I nod along, underlining occasionally, to a text imagined beyond this bedroom. I am reclined in a make-belief- bath made out of linen, my body braced by several soapy pillows. There is a new crane swivelling on its axis outside my bedroom window. Surrounded by global upheaval, she reads and bakes; all the false occupations of a middle-class maiden in the twenty first century.
T likes to walk the Botanical Garden Track in an hour of morning that really feels like evening. I comply because I’ve run out of podcasts. We walk around the circumference of the shrine of remembrance; there are large divided sections at the base that are reminiscent of something out of The Hunger Games. T tells me each section serves a different purpose and I wonder why he knows this. I stop to stretch my thighs and watch the sun rise pinkly over the east.
I find flakes of parsley floating in my tea. I switch the radio on, turn the volume to twenty-five notch you can hear from anywhere -even over steel-wool-dishes. I recently came across a station that yells dramatic headlines every fifteen minutes, twenty-four hours a day. Our premier keeps telling millennials we are not invincible. I drink through the parsley and make T a six-minute boiled egg on expensive vollkornbrot bread, which was, as Vince from the organic grocer said it would be, worth it. I bought it because Vince always looks on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Insomnia, we think.
EXERCISE BREAKS AT STRATEGIC POINTS DURING THE DAY ENHANCE PRODUCTIVITY AND PROVIDE SIMULTANEOUS SENSATIONS OF RELIEF AND REJUVENATION.
My body has discovered dairy. It is all it desires. I comply. In times like waiting for my sister to collect me for a walk, I will fill myself a thimble size of special K with the wholest milk I’ve ever tasted. She is especially late this morning and so, I sit up at the front sun-grabbing window with a second thimble. Who is K? I wonder. The cereal maker? Or the cereal maker’s muse? The flakes are so delicious they seem inappropriate for breakfast.
I bake a cake. My sister’s partner, who is very fond of cakes but trying to lose weight, assumes it is a healthy cake because it has zucchini in it’s name. I do not say anything watching him embark on his third piece.
IN A PARADISIAC CLIMATE, EVERYTHING IS CLEAR AND SIMPLE WHEN YOU ARE PERFORMING BASIC ACTS NECESSARY FOR SURVIVAL.
T says we need to go to IKEA. I comply, dragging my feet in the direction of the arrows, while he inspects everything. In the bedding section a dull ache presents in my neck. I grab three pillows and take them to a display bed. Before my head makes contact, a man in all-yellow approaches.
That’s not allowed anymore, he says.
I walk around with the memory foam pinned to my chest, pressing my hand into it over and over again. Sixty-nine dollars seems like a lot, I say. But we can be matching, T says. Go up to your nearest IKEA object and press on it at a difficult angle and watch its injury insult the substance of your life. They give you terrible headaches, a lady warns, plucking a down feather one from a separate pile.
And I don’t know what to do. Back at home, we find our new kettle smells like fish when it comes to the boil.
I SAW THEM STRIP A MAN SO THAT IN A MATTER OF SECONDS HE LAY CURLED UP AND NAKED ON THE SIDEWALK
Overnight, I enter the picture frame above the couch; the one containing the linocut of the reposed sunbather. It doesn’t stop there; I unzip my own skin and lay down in hers. I put her arms, folded behind her head, on mine like gloves. My ribcage fans in hers, and my lungs breathe slow deep breaths in the world of the picture frame. Grey sunlight soaks me. I stay like this all night.
I switch on the radio. Dan is mid sentence: ‘a state of disaster means the police can go above and beyond the law’. Now they walk around my suburb in packs, moving people on. Every latte-sipping-lycra-wearing man and his dog conglomerate at the cafe at the end of my street. Meanwhile, over the road, I watch the pack approach a dejected man lying on the street floor; the pack cast the man in shadow and chant, time to go home mate. I don’t have a home, he says, barely lifting his head.
