Hostel In Warsaw

His face comes into view so fast I can barely comprehend it, all mouth and shadow, and when he kisses me he does it with an urgency and fervency I have felt before, and I think this is nice, but I know inside that it is not nice at all. It is not nice because when he takes me back to his I will tell him I do not want to have sex and he will say I know, we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, but his hands will be brushing the hem of my skirt and his head as thick as a mattress pressed into mine as if it were grooved for his to fit there, but it isn’t, and if I were a less defensive girl I wouldn’t brush his hands away. If I were a less defensive girl I wouldn’t wonder why he says that I am irresistible, that’s why he finds it hard to stop himself, as though the urge to pin me down and make me shut up is not actually the thing that is irresistible to him, and why- when he scrolls on instagram late at night- he will repost sexual assault stats on his story as if he is not part of the 97%.

I watch the young man in the hostel peeling potatoes over the bin with a knife. The blade slips under caramel skin and makes a sound like a soft purr, but quite unlike anything else, you’ll know it especially well if your stomach is rumbling, best paired with the sound of the kitchen fan and the smell of onion and garlic and pepper, then he makes small snaps like branches breaking or bark being stripped from the trunk of a tree as he digs for the eyes of the potato with the tip of the knife, and there is a soft and satisfying sound as the skins hit the plastic bin bag. The thumb controls the edge of the blade and it makes a little crease across the skin, it kisses the skin just gently, ‘you did such a good job’ says the thumb and the knife kisses it, and the knife leaves a trace like a tram line on the skin and the thumb retracts and the blade runs towards it…

He drops an onion and it rolls across the tile like a severed head, and he grasps it and shucks off its pallid skins and tosses it in halves to the crockpot where it makes another delicious thud. Another onion, another skin, that macabre crunch that inspires one gruesomely, the violence of ripping an onion from its skins and tossing it into a pot, forgetting that it had given all its strength into bearing its own fruit, forgetting that it had bloomed with much concentration over a long period, that it had survived the suffocating net of it’s bag, that it had been nestled so in his palm before it was robbed of its necessary skins. The skins being tossed would never colour a soup, never make apricot a stock, never bitter one such stock in favour of the sweet flesh of its one and only companion, the onion.

When I go downstairs to the recreation room a bunch of men stand around making something and they are playing loud music and when I come in they look at me in silence and I sit down to read my book, and I don’t say anything about the music because I kind of like it and also I can be cool and I am not afraid of them. And they ask me where I’m from and if I’m alone and maybe this is innocent but I know the game and so I say I have an abundance of friends in Warsaw, perhaps I’ve lived here all my life, thats how well acquainted I am with this city, and they ask me if I would like to eat and I say no, I say no because I am not silly, but I wonder how nice it would be to share a meal with many strangers, and we both know that gender stands between us and that it is not an offering for a meal but maybe an offering for something else, not sex I mean- but something beneath that, something with the knowledge that our biological makeup makes the possibility of eroticism available to us. And while they are not implicitly asking for my sex, they are asking for my femaleness, they are asking with the full knowledge and understanding that I am a woman and that they are men. It is on everyone’s mind. It is on the hostel manager’s mind when he sees me alone on CCTV with them and comes in and tells them to shut off the music and when I leave he tells me ‘don’t wait if something is wrong, just come and find me’ and suddenly I feel a pang of sadness and gratitude and relief and more sadness because that means he can see it too, it is not just me who knows it, everyone does.

I walk through Warsaw and it is -13 degrees and it is unlike anything I have ever experienced and when I look down at my hands it is as if they have gotten smaller and my skin is hanging loose and they are bright purple and it hurts and I cannot believe that this happens every winter. I cannot believe this happens every winter here in Poland and I have not been privy to it, and I cannot believe how cold I am. When I sit down at the restaurant, alone, it seems as if everything is made for this one particular moment, and I am in the middle of it, experiencing it. And I wonder about all the sacrifices that have been made so that I could be here, and all the luck, and all the things that needed to be in place, and all of that supersedes the minimal pain I have felt in my life, and all of it supersedes my anxiety about catching a flight or walking around the hostel at night. I am a very young woman and I am sitting having a dinner and drinking a glass of wine and I am only twenty two and I am unmarked by anything before me and anything yet to come, and despite it all- despite all the things that could have happened or maybe should have happened, I have chosen to come to a city who does not know me and will not remember me after I am gone, and I have chosen to sit here. And I am a woman, and I am alone, and when I walk along the busy streets that take me back to the bed I sleep in, it will be just me who tells me not to be afraid.