Anca Dunavete

Sometimes little things tip me into euphoria. Sitting at a bus stop at sunset, the warm wind rushing in every direction through my dark hair, over my naked, golden skin. When I close my eyes, I’m a mermaid. The coins in my hand are seashells. I take dips into the ocean and the rest of the day feels old, as if all things happened last year. I’m caught in an underwater current. My reality swallows time, swallows me.

The scent of my soul is the smell of the rainforest. The world rains down on me, and I come into bloom. Freedom is the missing piece of the puzzle. When everyone else is making sense of the chaos, I am the chaos. This is the wilderness. My heart is a jungle, and I am every living thing in it. I am infinite in my shapes and sounds and colours, in my thoughts and my emotions, in my ever-changing sense of self.

And you want to talk about the stories – flowing through my veins, slipping through my fingers, coming out of me like streams of water – that I write as if they were definitions. But in each story I am a different landscape, a different force of nature, a different girl. If you follow the thread that ties us all together, you’ll get lost inside of me.