Things you can sleep next to in order to dredge up existential despair include: a long-term lover, a complete stranger, and an empty plate. An empty plate is like an undone promise if you clean it. You wake up alone with the same dull ache of clenched jaw because you dream that your mother is dying, or you dream that your father is a baby screaming at you. A dream is like a teardrop in the cold air, but only once you walk outside. In the kitchen, you have two scrubbies: one for surfaces and the other for dishes. You know which is which and you would never use the counter scrubby for a glass, but when you watch someone else do that, you don’t say anything and then you put it out of your mind. Your mind is like a coconut. Pale cream or grey meat and then that big centre divot. That’s the first thing you picture. You choose not to think about it when you’re drinking from an opaque water glass two days later. You log the choice.
To friends, you talk about falling in love as if it’s a matter of convenience. You haven’t done it in a while. In love is like a loud speaker. It makes you careful and vocal. You know that the way you pay attention doesn’t always serve you, that things can quickly filter in and out. You liked him on the sidewalk and that was it. The books in your room are a coloured gradient across the wall, and you can barely remember anything you’ve ever read when someone asks. You tell your friend that her man is a bad man if that’s what she wants to hear. Then you let him be the opposite later when she wants to feel at ease. Your friend’s man is a paper doll and it feels noble to dress him up however she wants you to. To peel the shirt out of its little paper book. But as a sister you would secretly brush his hair. You know that sometimes in love there is a contract of knuckle-white bully union, hands held tight as mutual conspiratorial act against. Against whatever. The bill taking too long. Jagged pavement. You want distance from the heart of that. You never want to red rover your little life. You want to carry cash.
The days are long and light so late. Ceremony is the faint lull of your roommate playing “Linger on your pale blue eyes” through a thin painted wall while you boil a kettle. The inside of a blue eye is like Iceland. Iceland is like a hot bath body with a cold forehead but you haven’t been, except in the airport. The Reykjavik airport is like a coffee shop. When you stood in line for your narrow airplane, a mother in a nuclear family said to her teenagers and husband, “if you don’t all cheer up I’ll sing.” No one cheered up so she did, she sang “Hey there Delilah” loudly and her kids turned many colours and you loved it. She ugly winked at you while they yelled at her to stop and you thought, “I want to be like that.” When it ended she exhaled the way that kettle steam crumples the grey painted wall next to the stove, over time. If you smoke in the kitchen with the window open, the entire smell still floats to your room so it seems like everything happened in there. You have no idea about science or the way the world is. Your friend asked you if you felt like the life of the party and you said no but you said you felt like the life of a party, somewhere. And your friend said that the party was probably just down the road or across the street and then she looked into your left eye specifically for a long beat and you said you wondered how close.
Science is a big human tongue and a cartoon bus rolling onto it. It is a circular rainbow gradient with a loaf of bread, a shiny apple, floating. You know there is no way to remember a feeling. You remember this when you give your friend advice. You both know that advice is often like the hardened glue of fake lashes but she still needs to hear it. You know there are ways to think within your own thinking. Sometimes you forget how to live.
And sometimes you forget that you forgot how to live. The days where you forget that you forgot are the loveliest ones. Today is that day. You are 10 000 days old. Nobody knows this except you and a website. Your metric birthday. You wake up and check it. Waking up is like ripping a pink marshmallow in half. Then you feel your body sit within itself. The cold wet window touches your hands, opening them. Your body is a system. You can summon goosebumps just by thinking about a drop of water sliding down your neck, slow as a tear, diminishing. You know that it’s too early to get up, that getting up won’t serve you later. The days are insidious, like a dog slowing down that you pet gently, vet money that you quietly put aside. Old dogs are like your father, in memory, holding open a sharp towel when you emerge from the bath. The bath is expectation because you can’t help but quietly lie down in it. You get up anyways.
You look at your yard that is barely a yard. A yard in any near season is like an unwritten speech that starts uncertainly. You can watch it reach its own potential that is not yours to have. You can watch it become itself. Seeing potential serves you. Severs. A spackled valley. Attention is a form of flirtation. Flirtation is the memory of a hot cherry Lip Balm melting in your tightly-clenched hand. You never want to lose it.
Your friend looks into your right eye and tells you you’re invested in fun and you ugly wink and tell her she’s not wrong. It is true that you’re invested in a certain way of paying attention, a certain golden hue. Attention is golden because it is top-notch specific. Your friend waits for you to kiss her so she can laugh it off but you do not. Laughing it off is a harmful form of investment. Your investment has never felt harmful to others and so you watch it. But today is more silver than anything. A heavy cloud leans sleepy into that forgiving divot of eye-level sky. Florida-pink peonies bloom and then bend in the thin green grass.
Aley Waterman is a writer, glass artist, musician and English Prof from and living in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. A graduate of the MA in Creative writing from University of Toronto, Aley worked on her first novel Mudflowers under the mentorship of Sheila Heti; Mudflowers will be published by Dundurn Press’s imprint Rare Machines in the fall of 2023. Aley has had poetry, prose, and creative essays published in Bad Nudes, the Hart House Review, the Trampoline Hall Podcast, the Newfoundland Quarterly, Riddle Fence, Vault Zine, Metatron’s Omega, and elsewhere.
Phomohobes are Jason Cawood and Colby Richardson.