And Inevitably, the Rain by ilonalodewijckx

... and inevitably, the rain

Ilona Lodewijckx

10 poetic reflections, dedicated to those who inspired them.

I. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m putting myself in a time-out. I'm a contrary child once more. A small, suffocating fool with yearning lungs. Whenever I used to act like a rascal, my parents sent me outside. I struck my sister, held my breath until I turned blue, slammed the doors of our age-old convent house and listened how the hinges groaned under a girlâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wrath. Out I ran, into the garden, the rain, under the birds and the mocking sky. I greeted the white horse that lived in the reeds and all the cats whose gore we later scraped from the crosswalk. I rode my purple mountain-bike named Cheyenne and pretended she was a prairie mare. I chalked my own likeness on the concrete until my fingers bled. And now I, too, have come to believe in that grotesque human assumption about the outside: that it holds the supernatural strength to sweep out the dusty depths of skulls and souls.

II. I’m on a self-imposed exile. A withdrawal in Warsaw, a city risen from the rubble, built on death, sacrifice, visions of starvation and genocide. This city wears its solemnity like a cheap stiletto heel; braggingly, proudly, yet unafraid to kick it under the table when music hits its pining stomach like a ball of heat. You could call it a flight, an act of cowardice, a futile escape, but you know full well, in the dark space behind your eyes, in the pulsating pit of your being, that no one ever really gets out. You can die on a metropole’s pavement, in those cold arms of stone with a needle in yours, and become a pebble among pebbles, one with the cigarette butts, dog shit, plastic cutlery and the little bits of kebab in the vomit puddles. You can die on your back in grass like a fakir’s nail-bed, with your palms skyward like a beggar’s, and be lifted like a straw, braided into a nest and feasted on by hungry hatchlings. Both of those are very different. Both of those are still dying. But this is not about escape, nor is it about dying. It’s about indulgence. It’s about creating a skinless life, one that you live with your nerves sitting on the outside, as bark for strangers to carve their names in with the keys of their dad’s ramshackle Peugeots. It’s about learning to wear discomfort like a clutch purse, and most importantly, learning how to put it down when it is time to dance.

III.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve learned that, much like a disobedient dog, you have to walk your heart and let it bark at the birds.

IV. I’ve found my feet among the granite casts of composers, poets, and tyrants. The world's wisest and most wicked, now left to the pigeons. Those old kings of empires long fallen, meadows drenched in crimson, bodies stacked like sandbags and turned to dust, are much friendlier after death, quietly astride their copper horses. And while the world wages wars on the hills of women’s bodies, our structures lean on limestone nymphs triumphantly pointing their nipples to the sky. My stone-cold friends do not bow under the swollen sun. They tower over me, cast me in their shadows, yet never mock my frailty. They’ve long forgotten the touch of a body hot with sleep, the way a heart keeps up with hurried feet, or the way flared nostrils, crooked teeth, dark moles drawing The Big Dipper like pebbles in the snow, become poetry when they grace a lover’s face. They carry heavy books, crosses, sickles, pythons and pomegranates, and with motionless fingers they point at the birds, the branches heavy with life, the stars flickering in the night like the gleam in a panther’s eye, as if to say, rage! you’ve got eternity left to be still.

V. I’m childlike under this dome of blue. They like to say that there’s no shadow without light or night without sunrise, and they say it with such empty factuality, as if they are not also lost at sea, bobbing swollen and waxy into eventual oblivion. But I can finally see it. Stone fountains rise from the gravel with phallic might and shoot up frothing water like young seed. The air is thick with piss, rotting fruit, creaming flowers. Stop and smell the roses, they say, but those blooming mouths reach for me. I believe that calm is the default setting. A tempest’s displeasure floats away with its clouds. Soaring waves wreak havoc, then settle back into stillness. My fury, my melancholy, they erupt and dissolve. The beast will always lay its weary head, and the scales will tip towards weightless compromise. So today I sit in quiet biosynthesis, my body unfurled under the sunlight that plunges down like flaming daggers. It seems strange to dwell in the same dimension as explosions, deluges, whirlwinds in the stubble fields, forces of nature representing raw motion. I am immobile, steadfast like a dreaming bull. I’m the point of eternal stillness, the peregrine’s wings seconds before plunging, the apathetic moon’s noble face. I lay down on the grass and rodents rest at my feet, sprouts pierce my skin to break through, and the earth seizes me like a lover.

