Bed Sheets and the Tiny Prints
This morning I missed breakfast, so I could lay in bed a little longer. I remembered the time when I was a child and woke up with bed sheets printed on my face in the mornings. I have not had them in a very, very long time, like I have not had drool at the corners of my mouth or gunk in my eyes or dreams at night for a very, very long time.
If you ask my mother, but she’ll tell you, even if you don’t, that’s because my room looks like King Augeas’ stables and will probably take Hercules and several rivers to clean, so how would I be able sleep there well. Now, if an exaggeration was an art form and had a representative goddess, her name would definitely be Irina, but I’ll admit in the mornings you can find some used paper tissues in my room, thrown straight to the floor during the night (bad allergies!) and a chair near my bed with a pile of clothes I’ve worn like twice. They look not fresh enough to be put back into the wardrobe, but not dirty enough to be thrown into the washing machine, so they stay loaded up on the chair. That’s before Irina visits, of course, tuts, shakes her head, washes everything and puts them back into the wardrobe in the neatest of ways. Slob is a word she’s usually muttering under her breath as she does so.
But back to the bed sheets and the tiny prints. Whenever I think of my mother, given we are not in a fight with one another, that’s the first image of her that comes to my mind – her doe eyes full of sleep, her cheeks warm and red, printed with dozens of tiny lines. I always wanted to kiss those lines and I think if I ever see somebody else who has them on their cheeks in the mornings, maybe I will want to kiss them, too. Just how the smell of mint tea brings me back to the chilly summer nights and the gleeful sounds of the big gulps we as a family were taking together. That’s why wherever I am, if I am having mint tea, I’m not really there, I’m back to my childhood home and have perhaps a deceiving feeling that all is well with the world. Perhaps, perhaps that explains some other things as well. Like, how I do not like tea people, but I love mint tea people. I also love coffee people, perhaps not just because I myself love coffee, but because that’s the smell I woke up to every morning whenever my mother kissed me. In all truth, her breath itself was a kiss between coffee and peppermint paste. And perhaps, perhaps that also explains why I finish four to five coffee mugs a day and brush my teeth equal times, chasing the smell.
Mariam Gurgenishvili
My name is Mariam, like any other girl’s, born during the 90’s in Georgia. In my case, it was 1996 and late May – a month of clear, balmy days and enthusiastic, newly awakened mosquitos. Ever since then, each and every birthday I had to listen to the toasts of my father’s friends about Jesus and Mary, how I was a bearer of the greatest name and had to lead an equally great, worthy-of-the-name life. Often mid-toasts I felt like asking them to focus a little on me, too.
Despite all the birthday wishes, ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a witch and a writer. Perhaps it began at the gates of Villa Villekula where I met Pippi who could do anything or in the magical forest where the little witch lived with her talking raven, Abraxas. In any case, I started daydreaming and writing around eight years old and still have tons of finished and unfinished stories from my primary school years, partly inspired by Colombian soap operas I watched with my grandmothers and partly by the tales of Hans Christian Andersen I read every night. I wrote all those stories during my gym classes where some part of my body was always hurting and I needed to be invalided out and carried inside a school library. I used to sit there gleefully and write about John Smiths and Bridget Watsons who drank Gin and Tonic and ate pineapple cubes with sugar coating and called one another “darling” and “beloved”, instead of “dumbhead” and “scumbag”, like the women in my neighborhood called their husbands. I was seventeen years old when I took a part in an exchange program and went to the United States to study there for a year. I have met many John Smiths and Bridget Watsons I had been admiring from books and films before, I tried pineapple cubes too for the first time (too young for Gin & Tonic), got called “darling”, “sweetie” and “love” and had a beautiful experience overall, but my deepest feelings, impressions and memories still belonged to the people I had left behind. People who had never tried pineapple cubes or Gin & Tonic in their lives. Those were the people that raised me and the people I grew up with. My first novel “Pearls”, which debuted in 2021, is a collection of those childhood impressions and memories, not only mine, but also of my mother and my grandmothers. It is mainly inspired by the women in my family and is about sisterhood and survival during the 90’s Georgia. I want to keep telling stories of young girls and women who were silenced, who were made to believe they were unimportant, so that those stories can bring them back their voices and their strength to make big old mountains tremble like tiny baby leaves. For me to continue writing, especially about the topics that require both courage and delicacy, I will have to grow, learn and evolve myself and I am deeply grateful that I am given the chance to do so.
