A Diary Segment from Summer:

Finding entries I wrote on my phone is like cleaning my bedroom and discovering old little Knick Knacks that I once loved.

Today, I drank dark coffee, a communist-style brew with raw granules that settle at the bottom of the clay cup like soft, soaked soil. I took a mouthful of those granules – an accident - but I could not spit them out anywhere. The floor was made of lacquered wood, and the window with the beams seemed sealed shut. I did like those curtains crafted from old bedsheets, patched by spindly sewing. So, I swallowed, bitter brails spelling something as they went down the warm well of my throat.

We climbed the stone steps of an aged town tower. At the tip of it was a horde of fleeting flies, caught in the hot, heaving space. I panicked at their proximity, ducked at the disturbing drill they thrummed. There were so many. A cystic cloud of black bodies and bursting bellies. Someone laughed, “Do you think their yellow bellies are pregnant?” I gripped the gag growing madly inside of me – I did not want those flies inside of me, too. Crawling back to the staircase, I imagined them burrowing deep into the dents in my neck where the spine bone protrudes – I was rot enough without the helping hand of insects.

Rested our fatigued feet in a crowded bar, suffocated with the smell of soured wheat and human skin. I rubbed my stomach. The discomfort dissolved as I sipped on diluted soup. If the flies were still trapped up there, I hoped they popped.

Walking in the cool, dim light of streetlamps, I confessed to my mama that I might not be able to pay rent to her. Or I might. It would be a gamble left for November. She smiled in that tired sort of way and told me I would always have a home. I wanted to let go of myself, demand that the world settle its sounds, to close the curtains. I needed to be my mama’s child again, not a grown woman who sleeps in big adult beds, drinks her coffee granules, and worries about rent. I wanted to be a little girl afraid of flies and afraid of the cricket in her palms because Dziadek said they bite.

In the car, window wide open I am all hair and wind and laughter.

It is night in the mountains. The cabin emits an echo that entangles itself with the nocturnal noises coming from the grass. The crickets are loud. They chirp as violin strings; they want to be noticed by the stars. I am wrapped in a thin linen sheet, film of sweat on the back of my legs. I tell the dark a story of a lamb and a garden mole – the air settles into a sticky, summer sleep.