VI. The night creeps in like a cancerous growth. My eyes can barely believe how easily the day surrenders. The darkness spreads her fingers with bayonetnails and gorges on the day’s peaches and cream. One drop of ink is all she needs to quell our rebellion. Cities fall quiet. The trees hold their breaths. The clouds that floated by like herds of colourless ewes dissolve into dark threads and become the night’s intricate tapestry. They’ve become prisoners of war, sheep reduced to tools for violence. No light, n’light, night, a dense and filling absence. My limbs reach to fill four corners as if I’m shackled to be quartered, or offering my guts to the vultures. I force my sleep and dream of a man who wears his soul on his face. I dream of teeth sinking into skin, leaving dents like thumbs in ripe apples. Front teeth pierce the milky membrane, molars grind flesh to pulp. I dream of blood protesting in a dark fury, a plum-purple uprising. I dream of a contracting tongue, wet like a swamp slug, suckling on sweet drops of fermentation like a nursing lamb. I dream that I am held by bony fingers, the way ribs embrace a trembling heart. The walls in this place are paper-thin. The wooden floor sighs under tired feet. A door locks, urine trickles in the porcelain bowl. I imagine Rapunzel’s golden braid flowing down the polished tower tiles. The flush, the faucet and the shower try to out-sing each other. We need so much water to wash away the night.

VII. I don’t believe that we start dying the minute we are born. Decay does not set in when we draw our first breaths. We thrust into this world with pink feet and pink butts like moonscapes. Our shrieks bounce off the pistachio hospital walls — the starting pistol. We learn to walk. We learn to eat with a spoon. We ask our mothers what ‘erections’ are and what ‘relaxing’ means and the answers stay seared into our consciousness forever. It’s when a boy is ready to make love. It’s when you can’t feel your bones. Our cells multiply, regenerate, our brains expand, our bodies bulge and spread like dew drops on a leaf. For a while, we are alive without question. For a while, we wake up more alive every day. But I don’t believe that we die at an old age, either. We don’t die tucked tightly into our sheets, staring blankly at a game show or wilting in a cafeteria eating white bread that melts in our toothless mouths. By then, we’ve been dying for a long time. Death occurs somewhere mid-life, abruptly and quietly. You’ll never know when it happens. The scales tip. Death is a wallflower. Expansion turns into contraction. We shrink and implode. While our outsides may still be beaming with life, our core has begun to slowly corrode. I think of this as the burden of my body coils the white duvet, taints it with sweat, sunscreen, dirt traces of an outside world groaning under a leaden heat. I know it well, this mosaic of nerve, scars and forgiven parts. I trace the etchings in my thighs, the hairs spun across my scalp like silver thread, the freckles that mark the sun’s ravenous kisses.

I’ve grown too tall to fit a small grave, to rest my bones under white stones the size of small dogs, and I’ve cried through too many birthdays to be the prodigy whose clippings are kept in all the family wallets. So I look out for the pinnacle. I try to feel my cells and detect their rot the way you’d inspect the peaches that you bought a week ago and have been sitting in the fridge ever since.

VIII. From where I stand I see the bridge I crossed three days ago. My eyes find the spot where I stopped and looked down, at the man fishing in the Vistula river, at his sleeping dog, at the sun on the water raising the illusion of diamonds. The bridge is unchanged, and cars and trams and hipsters on electric scooters are still crossing it, and the sun is still twirling on the water’s surface like Tonya Harding, and the air that I contorted with my body’s quiet presence has taken back its original form. What happens to a place after you’ve left it? I think of the time I fell in something like love in a starless night, how our drunkenness echoed in the sleeping streets, and how light rain drizzled down on our stuttering selves in freezing flakes of silver, as if the night was only starless because the stars were strewn across my black hat and their dark hair. Infatuation kicked me like a boot to the shins and left bruises dark as that night itself (and the raw regret of unveiling, too soon, too hungrily, that soft pink matter). The place where our bodies collided as vessels of red-hot longing was at daybreak nothing but a pass-through, a place to take out the trash or double park, with ashes and crown caps scattered across the wet streets. And the city is full of ghosts like this, memories of conversations and neurons connecting, stomachs sinking into pining life-canals. The world does not wait patiently to forget us until we’ve muttered our final adieus. The window-sills that kept us upright while our bones liquified have since been pissed and spat on, and the moon that shone on our mating dance now spotlights a love stillborn, buried in a departed winter without a name or a garland.

