she's not coming back

submission, touch, deserts, and the pull of constant movement

SNOW, BARE SKIN

The snowflakes burst into flickering lights as they fell onto her eyelashes — tiny galaxies, she thought, looking up through the phone camera, watching what she didn’t yet know was the beginning of a snowstorm.

There is the highest risk of avalanche, a guest at the spa said as if declaring an unwanted pause, forced into stillness by trillions of conscious, hexagon-shaped structures in their inevitable migration toward the ground.

.

What if everything in this world just simply obeys a mathematical order? she wondered as she traced her firmly pressed fingers along both sides of the guest’s spine, leaving quickly surfacing red lines.

They reminded her of a network of rivers carving their way through red sandstone rocks of Great Canyon she once saw from a plane to Arizona.

UNTOUCHED, SAND

So maybe see you soon? Or maybe see you stargazing in the desert, she said reproachfully, the last words tightened somewhere in her throat.

It wasn’t about him leaving, and leaving forever, but about how people in her life announced their future.

I’m leaving, they’d say with a mischievous smile, dividing unrealised stories in milliseconds, splitting realities like lightening cuts midnight-blue sky in half.

Almost midnight.

.

They kept finding each other in the most unpredictable corners of town. Sometimes by coincidence, sometimes not.

Once he saw her passing next to his building and pretended to struggle to open the front door, patting his pockets for keys a little longer just to turn around and say hi.

Another evening, the moment she glanced toward the window, laughing over an espresso martini with her friend at a bar, she caught glimmer in his light brown eyes already looking at her from across the street.

There were many unfinished moments like these, held for a fraction long enough to sense the edge of something both of them wanted, but once entered it would not leave them untouched.

You should come on Saturday, she heard over the soft crunch of her furry snow boots on fresh snow. A familiar warmth suddenly rose from her feet as she turned back to look at him one more time, and for the first time all winter, she didn’t feel the cold.

TIMELESS

Alpine towns like the one she currently lives in are marked by ski stations and conversations about someone leaving or staying.

The metallic click of ski boots in the café and the flashing notification light pulled her out of writing.

Ice blue whirlwinds on golden brown, oval-shaped geometric figures shimmered on the lock screen.

There Is No Beginning And No End.

She liked that painting.

She liked how people saw a vulva or a seed in it, and nervously lowering their eyes, coral rising to their cheeks, they would whisper that they didn’t really know anything about art. She liked their shyness.

But maybe she liked even more what it made her see deep in them.

Raw purity.

.

She never measured her life by before and after, yet she had a strange ability to appear in different countries, to exist in between — sometimes almost simultaneously.

Timelines overlapped, melting like French butter on warm sourdough, crystals of sea salt dissolving into it like moments in her life slipping into one another.

It was hard to notice when she no longer belonged somewhere, or when she suddenly bought a pink velvet sofa. As if somehow it had all been decided before she was born.

Her fingers hovered above the phone, and tapped on the new email.

MOTHERS OF DAUGHTERS

Feathers woven into braids fluttering in the late summer wind brushed wet cheeks of the eleven year’s old self. A row of tipis shimmered in the horizon at the edge of her sight slowed her heartbeat.

She went lost between dimensions of Atlantis and heavy tears dripped on the red, dusty ground, but not for having found the safety of the fire.

She realised that a part of her will always be moving. A part of her will always be away.

And her mother will always be waiting, as she was then in the vision from another life, sitting there by the campfire.

Some mothers simply observe. We think they are distant, but like golden eagles they hover above, wings spread across time, they watch the currents of our life — the small shifts, the hidden edges, mistakes we cannot name — they see without touching, without speaking, without needing to intervene.

I WANT TO SUBMIT

Maybe you don’t belong anywhere because you are the bridge between worlds?

Fuck that shit.

Trucks ploughing tons of snow outside pulled her back into the heat of her own body.

Sometimes she caught herself not recognising it, as if a piece of her had left and a fraction of someone else’s entered, lured by the promise of home.

A bridge?

I want to be all the way in.

Choiceless, full of care — not just for myself, she whispered, rhythmically moving her palms slick with grape scented lotion —nourishing, anti-aging — letting her hands drift slowly across the soft hollow of her lower belly.

She had’t felt a man’s touch for almost a year.

I want to submit, she fantasised.

I want to be told what to do.

I want to be disciplined —

held in place by the quiet authority of routine.

I want to be reduced to an equation – predictable, dictated by half-term holidays, committed to family dinners at in-laws on Sundays, and afternoons anchored by do you need anything from the shop texts.

I want you to keep turning winters into summers in me, year after year. I want to stay longer than just one day. There’s a horizon wherever we go, in the end.

.

She thought she wanted roots, but her mother didn’t teach her how to keep a hearth burning. She taught her how to be free.

TO THE OCEAN

“ To them, the journey is the destination. Should they find gold at the end of the rainbow, they would leave it there and seek another, choosing freedom over the burden of the pot. I haven’t thought once of Oregon, no dreams of the ocean or snow-covered mountains. I only dream of the journey. That is all. No gold for me. Just the rainbow.” ¹

When are you coming back?

For years the question followed her each time she returned to her home country — until some old friends and cousins disappeared into planning their children’s First Communions, while others simply stopped asking.

What does it mean, to come back? How could she come back if she never truly left?

.

There was a family story told in fragments about her great-grandfather Tomasz and his twenty years younger wife Małgorzata, whose restless hunger for life was said to have poisoned her heart — and perhaps everyone around her.

Something happened there, in New York, but to this day no one knows why they returned before the transatlantic Kościuszko had even cooled at the harbour.

Maybe they didn’t know what to do. Maybe they felt homesick between murmurs of languages they could never understand. Maybe they saw sunrises blocked by concrete towers so different from the vast fields of grain and giant bushes of white hollyhocks that grew by the front door of their wooden house by the forest.

But she knew this much: people who crossed oceans in 1930s would never give up.

You don’t leave in order to come back.

AGAIN

The sound of birds and passing luxury cars drifted through the open window of the second floor apartment she lived in. The late morning sun stood higher, right above forests of Swiss pines.

Three weeks to spring, she thought, sitting on the floor with a fuchsia makeup pouch open in her lap, getting ready for work.

The milky texture of Le Rub SPF50 sank slowly into her skin while a quiet, sudden longing gathered beneath her eyes. Sunlight struck the mirror, turned them light green, and the afternoon air filled with the scent of jasmine. ²

*

I will miss you too.

*

The red lines on the guest’s skin will fade by morning, but the touch will remain forever, like the way she was there that Saturday night.

2.17 AM.

Eyes open in the dark.

One hand traces the lace edge of her lilac silk night top, the other reaches for the phone.

I would like to come back.

Sent.

The screen fills with the red sands of the Mojave desert.

Thank You for being here.

Thank you for connecting to my words.

Thank you for being part of my stories.

And thank you for being my poetry.

Asia

1. Elsa Dutton in “1883” by Taylor Sheridan

2. jasmine-scented evenings in the Swiss Alps