Standing in the kitchen, I find I am genuinely sympathetic towards the bruised basil at my eye level. It is leaning a sad Pisa lean in a small tumbler of water. At the nice grocery store, T reminded me the basil and tomatoes I so desire are now, in fact, out of season. I bought the expensive out of season produce anyway and shoved it in my bag. It spent the whole time we were out mushroom picking in this crowded, dark space. Now, feeling the weak but heavy sun sink into another hemisphere at the juvenile time of 5.45pm and looking at the browning basil on the counter I am beginning to understand what he is getting at. I place a tomato on my tongue, a cherry, and my teeth break its floury skin to find a not so sweet, not so anything flavour inside.
When I am as hungover as I now present my rationale goes out the window. A desire for flavours -all of them- cloud my judgment so much so I don’t even care how much my belly distends. I am deliberate in not wearing underwear, tops or bottoms, in states like these. All-day I have craved warm, sodium heavy, foods that crunch and release silky illicit fats. I feel parched all of the time and find I desire flavoured drinks, carbonated drinks, pulpy drinks, even slightly alcoholic drinks. Anything but water. In between my eating a tin of chilli sardines on olive oil-soaked bread and a handful of slightly sweet, slightly salty popcorn I relieve my full bladder and catch sight of myself in the mirror. My face is flushed in places and the skin around my eyes has engulfed the balls so my two sockets look small and peculiar on my face. I dare look a minute longer and what reveals itself to me, so pronounced I can’t engage in anything else, are the lines, so many of them on my face criss-cross-hatching me into an older woman. I close my lids over the small sockets, catch my breath and promise to avoid my reflection for the remainder of the day. I also promise to at all costs resist the temptation of drink. Maybe this will buy me time, line-wise.
In this limbo time of meshing work and the home life, study and the home life, pleasure and the home life, leisure and the home life, indulgence and the home life, exercise and the home life, I am increasingly bothered by guilt. The guilt is like an itchy tag on my bare neck, all of the time. Pre-covid19 I filled my days with exercise, activity, work and loved ones so I would genuinely enjoy relieving the tensions I had accumulated in the day; so my relieving of tensions was warranted, deserved, satisfying. I am finding it difficult to craft tensions these days. I am constantly relaxed, indulging from mid-morning seven days a week. In a podcast I am very fond of, Leigh Sales tells Annabel Crabb about her behaviours lately; how she is constantly seeking comfort in food, clothes, activity or lack thereof. It feels, to me, like that uncanny sense of fleeting festivity, like it is one’s birthday Monday to Friday and on weekends, Christmas. I am trepid about the returning of things to normal as I don’t know how I will be able to hack it after so many days of lazily indulging myself. Money drifts into my account once a fortnight from god knows where, the government is now subsidising my taste for textual white wine and light juicy pinot’s that go so well with the autumn flavours starting to appear, the autumn flavours I now have the time to cook slowly and carefully. Lately, I notice T and I browsing the thirty to forty dollar wines. This was never discussed but another permissive upshot of what is going on in the world, apparently. It seems I, along with many others I’m sure, am being paid to stay put.
We arrived at this stretch of coast on the strike of midday today. I love it here or at least I feel I ought to. I’ve never quite been able to find the distinction between these two. It is the kind of place where a fast walking pace is hard to achieve and you remain in bed to drink your coffee. Since arriving, I have walked around plenty and achieved little. I find I am walking into rooms; the bedroom, the kitchen, the bathroom, the balcony, the garden, back to the kitchen, into the living room and back again to the kitchen, unsure of what to do next. I plead a wish to the clouds to please rain down on this stretch of coastline for I find bad weather conducive to the doing of nothing. Instead, the sky clears altogether, giving way to a chilly afternoon. The hours still go by; some are beautiful and linear while others, like the hours of three becoming four or four becoming five, are hideous and impossible to fill.
I get changed into a cardigan that doesn’t belong to me, which smells clean and foreign but at the same time all so familiar. I think it belongs to T’s mum, or at least it used to. I put it on in hope that it will make me feel less like myself because being myself today is proving to be an increasingly unpleasant endeavour. This will be my fifth outfit change in an hour, the twelfth today, as my body does not know, cannot know, what it wants. Comfortable keeps changing form, so much so I think comfort today might be unattainable.
We are between roasts. Last night chicken, tonight lamb, neither of which I helped to cook. I watch, something I have always liked to do, and ask about the sides which I am told will be similar to the one’s my sister cooked me last night: ‘though not quite’. Filthy wine glasses already decorate the house, impressed with icing sugar from afternoon espressos and crostoli. We are yet to lick our lamb-y fingers and T’s mum is already discussing affogato, a dessert my grandfather would order to commemorate an occasion special. The outside fire has been lit by someone capable and full of the bother I am not. I sit by it with a gin and tonic and watch the autumn sun disappear for good, taking Sunday the nineteenth of April twenty-twenty with it. I am supposed to turn twenty-three in a month’s time, among what feels like a long-drawn-out period of holidays and birthdays. I am wondering what it is going feel like and what the world might look like in a months time. Different, disparately so, I’m guessing.
Illustration by Sophie Dickinson @sophie_dickinson
Yellow Days 