I have been operating in a pervasively dreamlike state. I attribute my energy levels, or lack thereof, to the hazy Autumn light. Any homely sense of time has been dispelled so what I am left with is a body walking into rooms, putting things away, recognizing cravings to then go out of my way to fill them because there is time, so much. The cravings do not end at flavour; I find myself desiring that deafening wind in the ear feeling from riding a bike. I cycle places, mostly toward bakeries and patches of sun where Sicilian Nic is waiting for me with his pants tucked into his socks. The errands I run are non-urgent so I walk them. At the laundromat, I put in two tokens too many and settle myself into a massage chair to read Garments Against Women. When I look up the cafe is closed and the few people that were here when I arrived have left. I have no way of knowing how long my washing has been done. Inside I find my clothes dry and the t-shirts considerably smaller.
Over coffee this morning on some uncomfortable milk crates, his green, mine red, Sicilian Nic invited me to run away to Tasmania with him. I reminded him they are yet to open the borders up but he said there is a meeting coming up and we will need time to plan anyway. I still don’t know what I’ll bring. I also reminded him as he began to get carried away with the extravagance of farm-to-table life that it was not at all long ago I genuinely believed left-handed screwdrivers were a thing. Sicilian Nic is perhaps more of a romanticist than myself. This is why I love him so. When I rode home under a bright blue Autumn morning I felt good about the body I was in and the world it sluiced through.
I told him and T about the dream I had overnight, it’s complexities too vivid on my mind to hold it at a thought. I was at a music festival I had never been to before. I was in charge of bringing raisin toast and coconut water for everyone so with me carried large shopping bags. I couldn’t find a single friend over the course of the festival and at the end of my three days alone, I found them. There was no alarm over my absence. Nobody cared for the raisin toast or coconut water. Neither of them had much to say to this. I know I was doing them a disservice by asking them to listen and analyze the tendencies of my subconscious. From what I can gather I seem to possess a tremendous fear of abandonment. A new fear. I think, in the predicament, I was for a short, sharp period of time, abandoned. I was under the impression we were on the same page and now I question my capacity to percept abandonment and the change any abandonment may encompass. I question my capacity to percept where I am, where anyone is, where I want to be. Where the subconscious dwelt last night is where is dwells today. This is why we revise our dreams.
On the four mornings of the week that the I deli I dwell above is open to the public, I will sit at the skinny end of my dining room table, directly above table nine. I have a piece of sourdough toast and a six-minute boiled egg because I am my mother’s daughter. This morning I can hear my sister beating eggs and olive oil into a silky aioli that base and bind every sandwich on the menu. There is the background sound of Sunday morning radio, of starchy potatoes becoming golden and moreish in hot fryer oil. There is an intensity in the air from pickle juice on the boil, which I have learned if I don’t open a window will get stuck in my throat. The oven goes open, close, open, close, too many times to count. I can hear her partner’s low dutch accent muffled through the floorboards, his taking their money, of pleases and thank yous and five to ten minutes and no worries, mate. I float above all of this, feeling the push-pull of the public-private. I slide my finger around the spilled yolk to lick up the richness. I am alone up here but also not at all in the slightest.
At other more glorious times like that of when the deli is closed to the public, I will sit upright in the front window that faces onto Lennox Street, directly opposite the freaky wig-shop owner of Barnett’s Wiggs. There is something so oppositional in the way our two front windows align and the lines of businesses so do not. Not only do I enjoy centering myself at the large afternoon-sun-grabbing window but I am also expecting several parcels. I have been expecting the parcels for two days now and have started to resent any delivery truck that passes by and the posture the front window seating is imposing. I am expecting a book: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and a vibrator, which cost me one hundred and ten dollars. With the government giving me money to sit, I decided there is no excuse not to invest in my sexual career. I will find out what this body desires and what it does not. Occasionally a customer will approach the door with a confident hunger to find we are, in fact, closed today. I am still in my pajamas; a flannelette hot water bottle is tucked into my tracksuit pants staining my pale stomach a blotchy red.
