if you’re the only one who can’t hold her breath long enough to dive to the next low tide, then grab hold of him and soar over it all.
The reason is so cliché and simple that she’s angry with herself and cries, but she doesn’t want pity. No destiny but her own, no advice, no help. She wants her own experience. Why try to avoid it—so she won’t make mistakes? She needs mistakes, needs them! Fear of mistakes has been stitched into the spacesuits of astronauts and launched off to Mars for years and years. The need to make her own great mistakes surfaced as she trudged through her detached years. She wants the forest and silence, and to see how it’ll all end. And how they’ll start, if they’ll start at all. What she does know is that after the beginning comes the end, and after the end comes the beginning. But whether or not something will outlast her—that she doesn’t know. The most valuable thing she owns is an old Chinese Book of Changes. It hasn’t lied to her a single time. She only turns to this book in rare cases, when it’s no longer possible for her to go on like she usually does. And she’s not looking for keys to the past or future in this book, no. She’s noticed that the most significant thing lacking in a person’s life, and a frightening habit at that, is the ability to be aware of the present situation. She often asks the Book of Changes one question—where am I? And the book has never lied to her, it tells her the place like a well-drawn topographic map: Breakdown.
Observation.
Justice.
Or something else. Defeat turns into assault, structure into debris. And the characters, they’re the same ones you see in your dreams. Now that she’s in love again, she asks the book and the book answers: Swan. It’s the truth. But unfortunately, she’s not a swan when she’s in love. She’s a cat. And the swan never reaches shore. She laughs at herself—look! She’s in love. But does she need it again, she’s so tired and knows all the horrors of it from start to end, like she knows her multiplication tables, so why, and for what? Again with this sighing feeling of existence, this diploma of life. This stream that pulls her forward and makes the pit of her stomach flutter.
She catches cold so she has time to weigh her options. So she can sit motionless by her kitchen window for hours and watch the landlady, the pigeons, the veins in her hands, the creases at the corners of her mouth in her reflection in the window, her thoughts and feelings, all before she jumps to her feet, calls him, runs and throws her arms around him. Because… is there value in anything without love? Woman has always been and always will be the strength in what’s weak and the great in what’s small, but of her own volition—don’t forget that.
Outside, coincidentally, is the harsh Baltic seaside climate. When she was little she believed it was the only world that existed. There, by the sea, three months of sun and nine months of darkness seemed as natural as being in her own skin. The change of the seasons, the velvety tips of budding flowers, drawing sap from birch, or the patter of green, wet leaves against the roof of the house in fall—she was so close to it all, though her head was no higher than the ferns and her fingertips could just reach Gran’s knobby knees. Granddad Roberts sometimes brought his wrinkled face down to hers, coming into view like a piece of brown driftwood the wind had slowly unrolled from a skein of waves. He’d sing:
Over the fields sweeps
a low spring wind,
a violin cries sadly along.
The violinist plays,
he once was young,
the heart in his chest was once full of love…
And then he’d play the same melody on his silver harmonica.
Back then Ieva had asked:
“Granddad, does that mean your heart isn’t full of love anymore?”
“Always,” he laughed, “my heart is always full of love.”
Roberts smoked by the stove and told Ieva that the glowing rolls of paper he always held between his fingers were also lit by the flame in his heart. Pipes are for those who like breathing in fire, he’d laugh. Then Gran would scold him, call Roberts a smokestack and to stop feeding the child nonsense. But there was no real reason to scold, Ieva had eyes enough to see that Granddad lit them by picking out an ember from the grate.
Ieva hadn’t yet learned to read when Roberts told her all about the nature of clouds. How clouds, this everlasting gloom from fall to spring, were a second sea above the real sea. That up there where birds live, above people’s heads, was another lead-grey surface, which the wind constantly swirled about and chased into waves. It was lit by the sun and the sky above it was just as clear and blue as in the summer. Now, many years later, she’s been to the desert and has already felt that the door is open—she could escape from the swamp to the equator by myriad paths. She just doesn’t want to. She wants to feel like a child again—to be in the depths of the clouds. To be at ease in the depths around her heart.
The screenplay she’s just started is sitting on the table, but right now, as far as she’s concerned, it could be on the surface of the moon.
And what is she looking for? Can she ask anything more of life than the privilege to trust a single living person, and him alone?
And what can she ask of everyone, of the one and only God, of outer space, the Universe, but the desire and basic hope to never betray or hurt another?
On a shelf she finds letters she wrote to her brother as a teenager. And sends her brother a text message—an entire forest of exclamation marks. He responds with a single question mark.
Turns out—we’ve lived, she answers.
There’s proof, you can touch it. A little black notebook filled with words. If you have one free week, an unpaid vacation, or are part of a stay-at-home clinical trial during which you can afford to spend time in a dusty closet, digging through ink-stained, aging pieces of paper, or to look through photographs of the deceased that still retain some kind of discernable contours—you can touch it, this feeling.
Turns out—we’ve lived.
Mother
Mother tries to remember where she’s seen it before.
Faces peering at her from a glaring brightness.
Big eyes. Lips that are saying something, smiling, cooing, scolding. Faces that pull her from the comforting darkness and into the light.
An avenue.
For a moment she sees her father; he points out the leaves overhead. She is a child in her stroller, a child absorbing every single detail. She sees the leaves and becomes them, submerges herself in them and their silky movement.
The faces in this narrow room are like the leaves. They form a canopy high overhead, full of rustling movement and a teasing wind. The faces look at her as she lies there like a dried-up worm, wedged between the body pillow and the wall. A pair of hands throw open the curtains—a window fills with light.
“Good morning! Time to get up,” a light voice says.
The face leans in very close—it’s a woman’s face.
Mother opens an eye. The other is crusted over with pus. She looks at the faces and her toothless
