Marija Andrijašević

the look in my eyes is as kind as an amphetamine and believes that pharmacy is a god-given science. every morning, while still without thoughts, i slide my hand along my stomach hoping to reach the thighs. a strange feeling. i will get up, i will exist and you will know me. i am bad with promises, i do not like them, but i tend to promise nonchalantly. life slides when i control it. it goes slowly and continually. and it never talks to anyone. it has no limits. now look here, one time i saw my old man crying and it was very awkward. he had poor eyesight and i would usually tell him what color the light was. and the day he cried we were driving to the country. him and me. the light was green. he was crying. i just kept thinking: well, what the hell’s wrong with you? fuck you, crying in front of me like that. it wasn’t me who slapped you.

gray is not my favorite color, but to me the sky is never blue. it is always gray. the sun is red and the roads are covered with blood. they’re hanging by a twelve-inch string. like his body. my name is to sacred for the life i am living. now then, there he was crying. he cried for, well, 12.5 miles. and i just kept wondering whether we would stop at the gas station and whether he would buy me an ice-cream and whether  the rest of the family were getting by without us at home. if only he’d stop crying. i never worry about tomorrow, i let time pass from one moment to the next. i hide my face, it is interrupted by commas and dots. it is incomprehensible. my eyes have a black dot in the middle. darkness coming from within.

he kept saying he loved us. we were his life. no one ever thought he’d do anything good. family. he was black to everyone. then i began to realize and to raise the question from within: but then why are you destroying us? you created us, don’t destroy us as well. and wipe those tears from your eyes or we’ll  end up under the tanker in front of us. i do not know how to love if that love is not returned. my sky is always gray. that day my brother locked himself into the room. my old man called the police. later my uncle came and begged my brother to come out. i cried in my room. i couldn’t understand. i was eleven i didn’t know why the world was called the world and why our father didn’t love us or why he loved us in that very peculiar way. i begged my old man for us to get out. we sat in the car and headed for the country. then he started to cry and i was no longer sure who was the guilty one in our stories. i walk tall. nothing bad exists in my life. i want you to know that.

a few days later everything was all right again. we had forgotten. it lasted long enough for the next blow to break us into even more pieces. my old man never cried again.

we have completed this marathon through our lives. today we are knitting sweaters for new winters and someone else’s bodies. she tells me that i don’t love you as much as i think i do and that i don’t even remember you. she calls you a need. i am looking at you through the green lenses of my glasses and through the blood that leaves traces around hangnails. i tell her that i do love you as much as i think i do and that you don’t even need to be remembered. you’re tied in my eyes by kinetic photography. by the dispersion of a moment. the space is guilty of the diffuseness of this love. but it will never warm us, do you know that? the sun reflecting off her body. i usually fall ill around one-fifty in the morning. i turn out the lights and i live in the sweat of what illness is generating from within me. metamorphoses in my existence being the only life within me.