Anna Swir

I am not born as yet, five minutes before my birth. I can still go back into my unbirth. Now it’s ten minutes before, now, it’s one hour before birth. I go back, I run into my minus life. I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel with bizarre perspectives. Ten years before, a hundred and fifty years before, I walk, my steps thump, a fantastic journey through epochs in which there was no me. How long is my minus life, nonexistence so much resembles immortality. Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster, Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been an ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband, The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern. I walk still further, what an echo, my steps thump through my minus life, through the reverse of life. I reach Adam and Eve, nothing is seen anymore, it’s dark. Now my nonexistence dies already with the trite death of mathematical fiction. As trite as the death of my existence would have been had I been really born.

One must be brave to live through a day. What remains is nothing but the pleasure of longing—very precious. Longing purifies as does flying, strengthens as does an effort, it fashions the soul as work fashions the belly. It is like an athlete, like a runner who will never stop running. And this gives him endurance. Longing is nourishing for the strong. It is like a window on a high tower, through which blows the wind of strength. Longing, Virginity of happiness.

There are moments when I feel more clearly than ever that I am in the company of my own person. This comforts and reassures me, this heartens me, just as my tridimensional body is heartened by my own authentic shadow. There are moments when I really feel more clearly than ever that I am in the company of my own person. I stop at a street corner to turn left and I wonder what would happen if my own person walked to the right. Until now that has not happened but it does not settle the question.

Look in the mirror. Let us both look. Here is my naked body. Apparently you like it, I have no reason to. Who bound us, me and my body? Why must I die together with it? I have the right to know where the borderline between us is drawn. Where am I, I, I myself. Belly, am I in the belly? In the intestines? In the hollow of the sex? In a toe? Apparently in the brain. I do not see it. Take my brain out of my skull. I have the right to see myself. Don’t laugh. That’s macabre, you say. It’s not me who made my body. I wear the used rags of my family, an alien brain, fruit of chance, hair after my grandmother, the nose glued together from a few dead noses. What do I have in common with all that? What do I have in common with you, who like my knee, what is my knee to me? Surely I would have chosen a different model. I will leave both of you here, my knee and you. Don’t make a wry face, I will leave you all my body to play with. And I will go. There is no place for me here, in this blind darkness waiting for corruption. I will run out, I will race away from myself. I will look for myself running like crazy till my last breath. One must hurry before death comes. For by then like a dog jerked by its chain I will have to return into this stridently suffering body. To go through the last most strident ceremony of the body. Defeated by the body, slowly annihilated because of the body I will become kidney failure or the gangrene of the large intestine. And I will expire in shame. And the universe will expire with me, reduced as it is to a kidney failure and the gangrene of the large intestine.

Our embrace lasted too long. We loved right down to the bone. I hear the bones grind, I see our two skeletons. Now I am waiting till you leave, till the clatter of your shoes is heard no more. Now, silence. Tonight I am going to sleep alone on the bedclothes of purity. Aloneness is the first hygienic measure. Aloneness will enlarge the walls of the room, I will open the window and the large, frosty air will enter, healthy as tragedy. Human thoughts will enter and human concerns, misfortune of others, saintliness of others. They will converse softly and sternly. Do not come anymore. I am an animal very rarely.

As a child I put my finger in the fire to become a saint. As a teenager every day I would knock my head against the wall. As a young girl I went out through a window of a garret to the roof in order to jump. As a woman I had lice all over my body. They cracked when I was ironing my sweater. I waited sixty minutes to be executed. I was hungry for six years. Then I bore a child, they were carving me without putting me to sleep. Then a thunderbolt killed me three times and I had to rise from the dead three times without anyone’s help. Now I am resting after three resurrections.

Happy as something unimportant and free as a thing unimportant. As something no one prizes and which does not prize itself. As something mocked by all and which mocks at their mockery. As laughter without serious reason. As a yell able to outyell itself. Happy as no matter what, as any no matter what. Happy as a dog’s tail.

She is sixty. She lives the greatest love of her life. She walks arm-in-arm with her dear one, her hair streams in the wind. Her dear one says: “You have hair like pearls.” Her children say: “Old fool.”