dust_Siren

“No one forgets the moment they first catch sight of their own soul through someone else’s eyes.”

— persephone ✦☾ “the siren woman: an invocation”

Putting one foot in front of the other, towards nowhere in particular. The stupid heat of a Bucharest summer around you, nurturing the inner flame that chokes you. The taxi slithering through the remnants of traffic, a coked-up snake dragging your husk. Indeed, you are a puppet pulled by lust, you cheeky fucker. The cab driver talks to you, regaling you with stories of truckstop affairs from when he was a young man, cutting across Europe. If only he were your age still, if only...

You part ways, leaving behind an old friend that was never yours. The smell of rain, sulfurous, envelops your being. Your nostrils become your eyes. Is this your city? A new vision illuminates the old cracks, puddles growing like the pupils of a dormant titan, the apartment building growing like his midnight hard-on. You haven’t even noticed that dusk came. Is this how old age creeps on people? You are yet to find out, thank whatever gods may be.

Step after step, you forsake the elevator, that old cardboard box built by Ceauşescu, prolonging this sweet longing, knowing that when she opens her door, all of this will be a memory. Maybe that long ascent is where you birthed this hackneyed poem, growing into you like a cancer. These words are just an extracted tumor, yet in its striations you can still see her face clearly, even after, especially after all these years.

Yet, her face wasn’t what you saw when that door opened. Only smoke, a black curly mane growing out of that grey cloud, holding the cigarette like some silver screen queen. At best, she was a little nymph on stiletto stilts, the corset, the garter belt, the stockings, an armor forged out of cheap giftwrap. You reach for a hug; luckily, she reaches for a kiss. And serpentine, she ensnares you like a hare. Her smoky tongue reminds you of the dirty carrots you would steal as a child when you accompanied your grandpa to the market. You couldn’t ask your grandma to wash them for you, so you ate them in secret, chewing them in the windowless bathroom, with the same relish you now have as you feast on her belly button, kneeling to pray silently to this little idol.

She pulls down on your hair as if to drown you. Now there are no traces of nicotine down here; now there is only savory rosewater. You hold her thighs until she arches her back and her moans wash away the stain of your ego; you hold on her thighs like you are bound to the mast to hear the Sirens’ call to you, oh Odysseus.

An eon has passed, and you are both on the carpet; you haven’t even noticed how your knees have turned to painful wood until she pulls down your skinny jeans, you’re molting like a snake, your red Supreme flannel shirt lying like a flag in the dust of her studio. Your skin fuses to hers, and you look into her eyes. You never noticed how green they can be, or how her alabaster glows in the apartment’s faint moonlight. The clouds must’ve left the skies. They surely left the firmament that is your mind. Your hands run through her charcoal mane; it’s like wool. Like the glass wool that your old neighbor told you not to touch when he was renovating your house, you were five and a good boy, and you listened. Now, with her in your arms, it feels like you’ve been rewarded for your obedience to the wisdom of your elders. Her kisses, with the aftertaste of Dunhills, melt even that memory away. Her prickly claws burrow into your back as you merge. Violence is the child of time. Words give way to growls, moans turn into confessions. Both of you twist and coil. With her, you can feel your heart before your body, rising like the sea, the broken moon above the silent towers guiding you like twin waves from floor to creaky bed. In what is now a mere blink, you remember how spent and sweaty you both were.

“Tell me what you are always writing about,” she says, lighting a cigarette.

“Not writing about anything, it’s just poetry,” you take it from her, a drag instead of a punctuation mark.

“Well, what’s it about? Are you going to write a poem about me?” She giggles; you smile. You never did. You remember the notes in your phone, in the pocket of your jeans, in the faraway corner of the room. “Don’t get up, just tell me about them, or recite one of them.” That’s when you remembered you couldn’t recite your own poems. So you recited obscure lyrics with pathos. You even made her cry.

Passenger wasn’t popular in Bucharest in 2014. That was your luck. Even then, you felt it running out, one inner light after another burning up in your heart. Another firefly that guides you to your grave, dead. She told you about her dreams, about the ache that dentistry school gave her. You never told her you wanted to be a writer. That was a brief moment in time when you were content to write poetry in notebooks and note apps, during lectures and commutes.

You want to leave before sunrise; she asks you to stay so you can touch it together. And then the cruel dawn bestows a halo on all the blocks, making these ugly sentinels holy for a moment. She holds your hand, and you grip hers. You don’t realize how small and frail she is until she says something about blood circulation.

You finally see the cracks in her caked-up face. Sweat gathers in them as puddles do in the pavement below.

Thus, you’ve succeeded in merging the sun with the moon.