moving me and I lay there on her face, trembling with shame. The man had gotten up to dress himself now with his back towards her, and she silently lay on the bed. He pulled out a stash of money from his suit pocket, left it on the bedside table, and walked out the room. 

She counted the money and tucked it inside her wallet. She took out several of her IDs and examined them one by one as if she was thinking back about her life, for her hair and face looked a little different in each picture. One says Mary, another says Janice, and the others say Phoebe, Caitlin, and Lily. I do not know what my master’s name is anymore either, a long time ago people seemed to have called her Lily, but that was too long ago and I was too young to remember. Sometimes I felt like an orphan hopelessly attached to this world, an individual with an identity that no one knows. She walked up to the bathroom mirror to look at herself. And there I saw myself, red and swollen and emptied of a soul. Her hair was messy and her nude body was beautiful. But some parts of it had bruises and scratches from some of the more violent customers, and her eyes blinked slowly and blandly at those wounds. She walked into a tub filled with hot water and lowered herself in. Her hopes to be cleansed will never come true, and my disgust for her will never cease. She silently put her clothes back on, grabbed her purse and left the room.

Dinner was good that night. I guess either the man was generous or she decided to give herself a treat. The warm soup was calming and just the right flavor, not too salty or too overpowering. The fish had good texture and was marinated long enough for the sweetness to be tasted. The dessert was the best part - the cool, refreshing mint gelato was sugary and made me feel like an innocent child again. I was a bit comforted by the delicious food rubbing up against me which was more pleasant than what I was used to. I could see people’s faces turn to look at her as they passed by her seat even though she was in her usual spot in the corner by the window. She is very pretty if I could say, after all I have seen her as much as anyone. She didn’t have any friends, family, or lovers; she was lonely. But this was all taken into her consideration long ago when she decided to go into this business. You can say she took the easy way out; she wanted money more than anyone did, but her money-making career was distasteful to most, even to me. I was her best companion but we exist on a purely symbiotic, or rather a host-parasite relationship. Just as she feels that I am a part of her, I feel in every way that she is a part of me… 

But today I really felt like I cannot do this anymore. What I am doing is immoral and this thought tumbled stronger than ever today. Why was I the chosen one to be born onto her like a slave and be forced to do such corrupt deeds? I am saturated with embarrassment everyday as she walks out into the streets, and I feel people looking at me with disgust. I am a symbol of her and no matter how pretty she is, she is unclean. And as she made it part of her usual routine to drink at the bar just downstairs from her building, I have again become a portal between the two worlds. Tonight the interior of her body will fight again when men so slyly feed her beautiful scents of alcohol, and I know in the end I shall be drenched in corpses and tears of her stomach who always raises the white flag. I cannot stop myself from trembling and the fluids from the bottom of her stomach do not stop coming out. By this time she was already unconscious and left her body to battle on its own, but we were still awake, awake and struggling. I felt the pain within her stomach, and as I lay there in the mass of regurgitated food waiting for it to be all over, I started to feel something different. In my terrible despair I closed my arms, her mouth.
For the first time in my life I felt control over my own body. 
I felt a gush of bitter, acidic vomit pour out of her stomach into my closed body. She groggily opened her eyes due to the discomfort as the undigested food and alcohol kept regurgitating involuntarily, but I did not let her open her mouth. So much vomit accumulated in her mouth and I swelled up like a balloon. I felt her eyes glare down upon me in shock and her fingers clawed on the lips in attempt to pry them open. She made muffled sounds from the back of her throat as she scrambled her way to the bathroom mirror to look at herself, eyes wide and round. I did not budge for a while until finally my arms could not hold the volume anymore and I opened them slightly like a latch on a door. The remainder of her dinner sprayed on the floor and she was bent on the carpet for several minutes, coughing and gasping for air. 
The next few days she lived in terror. I wanted her to feel the same helplessness and disgust that I had felt for so many years of my life. She had tried almost everything – prying the lips, hitting the mouth… she even slid a sharp knife in between the lips, but I just wouldn’t open. One morning was interesting because she received a phone call from a number that I’ve seen so many times. Then I knew that I must take this seriously and play it slow. I let her speak to her agent and for a moment there, she almost thought that she gained her control back. But on the way there I couldn’t help but giggle, and it must have been such a sight for people to watch this pretty girl laugh to herself in the middle of the street. Finally, she met up with her customer, this time an even older man with much more stability in his eyes, and I got so excited thinking about what I could do with this experienced man. They arrived inside their room in their usual silence, and as the man shoved his face towards her face for a kiss, he found his lips against a crease that would not budge open. At first he thought she was playing shy, but no matter how hard he tried to push his tongue inside of me, my arms would not budge. I did feel the nasty, wetness of his tongue though, and as I defended I watched his face fill up with anger, his tongue almost dried up. Oh, how she whimpered and made these pleading noises, but he would not get it. She grabbed him with her hands, the only part of body she could still prove herself with now, and the man took off her clothes. She was still trying to say something to him, I don’t know what, but the man did not care. All he wanted was for the girl to show some sign of obedience, and she did. He did not understand why her hand gestures seemed eager to get on with the business while she just simply wouldn’t open her mouth. He stared at her face in confusion, and at this I really couldn’t help but burst out laughter. I laughed and laughed and the man looked at her in disgust. She made muffled cries again as I shut myself close and tugged the corner of his shirt for him to stay. He slapped her face hard without hesitation, grabbed his coat and walked out the door. She sat on the ground like a red-faced statue, and I opened to laugh again, the laughter reverberating within the empty room. 
She tried to call for help, and once, she almost got me. The police still showed up at her front door when they sensed the emergency in the muffled message, and when they saw that not one part of the house was broken into and she looked perfectly fine, they questioned her. She wrote down her words on a piece of paper – “I cannot control my mouth”, but she got nothing but ridicule. The policemen laughed as they prepared to leave, and one asked, “Do you think this is some type of a joke? Don’t do it again.” She tugged their uniforms and begged them not to leave just as she had with her customers, and it was a joy watching all these men turn her down. She kept writing and writing on the piece of paper but her hands trembled so and the words overlapped each other. She tried to explain what had happened in words, but in fact, neither of us really knew what had happened. I lay there watching at a distance while looking at the expressions on the cops. They looked at each other and at one point I heard them talking about the possibility that she might have psychological problems. She heard the same too, and she calmed herself down and wrote them a message, “I’m sorry for the trouble, don’t mind me.” They scoffed and left her crying on her bed with the door shut behind them. Those tears glided down and passed by my body from time to time and I have never felt so alive. She had slowly accepted this fact and from that day on, the world was a much prettier place. 
Sometimes she would sit in front of the mirror for hours staring at her emotionless face. I knew she was staring at me, and every now and then, I would return her with a sly little smile.