“Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.”
Rebecca Solnit
“Get up,” the woman would say. “Time for school.” First, she would wash herself. Then the kid.
Greeting and bidding farewell to the day through purification, it was a childhood memory for the kid.
Diving into water after the closing of the night, did it mean purifying yourself from what you’re escaping? Or rebirth?
Was that why the mother and the kid surrendered themselves to the water every morning?
The voice of the husband who was stale from the night, the voice of the father echoing into the morning.
Oh, the sound of water that splits the hegemony of the world like a snapping whip.
Ssshhhhh… kkksshhhhh… Would it stop the voice?
Detail from Gustav Klimt's 1905 "Die drei Lebensalter" (The Three Ages of Woman).
All the while, the woman would sing a folk song. “Not just one trouble but in many colours…” Some songs stopped the voice. “No, tell me about your colours, not your troubles,” the kid would say to herself. It did stop it. The song wouldn’t let it, the troubles wouldn’t let it. She knew that colours withered in troubled homes.
She knew that “The catastrophe was not the fire inside the family but the smoke rising from it.”
She knew that her mother’s cervix got wounded while giving birth.
She knew that her father made that wound bleed every day, that it would not heal without them re-birthing one another.
She knew that it was the destiny of motherhood to have the wound of children born from unborn women.
She knew they had to be reborn.
She knew that if she were to dip a finger in the rivers, it would turn into lava. Knew that if she were to send a voice to the water, the water would rot.
“Get up,” said the kid. “Get up, time for life.”
“Understand that the world is a bad place but do not faint. Hit the road. The ruins you leave behind will do you good. You will be purified. A stirring of life, a stirring of dreams. Dive into the water, dive into life but do not drown. ‘Because who cares if you drown? Who cares if you sink?’ It is only us who care about one another. A piece of life, a piece of soul, a piece of existence through which we will give birth to one another, the destiny of the same power.
Forget the night, forget the morning of the night, re-birth yourself. Because humans build themselves and re-birth themselves through their own actions.”
“Let’s hit the road,” said the kid.
The mother gave birth to the kid, the kid to the mother. Each birth pregnant with the other.
First they took steps, then they walked.
“Ssshhhtt!” said the kid. “Listen to the water.”
“Let’s drift from the road,” she said.
“Out of bed, out of the house, out of school.
Escape the bed, escape the house, escape the school.
Run away from the husband, run away from the father, run away from the teacher. Let’s make one another reborn.”
They walked on…