Permagel

by Eva Baltasar

Every cell reproduces itself, independent of me, and in doing so reproduces me, fashioning me into a proper entity.

Working with my cells, I am forced to adapt to them, to be like them, a small, anonymous goldfish inside this lovely glass enclosure.

It was like I was half-girl, half-milk-tank, a sort of saturated vat.

I’ve settled on an edge, I live on this edge and wait for the moment when I’ll leave the edge, my temporary home.

Self-medication is a permanent temporary solution, like the low-watt bulb hanging in the hall. Twenty years with a dimly lit hall—how little it takes to become used to seeing so little.

After a while, you’ll find that the edge gives you room to live, vertical as ever, brushing up against the void.

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.

Happy! That word had been gathering moss by the time I was born.

I ask questions and tell lies, tell lies and ask questions: that’s how I roll.

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.

What I wanted was to live effortlessly, like a little worm-eaten branch that floats downstream with no ambition other than to drift along, bowing to every change in direction and embracing its weathering.

It dawns on me that this must be like the pain that follows an abortion, the residual sadness of a life unlived, clinging clawlike to life.

But I’m alone; I am fifty-two kilos of loneliness and lamentation, a real treasure.

Though I’ve had fabulous lovers, they’re never so fabulous as the day I leave them.

Every part of her was a cry for life. While my life was a cry for death.

At least she’s a considerate bitch, my sister.

It was enough just to listen to her, to let her words penetrate my body, softening it in strange and unpredictable ways.

And I renewed myself in that image, of my French piano-playing lover. But every second I died. And it was a very dignified, respectable way to go.

Not everybody has a lesbian sister to comfort them after a breakup.

“What’s it like”—enticing inquiry—“to fuck a woman?” I swear this is the first time she’s ever uttered the word “fuck,” plumb-drunk on Coca-Cola.

And she would say it just like that, in italics, because she had the ability to apply font to speech.

This never made sense to Roxanne, whose whole life was a treat.

her tongue was a sovereign being that lived alongside her, a slave to my pleasure.

I’m not a sex addict, though I do spend a lot of the day thinking about sex.

Sex distances me from death, though it doesn’t bring me closer to life.

Life belongs to others, it always has.

Imminence is just the carrot dangled by the future to keep us present.

I weep like sugar from fruit left too long on a branch. I melt. I give in. I turn little by little into a sack of bones.

A hard-rock lullaby grows inside me, cracking the permafrost.

I feel the termite hill inside me, a cloud of red and orange dust, a crypt about to walk off.

When I look at her, I see a lake lost in its own depth, a lake black and crystal clear.

I’ve realized that I know myself by heart—I know myself to the point of recognizing people who don’t exist and yet complement me. I know myself like a path that leads home, like a doorless corridor, like endless guardrails. I know myself like a decade-long involuntary commitment.

I sense a change in my body—it is unsexed, majestic and magnificently afflicted, like a tower riddled with sorrow. And I can feel the whole crush of humanity inside me, concentrated in a place that is absolutely personal.

Sorrow is an enormous mystery light-years away from love, I think.