POETRY
A poet is more than just a poet. A poet is the most miserable creature that ever walked this earth. Add womanhood to the equation and you have a complete disaster.
Male poets, at least, are granted the privilege of being accepted — even celebrated — for who they are, whether loved or hated. They can stumble through alcoholism, addiction, and misconduct, and the world forgives them with a knowing smile. He’s a poet, people say. A misunderstood, genius romantic.
The same gloom in a woman, however, only provokes awkward discomfort. And who can entirely blame the public? There must be a reason they feel this way, and it’s not necessarily wrong. People can’t be fooled; they decide what art is, not the artist. Especially when female poets themselves sense their precarious place in society — and in life itself. In the end, it’s charming when a man serenades a woman. When a woman writes of her feelings for a man, it’s merely embarrassing.
I suppose I’m one of those disasters myself.
For once, I will be bold enough to call myself a poet. A failed one, admittedly — an amateur who doesn’t know how many iambs belong in a verse. For me, poetry has never been a matter of precision or prestige. It’s a mental state: too intense, too passionate, too harsh, and at the same time hopelessly vulnerable, defenceless, and fragile. Because the word is everything. It was there in the beginning. It can crush you or fill your soul with sudden, blinding hope. It’s the only way I know to express myself. I can’t dance, and I lack the patience for painting — though how I wish I could visually reproduce the beauty and horror that surround me. Their fusion is the very essence of life. Only when my senses seize that charged fusion do I feel the urge to write, to shape it into something as delicate and fatal as I can.
It’s like balancing on the edge of a cliff. The wind, like time itself, passes through me, carrying on its invisible waves the indifferent force of eternal life. At any moment it can tilt and push me into the abyss. In such moments, one doesn’t care for conventions.
Before the fever nearly killed me, I managed to capture five precise descriptions of strange occurrences from two years earlier. They allowed me to recollect what I had forgotten and impose order on the chaos in my mind.
For a long time, I was reluctant to speak of it, because I still can’t define those phenomena or say with certainty whether they were real. Perhaps I was once again standing on that outer edge, only this time unable to separate reality from lucidity. The events felt too vivid, too tangible, to dismiss as mere delusion. After many failed attempts to record them as a dry report or log, I tried to forget. But insomnia wouldn’t allow it. Every night I returned to that alpine village, reliving every minute spent there.
We stayed for seven days — the coldest and darkest seven days of February. The exhausting battle between forcing sleep and fighting my own mind led me, again and again, to repeat one sentence in my head. That sentence grew into a verse, then another, then another. Eventually it became clear there was only one way to tell the story. If I held to that rhythm, if I kept that pace, it might reveal the mute, frozen nature of that week in the mountains. Those seven unforgettable moments of winter.
