Permagel

by Eva Baltasar

Right now, I am and I am not. Maybe I’m just putting myself out there, declaring my presence, like a mildly annoying smudge on a lens, a dark cloud over this chill expanse.

I take a breath and make it mine as it courses through my animate airways. Alive, I still give off a certain warmth and am probably oh-so-soft inside. On the outside, I’m softer than I might seem, as good as a pastry, a warm thing of varnished wax as alluring as an opening line. Every cell reproduces itself, independent of me, and in doing so reproduces me, fashioning me into a proper entity.

Not for me, though—best to keep moving wildly to the edge, and then decide. After a while, you’ll find that the edge gives you room to live, vertical as ever, brushing up against the void. Not only can you live on it, but there are even different ways of growing there. If surviving is what it’s all about, maybe resistance is the only way to live intensely. Now, on this edge, I feel alive, more alive than ever.

There’s nothing worse than feeling like you belong entirely to someone else, having to hear that you’re key to their happiness or unhappiness, reduced to a Lego block.

Doubt: the first chink in the permafrost.

twenty-three, it’s too late for everything. Not until our forties do we realize there’s still time. Maybe not for everything, but at least for everything that matters. After all, we’ve spent more than a decade trying to work out what’s important.

Doubt: the rift through which the world’s heat slips in, a brazen violation of the permafrost.

Sisters lead identical lives until one of them grows up, and then the other begins to do things in secret—above all, meeting new people to fill the hole her sister has left.

I stifle the feeling, remembering she had lived her life just as I had: at the margins of our family. I wonder why. There must be a reason. Both of us had craved intensity and if we’d kept on living with our family, it would’ve been diluted. Family, a first-rate solvent! You can’t possibly reach the epicenter by their side. Some individuals can only grow as amputations.

I always look like I’ve been superimposed.

This icy firmness stores a world that is habitable, yet dormant.

She’s an exceptional girl with no choice but to grow under the dark dome of a bell jar.

I tell her that good and evil are relative in the face of an imperative like a mother’s love. I tell her that children are tiny archives of unconditionality, and that love is an absolute, impervious to feeding methods. Her survival takes precedence over that of her children, or else it would be impossible for her to ensure their continued existence. But she isn’t listening; she is convinced she’s done something wrong

Another beating heart in Permafrost is its carnality, the way it depicts a body moving through and against the world. The world outside the body, with its demands for a certain behavior, and the world inside—not only on the level of thought but of bodily function—are in constant conflict throughout. The result is an intensity of feeling, something the protagonist both craves and balks at. Hence the permafrost, the thick layer of ice she’s thrown up to protect her inner life from the living that’s happening outside. Hence her fixation on sex, which allows her to safely bridge the two. Yet, if there is a conflict between the external and the internal, between thought and body, body and world, there is none around the objects of the body’s desire.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to think of the original text as a fraction of a whole. Picture a sphere. Picture the moon, even. When the reader directs their attention to a text as it exists in a single language, they are seeing only one face(t) of it, much like we only ever see one side of the moon from our singular viewpoint. The rest exists behind it, in darkness. Perhaps we can only participate in the full potential of any literary text once we have read it in every language and across all time. Maybe it’s not translation that is impossible but rather a complete understanding of any piece of literature.