Inga Abele - High Tide

“Well put, and even a bit ironic. But how come your eyes look so sad?”

“Because today’s January 15th. That’s all. Let’s take a walk along the Spree.”

Thesunset is totally insane, Ieva thinks.

And where are they all going…

Tonight the sunset is pure madness, this is what she thinks.

And what she thinks has no meaning. The word “insane” hasn’t meant anything special for some time now. People shout it in the streets when they want to make others think they still feel something. And she has no clue what madness or insanity really are. Just words.

So we need to get rid of them.

And that orange, flaming eye through the bluish veil of mist and the fragile claws of night reaching for the white, disheveled clouds… Something dramatic was happening there, something strange. Over the woods themselves.

How can you say it, what do you call it, how can you find the words?

She looks again a few moments later — there’s nothing there anymore. It’s extinguished.

That’s a good word — extinguished.

Extinguished.

She looks out a different window. A group of kids runs around the courtyard in the half-dusk and calls for a dog to follow them. It’s always like that — always following them. Her daughter did it, too, step by step. Going somewhere. But she had so wanted to protect them. The dog and her daughter. And everyone else.

There’s no way she can.

Fog settles over the yard.

Maybe she should call these kids inside? So they can smear their muddy fingers on the walls and steps, eat cookies in the dark of the room, at the foot of the bed. So they can squeal and dance among the pillows, secretly play with her lipstick and, one after the other, suddenly grow up.

Like corn kernels exploding high over the midday heat.

When kids grow up, they instantly distance themselves. They become continuous even though, frankly speaking, it seems like just five seconds ago they were nothing more than an orgasm.

There are a lot of little deaths in life. Though no one probably thinks of these fragmentations like that. So what are they called?

She doesn’t know.

Kids glide through their childhoods and continue being continuous.

It’s wrong. Like all the grownups who carry the many lives they’ve lived within themselves, continuing and continuing on.

She could call them in — like recruiting an army — pass out chocolate rations for survival and smile bitterly at them, rewarding them for their nerve to come inside with their muddy shoes. But the dog will probably drop ticks, fat like overripe grapes, and the kids will trample them and smear them over the floor. She doesn’t have time to wash the floor tonight; she has to protect her idea. A kind of basic task, egotistic. She has to be with herself. So trivial! And what’s more — what a sunset! The shouts of the kids in the courtyard. They live in an entirely different world, a world she knows nothing about. That world will blossom when hers wilts. Every moment, thousands of worlds simultaneously blossom and wilt. A moment of chaos in your head — God, when am I going to have time to wash THESE dishes?! What time did he leave? It seems like it’s been forever. But no, just a few hours. Maybe, if she were someone ELSE, she’d be able to take a nap in the middle of the day?…

Where are they calling that dog over to? Where will they wander off to, where will they go with their unkempt, tangled hair and frozen, red hands? Wherever it is, there’ll definitely be some kind of danger: a marsh, quicksand, a quagmire, a steep bank of sweetly flowering, poisonous Daphne bushes or something else equally alluring… Maybe she should protect her daughter, call her in, keep her under her wing? Once upon a time those kids had been her daughter.

At one time she still entertained the hope that she’d be able to protect all of them.

From everything.

But no. It’s not possible. She has to be with her own self tonight. In a completely grammatically incorrect sense. A small task, because the goal is small. She is nothing more to the history of the world than an ant is to Mont Blanc. That’s why it would be best to go, bless the dog and the kids, gather them up, and feed them or something. But her goal is minute, and her suffering will be great, because he who puts others before him is happy — only she still puts herself first more and isn’t even ashamed of it. She’s come to enjoy withdrawing further and deeper into herself. And someday she’ll have to pay for all of it.

This fog!

One time at the Central Market, a gypsy woman had told her fortune: “You’ll start from zero many times over, it’s a gift you have. But only to a certain extent.”

Marking boundaries. Building a wall? No use — she doesn’t have the skill. You can’t start anything by force. It’s just — I choose to believe. Again and again from the beginning. Ieva looks around carefully. If there had been anything left over, even a grain of sand, she could cultivate a pearl out of it.

She could keep it together.

Everything is scattered. Live half your life and realize that everything is scattered.

But at night she can feel there’s a river. Not a single time in her life, not a single territory through which this river flows, isn’t a part of the river itself. The heart of the river is somewhere in the distance — there, from where the river flows, or there, to where it flows.

While she washes dishes she suddenly grabs a pencil and writes on a paper towel — Oh, this fog! How she’ll wind up paying for this sentence! Half of her unhappiness is her imagination and curiosity. She’ll withdraw from life with each letter, paddle away from existence, until she’ll no longer be able to pave a path back to the simple scene beyond the window. Farther and farther away — like a stream down a mountain. Like the Earth from the sun. She’ll continue. She’ll be far. And wide. She won’t tell her daughter how much she misses her, because she won’t know how to find the right words. She’ll spend days hammering out the same passages, struggling to formulate love in short sentences on paper until others will simply accept it. She’ll spend her entire life studying, but never learn how to write the word “sunset.”

It’s insane — where did it all go! It was just there, she thinks, looking out at the grey sky. And the courtyard is empty. They’re all gone.

Shegets in late. Nobody visits this late — it’s unacceptably late. Extremely late. It’s already that time when early evening is being ushered out by the night. The twilight pulls your thoughts under — and once twilight sets in you can’t start anything. Tendrils of darkness snake into your mind. It’s too late to talk. Everything seems to have already settled into itself, so why waste words?

It’s a good time to drink tea and sit quietly. That may be exactly why she chose to come over so late, so she wouldn’t have to talk. So she could spend the night and take off in the morning. Visit mom — just a date circled on the calendar.

Ieva opens the door.

“Hi!”

“Hey.”

A quick kiss on the cheek and then a step back. Maintain some distance. The air around Monta carries a lingering haze. She probably stopped for a quick smoke before heading up.

Ieva makes tea. Monta wanders around the apartment.

“Can I use the internet?”

“Of course.”

She sits at the computer. Her hair is in dreads — tight braids, thick and prickly like a bristle brush and the color of darkness. Her angular shoulders hunched, her slender neck tense. It’s like her daughter is surrounded by invisible spears, cactus needles. A teenager; not to be touched.