Rosemary and Sage

Ridged mountains rise and fall with my breaths. Snow-capped peaks, dew-filled valleys, a world across my bed, flung by chapped hands.

I do not sleep these winter nights, though I dream, north with the behemoth metal ships that haul their way into ports, windswept and exhausted. It is these winter nights that scrape my bones dry and clean, ready to feel for another spring, another year.

Lacy ice crawls its way across my walls and the puddles in the courtyard, reflecting the lace on my dress, my winter-white veil. I do not sleep tonight, and I will not sleep tomorrow, when I am passed from one hand to another. I am a girl, a woman, the smells of rosemary and sage oils still clinging to my hair from my grandmamma.

And still I breathe a pattern that I cannot stop. In tastes of unripe berries in the fields, and out is a smoky dance of steam that fades in the cold. I am a brass-bellied ship, waiting for the welcome embrace of home.

Cold crystallises in the air above my face, so I can see the shape of the days before me.

I have never met this man.

He is tall and blond and green-eyed, so they say, not wind-chapped but callused with hard labour spent sweating in the spring and summers that paint their way green across glacial valleys. He is tall and blond and green-eyed and kind, not for piety but because, just because. He is tall and blond and green-eyed and he will call me moja supruga.

Leaves scuttle through the courtyard, sounding like spidercrabs as they click their way across ships. I am startled, unfocused. My bed rocks with the waves of a storm, pounding down, up, down. My bed is cold; I am as slippery and scaled as a fish, and they will not catch me.

And still I breathe in the pattern of the waves, gulping salty-sweet gasps in, and tasting fresh watered relief as I breathe out. Ink freezes on these winter nights, but the lignje still swim, can still be caught in nets. Their blackness still spills across my hands as frosty light spills from the moon, splashing across my land and room, spilling droplets on the snow blanket of my bed but leaving darkness in my hair. With darkness in my hair and hands as the winter nights wear on, I do not sleep.

Mist is on the window; she hides the mountains at the courtyard's back, where all the trees bend and bow and face the moon. The trees I once climbed with my sisters, in the fields that smelled of sage and rosemary and of grandmamma, who cooked and knitted and cooked. Sage and rosemary and warmth in winter, and I used to sleep.

Back when I still felt whiteness and sunshine in my dirty bones, I used to sleep, and wait at the docks for the rivet-filled ships to return to our icy port; to come home. Their bellies would be filled with the spidercrabs that clicked in the metal floors, and lignje, and sliding, gasping fish.

Winter came with glossy fires and melting snows and a promise of spring on the tips of the tongues of the mountains that stood in the fields and across my bed. The house opened its mouth to smile at summer that would come through the cold as the ships left again with the boys and the smell of grandmamma and sage and rosemary.

Rosemary is how I remember to breathe in these stale winter nights when I do not sleep.
This whiteness of me is not right; I should be the darkness of the sea where the rocks grind storms and winds to push us into autumn. I should be the darkness of my ink as I write, as I trace out words of tomorrow and my future sorrow.

These winter dreams of mine crystallise between my teeth. Leaves that fell from the trees at the first kiss of autumn fly through the snow, and I want to fly with them. I want to fly with my arms bare and my white dress and my white, icy laced veil. I want to fly to the tall man with the blond hair and green eyes and kind smile.

The ships will be home soon, flying their chequered grb flags with the leaves and the snow and me. And I will weep with the metal-bottomed ships that will be welcomed into our home embrace as they trip with filled nets. The waves rock my soul, but not with the fury of before, of the storm that tugged my hair and tugged my heart in the cold. I did not sleep that winter night, as I do not sleep now, when my cold, snowed-in bed is empty and I wait for tomorrow.

The night cracks. It is the sound of the puddles in the courtyard after they freeze, the sound of my bones in the summer when I fall from trees into rosemary and sage. It is the sound of ending, as I am at an end, just as winter is the feeling of sadness and cold and the loneliness I will fill tomorrow.

White is not the colour I want, but it the colour of my life. White is my chapped hands in winter as the wind slices the white snow, the white ice, the white of my bones against the red of the grb. White is my bed, around the spilled blackness of the ink, and my dress. My lacy, icy white veil, which I will wear tomorrow. White is my loneliness.

White is the colour of winter, wind and flight.

It is time for me to fly.



The suicide note of Fabinica Puškarić, found on her bedside in the asylum in which she had been living for the past three years. It was found on the 3rd of January, 1910, on the anniversary of her husband's death at sea.