ajar

She's resting on the counter. I approach her and ask 'what is in your veins this time?', almost consciously ignoring that I barely know her. It's my last night in town so I dare to inquire about her filthy ways and her amber long-sleeved shirt in Brighton's stickiest summer ever. All this wild child aureole makes her face bony and when I look at her I can only see a big drought, youth has biten her good. In a calm husky voice she confesses to me that she cannot have children and that she's haunted by that, as if she were less of a woman only because of her incapability to give birth. 'I can only bear hefty dry bloodstains in my sapless womb', she mutters. And I like the way she talks and the words she carefully picks. She's got so-called manly vices but her body is the rare victory of all that is elegant. I comfort her by telling her that her arid blood is as sacred as the one spilled over the battlefields and in the midst of her jittery wobbliness she lifts her forefinger and draws an invisible laurel crown over my head. The previous month her cat's paunch had got swollen and her plants had got new branches and her sister's belly had got bigger with the tiny bodies of two green-eyed babies. And she said that when the kittens died and the new flowers shrivelled up she feared for her sister, however she didn't take the time to narrate to me how she intervened. Everyone has secret gardens and weed wears them all away. 

She wags her jejune hips, I wonder if she lets men squeeze her purple wrists and if mornings feel repetitive to her. It dawns on me that maybe her story has a moral, a life-changing blaze, a message directly addressed to me. But I fail to embroider it in my memory because over and over again I keep piercing myself with the knitting needles.

©Text: Victoria Bardot, 2014

Image: portrait of Biritsh model Kate Moss