Marica Bodrožić

Translated by Gerald Chapple

I unpacked nearly all the moving boxes today. There hasn’t been much talk yet in the emptiness of my new apartment. The memory-filled air from my tiniest room—I imagine it to be like a wee bird—suffuses all the other rooms. Sometimes my rooms seem to expand. Time and again I’ve turned my thoughts to the sea ever since moving here. The longer I’m able to remain silent, the more resolutely my ears travel to the sea, back to the villages by the sea, to the houses by the sea, to the people by the sea. I can bring the sea to mind without any effort. It’s a mystery tour off into the blue. The interior of the water. Ears; rustling. No crackling. In my bones. I see sailboats before me, small fishing boats. Nets filled with the night’s catch. Images that take my mind so utterly by surprise that the pressure in my forehead has let up almost entirely. The old pounding and hammering and pressing—it’s all just a memory now. Soon to be a mere intimation, and it will be a strain to look backward if I try to comprehend what it was like back then, my life.

My ears hear the sea. They hear it for me, and I’m becoming that sound-space through my ear, becoming the sea’s steady, repetitious moiling. In the depths of silence they come onshore, the waves. I sense the long-ago sand between my toes. I listen to myself and hear—after the sea’s toiling—my own breath in the synchronized sea, in the indefatigable labor of the waves and the following silence, in my ears. In the silence of the sea I have no name. I exist. Never before have I heard how lungs can draw breath so loudly before life does. And I ask myself—now that all places are one place in me, all times one time in me—whether I can manage to keep moving ahead at time’s urging, here and now, on into the future, following time’s tempo without falling prey to it. Or whether I should teach my lungs something new, to turn the murmuring of time into my murmuring, into words entirely my own that time does not know, cannot know, because I am charged with giving words to time, handing words over the edge, through the latticework that embody our contacts. Rubbing against the air. Trembling. At the mere thought of the vastness of the space now displaced inward, uncharted space. Nothing to lead me through the dark. And yet that’s exactly where an exactness lies, tied precisely to my beam of light. I know it. I’m way beyond intuitions or inklings.