IX. Time hammers on my back with tiny fists and leaves my skin tender like Turkish delight. Bruises like figs turn the colour of hot sand before they heal. It’s a terribly slow murder, and every punch marks a syllable. Was-this-love-tru-ly-great? Did-you-make-a-mis-take? Why-do-you-failso-much? Are-you-hap-py-e-nough? Do-you-know-how-hap-py-youcould-be? Are-you-too-proud? Should-you-speak-your-mind? Should-yousplit-your-chest-and-place-your-heart-like-a-coin-in-a-stran-ger’s-palm? Are-you-was-ting-the-meag-re-years-of-youth-you-have-left? Are-youspil-ling-the-fruits-of-your-fer-tile-bo-dy-and-the-soft-wet-ness-of-yourde-sire-and-the-milk-from-your-breast? Why-don’t-you-know-what-others-seem-to-know? Won’t-e-ve-ry-one-bore-you-e-ven-tu-al-ly? What-ifyou-died-to-mor-row? Are-you-scra-ping-the-bot-tom-of-the-bar-rel? Are-you-li-ving-loud-e-nough? Are-you-try-ing-hard-e-nough? Are-youan-im-pos-tor? Why-are-you-pre-ten-ding? Why-do-you-think-you‘re-speci-al? Are-you-drink-ing-too-much? Are-you-fun-da-men-tal-ly-good? Are-you-figh-ting-the-weak-grow-ling-a-ni-mal-that-lures-you-in-to-thedark-some-times? Do-you-make-your-fath-er-proud? Do-you-make-yourmoth-er-proud? Do-you-make-un-worth-y-men-wor-ship-the-groundyou-walk-on? Are-you-sa-cri-fi-cing-your-self? Are-you-kind-e-nough-toprin-ces-and-beg-gars-a-like? Are-you-a-ge-nius-and-if-not-what-are-you?

X. I ate sugar-crusted peach pie. I mourned a burning rainbow. I longed to kiss a dancer with skin like hot milk. I mingled with the sparrows. I drank wine until it crystallised on my lips in flakes of carmine, like blood, as if I was the biter and not the bitten. I decided that the time is now. I wrote too little, but thoughts fluttered inside my skull like bats. I thought that, if a heart beats in a cage and caged birds still know their tunes, it can’t be so bad to be confined by the chalk lines of my mind. I drank apple vodka that tasted of grandmothers, but not quite mine. I defended with all my might the memory of you, your generous heart like bath water, the entanglement of our ghost bodies on the top of the volcano where the cyclone made us topple like drunkards. I wondered why everyone I met was white. I ordered pierogis and kept them in my bag for later. I was no longer who I was when the snow fell. I held every breath of air in my lungs like a gift, like Japanese pearldivers scouring the ocean floor for a glimmer among the rocks. I was so full of life. I sweated so much that the black fuzz of my t-shirt stuck to me like chest hair. I met a Canadian girl who told me that winning looks differently than I think it does. I held a fearless finger in the candle’s dancing flame and treasured the unburnable seconds taunting fire and pain. I liked the words love bite, collision and helter-skelter. I saw the sun come up and the roses open their buds. I petted an ugly dog and let it put its paws on my new pants. I took photos of fountains and old cinemas and broken traffic signs. I learned that constant dropping wears away a stone. I heard a story about a parrot named Carmen who could only say her name and the word ‘slut’. I listened to the same five songs in a loop. I watched lovers entangle their pallid thighs al fresco, on cotton islands amongst the ants, feasting on olives and wine until the rapture came, the night, the swarms of mosquitoes and inevitably, the rain.