I'm sitting on the couch and they are at the table eating a quesadilla and we aren't talking and at first I felt lonely but now I'm just breathing in this crispy spicy cheesy smell; I can smell the butter still hot in the cast iron pan, and the tortilla, I can even tell which spice is in it, I can't remember the name but I can picture the bottle, morita something, smoky and complex and rich and deep red with an edge of heat, and I'm listening to their small human sounds, and I'm remembering that connection is a practice, and it's also just a fact, as gorgeous and life-giving and heartless as a river.
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I stood in the kitchen, because the table was too far away and the trees in the neighbor's yard are pretty, and ate a warm buttermilk biscuit, split, with unsalted butter (we are out of salted) sprinkled with kosher salt and drizzled with honey from the back of the cabinet that's crystallized a bit and crunchy, and then another one with butter and salt and raspberry jam, and the biscuit layers shattered softly on my tongue, and the new leaves on the oak tree next door were yellowgreen screaming with aliveness, and the thought passed through me, "will I look back on this moment as the worst of times or the best of times?" and also, it was a goddamn transcendent fucking biscuit and this apocalypse can't take that from me.
I sat by the open window, even though it was a little bit scary to be so close to the outside, and put my feet up on the sill, which is painted shiny gold, and felt the cool spring shadow air blow into me while I talked on the phone with a friend, and looked up at the blue blue sky, and felt connected.
We stood out in the front yard, throwing snowballs at each other and watching the clouds blow across the sunny blue sky, being careful not to touch anything that anyone else had touched, at the end of the world.
Yesterday I walked through the morning, and it was soft and cool and wet, like heavy dew, beading up on my sweater, and I counted colors, five red, five purple, five white, five orange, five blue, trying to find calm. Purple was the hardest to find. I'm thinking about fives, and how fives are the middle of things, and the hardest, because you can't see the beginning or the end anymore. But six is next, and then seven eight nine ten, and then we get to start over, and maybe that's enough.
I stood in the back yard, barefoot in the cold wet grass, and looked at the full moon, our faces turned towards each other, and I remembered that I am made of the same stuff the grass is made of, and that my house is my anthill, and I live on a planet in space, and there are huge mountains in the rings of Jupiter made of dust and they cast long long shadows and that makes my feel sick and scared with awe and reverence, and we're on a rock that's hurtling through space, and I'm a rock that's hurtling through space, and I breathed out one huge smoky breath, and then hurried back into my anthill, and I can still feel the cold radiating from my feet (now dry and shoved back into thin blue cotton socks) as I type this.
Everything feels very bad right now. I feel trapped, and I don't trust myself or anyone else. I'm not sleeping well and I ache. And also, we played hide and seek tonight and the kiddo snuggled against me and I could feel her heart fluttering hard against my palm, and later I opened the back door and a cold rain blew in and it felt fresh and sweet and alive.
My friend sent me some flower essences in the mail, in a package carefully wrapped up in brown paper and transparent tape, with three stickers shaped like animals pasted on, I can't remember which animals but I think maybe there was a whale and they were definitely pink and blue and yellow, and I've just opened the bottle of pink yarrow, for confidence and boundaries, and I wondered if it would smell like flowers but it was pure brandy basically, and there were no instructions but I thought, one drop is probably good, and I missed my mouth and now I've got confidence and boundaries running down my chin.
Eleven years ago, I was married and I lived in a house that I named Beit Balagan, which means "the house of happy chaos" in Hebrew. I had it spelled out in rainbow plastic letters, little magnets stuck to the front door, because I wanted it to be true, even though it never was. And then tonight, I was sitting at the end of the table, people were laughing and telling stories, and the baby was dropping smushed-up chunks of banana on the floor, and the kids were rolling around in the living room, and the table was a mess of homemade challah and butter and salt and candy wrappers and plates of half-eaten food and all of a sudden I remembered the rainbow plastic magnets on the door and thought, here I am.
I was inside all day, crunched up and angry and rushing, and then I walked outside and the dusk was full of towering clouds and dark spaces and the wind was full of water and I felt like bones and blood and flesh again.
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AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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