Perhaps when I got married, I was just collecting newer parts of a sentence for some kind of imaginary phrase. A bigger step to a deeper intake of breath. I was longing for a long-term profession. Perhaps also when I was expecting. I needed two subjects who would crouch in the folds of bunched-up thoughts. Who would bring other meanings. Whom I could ponder about. Whom I could thank for being able to look at myself, at ourselves, differently. Who would hold up a mirror, extend and turn over and magnify whatever they could.
I was living in waiting. For something else to come along, something that would extend beyond us.
(…)
I should have seen on the screen how they were placed inside of me. But all I saw were spots and lumps. Despite every explanation. The picture that had developed inside of me didn’t need any kind of extension. I imagined how they occupied the most obscure nooks within me. And then the horror crawled all over. I didn’t know I was so full of nooks and zigzags. I didn’t know that I could be occupied so easily.
They rearranged themselves. They pushed around everything inside me, my stomach to my breasts, my head into my heart. For weeks, I laid motionless, so that they wouldn’t arrive too soon. Stones collected in my gall. As did time. I couldn’t pull them from myself, they had to be removed. These heaps that had been shaped into two children. After they were born, things only returned to their place in part.
Or rather, in whole. As whole as they could. Back to their original place.
(…)
For a long time, we billowed, wave-like, my stomach in two parts, a hill, two waves starting on their path within a narrow frame. We billowed as one can together. Always regrouping in some other way. On the inside, on the outside.
We joined in every possible direction and combination. They joined within me and with me and with each other. While they were zygotes, while walking hand in hand, while sleeping. It happened while changing beds, while changing sides in bed. We drew the crisscrossed positions of their bodies day by day.
Foot on stomach, palms on face, on thighs, on the duvet. Within each other’s lives.
(…)
I interpreted them and I interpreted myself. Being. And I also didn’t interpret, I just took things in with my every sense. I kept watch, like when a person is pulled into a book in the lonely processes of reading. Nothing can startle a person out of that absorbed state.
(…)
Until they asked, I never thought of my own beginnings—my births, as an infant, as a mother. The beginning only meant their beginnings. Without expressions.
They were born, and that’s when all four of us started. And something ended, the waiting, the me from before had died. No. She lived in. I believed in continuations. I thought only of burials, of sprouting and blooming. The end, death—I had driven that out of myself.
(…)
We imagined them as growths and an extension of ourselves. And as independent lives.
As a mass of entanglements. When you don’t know where one thing starts and the other begins. Layers and layers of growth, a weaving, indecipherable jungle. The vines creeping from within us. The plants budding from the soil and the trees. Dizzying canopies.
(…)
We dreamed we were tiny plants with enormous, interlacing roots.
(…)
Connections came to being, I carried connections within myself so that they could connect to life and connect themselves. So that they could connect even better. Intelligible and unintelligible words tumbled from our lips. Unintelligible words that we believed to be intelligible and intelligible words that we believed to be unintelligible.
We created and bore meanings.
We pinned suffixes onto each other over and over until we could no longer remember which one of us was the original word.
We recognized each other, and we also didn’t recognize each other. We had flowed so much into one other. We believed in what promised to be the strongest of conjunctions.
We didn’t leave spaces. The spaces show up anyways, ever more periods and commas. But we hadn’t thought of that.
(…)
Hiding endless junctions, the most pruned of sentences. That’s what we were.
(…)
We flittered about at length in dreams, in sleepiness. In each other’s dreams, in each other’s sleepiness. Perhaps the merging of our misty dreams resulted in a stifling fog. I didn’t write, I didn’t read. Although my every minute was spent reading and writing. I wrote my two children. Or no, just myself. But I didn’t want to admit it. That everything is about myself, what I give and what I take. What I’ll become.
They were already created, and they are constantly creating themselves. I can only add to them.
(…)
At the start of the night, I collected letters that I would use to spell them out. I didn’t know that they were collecting their own letters, that they would spell the words, the sentences, define the paragraphs.
We juggled with punctuation. Exclamatory, imperative and precative sentences made us jump. We guessed at their roles and their functions. We were left with only question marks.
We put ellipses at the ends of sentences. We stumbled into unfinished thoughts.
We didn’t put anything in quotations. Parentheses only appeared around things outside of us.
(…)
The reciprocal longing was so natural, almost like breathing. A kind of stretching. Pining, thirsty mouths at the breast. Pining, thirsty breasts at the mouth. A trickling here and there.
I thought we would never trickle out of each other.
We launched this project with the support of the Kult Minor - Fund for the Support of National Minority Culture. Its aim is to translate contemporary Hungarian poetry in Slovakia into English. We want to create a virtual anthology of contemporary Hungarian poetry in Slovakia.