I climb the dreaded Anderson street hill four times. I find, each time I get to the top, my body swiveling to take me down again. A podcast moves around the outside of my head, Alice Bishop, author of A Constant Hum, speaks to someone about the constant hum of patriarchy, that it doesn’t go away, even after a natural disaster leaves nothing in its wake. Mine is more like a whistle than a hum. And I wonder, at the top of my fourth hill, when this body became so good at checking against, at walking up hills? I sit on the damp grass after walking my body around the botanical garden track two times. I can feel the Lilydale topping in my slipping socks which are so overdue for a wash they should be thrown out. I have played and replayed a poem by Erica Ehrenberg three times now. I would like a more muscular vocabulary, robust and capable of jumping and affecting. In my pocket-sized vocabulary book, I write words like
bucolic, fecund, sagacious, caveat
with there respected meanings next to them. I spend time committing them to memory but have since lost the small black book and find the words no longer there, on recall. Ehrenberg’s prose poem is self-aware and supple; at the same time, she seems very close to crazy. I empathize with Erica Ehrenburg. Particularly with the lines, I like the way the cold porcelain feels when I’m slightly concussed by everything going off in me, the regulated curve of the soap is a relief, the plastic bottles of shampoo. I want to lie in this damp towel in these starched sheets forever while another body that just moved through me clips his toenails and opens a beer. When I read work like this I am reminded of the bitter lack of my own. I would like to write something marvelous and fictive, a short story maybe that is all yellow, yellow, yellow, the brightest kind.
Sitting at the sun grabbing window allows for a great deal of insight. Orgies of flies fornicate on the pebbled base of the cacti plant, which does well drinking sunlight on the sill. A teenage boy in a plain, well-kept uniform approaches the front window on the morning of the third day. I have never seen him before. He has a bucket with one tall window-washer and several smaller window washers. Around his waist is a utility belt with even smaller window-washing utensils. His trim hair, posture and tucked in collared shirt give him the air of someone that belongs to the military or navy service, and the subsequent way in which he washes the front windows affirms such a training. He is seemingly unphased by my presence and for eight minutes he works on large front window with utmost precision. He seems to genuinely care about the window. We are so close for a brief period of time, I can see a pimple starting to surface on his jawline. If you were to remove the thick glass I would be able to feel his slow breath on my face. He applies a soap that turns my outlook opaque and then wipes the soap away with clean, disciplined strokes. He does this twice so the outside world is revealed to me all over again with a clarity I was not aware it lacked. He studies his work before he leaves, touching up the corners with one of the tools from his waist. Finally, after not acknowledging me once, he looks into my eyes and sends me a wink and I am suddenly made very aware of my pajamas, of my visibility.
The afternoon sun beats through the glass to melt any aspect of productivity left in my body. A hot-flush swells up my face. I have wondered aloud so many times: can you get burnt through a window, though no one seems to have a definitive answer. I think about the window washer, how many he has to do before he calls it a day. I click buttons to fill shopping carts before remembering the very reason my muscles between my shoulder blades ache the way they do. I empty the cart. At five-fifteen the sun moves behind a construction site to emphasize the silhouette of a crane. The empty deli behind me falls dark and I fill a small glass with cider, dim my laptop. I observe people walking home, couples, and singles, who have been to the supermarket. Sometimes I can ascertain what they’re having for dinner by the contents in their arms. I see many coconut waters, bottles of wine, and rolls of toilet paper, as well as chocolates of all varieties. We like to believe we are different but if there is one this pandemic has shed light on, it is that we are all so much the same. This reminds me of the Ehrenberg poem again. I need jobs, friends, phone calls, a career, she writes. Dinner, emails, clean underwear, money, books, a vibrator, I reply. But, she says, there is nothing I like more than watching the light as the sun goes down smack-dab through the globe of the coffeemaker. I have vanished in it.
Yellow Days 