At the supermarket, there is one citrus fruit left in the citrus fruit box. A man in a too-small blazer sees me see it, then beats me there. He actually looks at me as he slides it into his basket. I see him again, two more times, as I traverse the aisles. All around me things try to announce their true nature. I do them all, even the sweet biscuit section I don’t usually bother with. I buy T some biscuits for his English Breakfasts. Then contemplate lime juice concentrate out of the bottle, only to put it back in the wrong place. In the toilet paper section, I find no toilet paper at all.
I watch the mushroom cloud footage of Beirut some seven times. Every time the cloud reaches its fullest form I gasp, momentarily paralysed, to then drag my finger back to the start. It’s almost beautiful and then you see all the damage. All day the things I do, especially my exegetical essay research, feel the kind of trivial that makes one wonder about it all, everything, even the angles of the flowers.
I can’t breathe at the top of the Anderson Street hill. When I slide the fabric down, I find it full of salty droplets. A lady approaches me. Tells me I am a stupid selfish girl. I disagree, mostly. I try telling her I cannot breathe, but this only fuels her. I walk home, a mouth full of sweat thinking how I never in my life thought I would be called a murderer.
On my new pillow, I dream I am in the Hunger Games. I am standing on the podium. The countdown projected into the artificial sky. The crucifix of the arena is prefaced by a ball-pit of perfect-circled citrus. The man in the blazer dies first.
WHEN YOU GET OLDER, YOUR SKIN STARTS TO BE MORE COMPLICATED. THERE ARE PROTRUSIONS, HANGING SHAPES, SHADINGS, AND PATTERNS. THEN YOU CONSIDER ANALOGOUS CHANGES INSIDE THAT YOU CAN’T SEE.
I attempt a polenta rosemary cake to find out that peaked whites cannot be attained with the Nutra Bullet. T compares it to a baked potato. My sister bakes a much better passionfruit butter one, which requires a whole stick. Her partner doesn’t touch it, instead, he asks me if I can make another of my vegetable ones.
Music rises through the floorboards at 11. I wonder up to my sisters to study. There is a hill. At the top, the fabric over my mouth is wet. I paint my nails to a lecture on exegetical essay writing. The ten tiny canvases at the top of my fingers are jagged and arduous to coat. The only colour is hardly a colour at all; porcelain. I wet my face with a warm water then a milky cleanser, apply eye cream and eat a slice of the new zuccini cake I made out of eggs, flour, sugar and olive oil instead of butter. I feel like a middle-aged woman, my breasts are the biggest they’ve ever been.
In the morning I put on my favourite pants, the ones that endorse compliments, even from strangers. I bend over to secure the velcro of my shoe in place. There is a ripping sound. I turn around and in the mirror find my favourite pants no longer.
HOW DO YOU FIND THE RIGHT POSITION TO LIE DOWN WITH A PERSON OR EVEN AN ANIMAL? OFTEN ONE OF THE PARTNERS IS SMOTHERED OR CONTORTED. WHEN DONE PROPERLY, THOUGH, EVERYONE IS HAPPY.
My hands, neck, and head sink into the memory-foam, the rest of me sinks into the bed. Memory foam. I wonder if it’s that it remembers the head, or that it aids the remembering of things? The thoughts that arise here are not like the other thoughts. They are long and stringy with no beginning or end. Even with T’s arms around me the way they are, the thoughts are all mine. No-one can get in. No-one even bothers to try. And so, I fall through them. Eventually arriving at okonomiyaki. There are waves of white mayonnaise. I can taste air-dried bonito. I swirl it around in my mouth thinking how it almost rhymes with economy. T’s businessman dad told me that once you buy shares it’s best to forget that you did so. I checked mine seven times today. Let them marinate, he said. My profit is three-thousand-two-hundred dollars, presently. I watched it bounce around until the market closed. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. I wonder how many okonomiyakis three-thousand-five-hundred dollars buys. Rooms worth. Then I think of the statistic.
I’d checked what the average yearly income would be if the gross world product were divided evenly among everyone, and according to Wikipedia it would be $16,100. I saw no reason, political or financial, ever to make more money than that.
The statistic comes up on the memory foam often, like a sleep aid, like a reminder that Sally Rooney says it will all be okay.
Yellow Days 