Curdles
I woke up from sleep. Again.
Some nights slit me open by a thousand small razors. Disquiet, internal and imprecise. Pain rides my nerves into a backstreet riot. I reached out for her instinctively, groping in the fog of memory. Her breath warm, body curled around mine, her shoulders sore from holding me too long. Grief and grace ripened.
Tonight is violent in its prickliness.
Speaking in silences, tangled in a fragile intimacy that blooms in the hours just before dawn. Both seen and ruined. Too vulnerable and bare and that the ache of being held hinged on an injury I couldn’t lay down.
Hydrocodone seeps into the edges of me. It softens the outlines. Pain dulls into a murmur. I am drowsily, deliciously fucked by desire and tiredness, longing and relief.
It’s a Sunday-shaped sorrow. A less enchanting Sunday. Tastes better than cold tea and a hollow tooth cavity.
Somewhere from the home theatre, Gladys Knight croons. Just take me, say you want me. God. That voice.
It comes on gentle and patient, almost maternal. An old joy sitting on the porch, telling me truths I don’t want to hear. It’s my friend Dymph’s addition to our #SoulSunday playlist. A ritual I always look upto. A soundtrack to my Sundays now. Once, Sundays were for a long wounding full discography, pensive markets, meal prepping and nature walks. Now they’re for pharmacy runs and body wipes and sitting by the window yearning.
Love has a mouth. Its name is vulnerability. Sometimes it sings to Gladys Knight at sundowns. Other times it peels sweet husky Erykah Badu or Wanja blues.
Half asleep, I found an apple that reminded me of a bruise on my thigh from many years ago. Catheter tubes. I bit into it anyway. She has filled (my) May with such gracious care and tenderness. Even with a clumsy tiredness whipping her into salt and injury.
Take mine too. You have been giving. Eat from my plate.
It smelled of nectar gone to sleep on the bone. Mildew clinging to hibiscus in an abandoned garden, next to our old study extension. It tasted of rusted sugar and damp queencake paper. The breath of a house where everything weeps in warm leaking eyes if left untouched. Soft. Fragrant. Crunchy from the pit outward. Flesh remembers being fruit. Girlhood forgotten on the windowsill of a father’s unceremonious goodbye. Boys measuring their egos in piss contest. Packed food stand alone in the kitchen, stoic and grieving. A mother who has grown tired of her own cooking. Gaping through the severance.
Decay wears sweet joy beautifully. She’s obliging. Delicate. She sleeps beneath floral quilts that still smell of my grandmother’s hair oil. She sighs when the walls forget her name.
Most days, I open the fridge out of habit. Or loneliness. Or both. I stand there barefoot, letting the cold air tongue my shins, pretending to look for something I won’t find. I don’t throw things out. I let them sit. I let them speak.
I’ve always loved theatre. The decadent drama of intimate rot. It thrills me to see the romance of clean supermarket receipts. It doesn’t guarantee safety from tragedy. Or attraction. Wrinkled fruits skinning their coats. Wilted herbs are offcuts from my foraging. My hardness throbbing palpably in her sweet mouth. Her brown-hazel eyes seeing me beautiful. Hearty.
A bag of spinach creased into grief. Boiled beans turning into a whisper of what it once was. An old woman collapsing into prayer. Each drawer and jar, is an inquisition of intention and abandonment.
Meals never made and consideration left to die anonymously beneath cling film. There’s a half-eaten banana bread no one touched after the argument. A jar of sugarcane juice I once liked. Nausea doesn’t come over anymore. My body kept the jar.
My body keeps things. Even when the hurt leaves. Even when appetite dies.
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There’s a packet of almond milk. Opened. Cork jammed back in. It’s gone sour but I sip it anyway. Love, too, is astringent when it overstays its welcome. I keep the bottle for the night I opened it. Throwing it away would be to admit it meant more to me than it ever did to her. I almost reach for it. But I don’t. I know how it starts. Disappointments punctures the mirror and deflates our beautiful perceptions. Something real thrives afterwards. If let, nurtured. Carelessly sweetened by forbidden foraging.
The peanut butter is speckled with crumbs from a breakfast long dissolved. A tub of ice cream, shame-bitten at midnight, waits wagging its dog tail. Was there nothing underneath? Her fishnet bagged my mbuta, tanking my philosophies into the lake. All beneath my beautiful climbed down. I have burned my journals to warm her sweet body. I know the storm has been growing sweet on her. Sometimes red and glowing. Other times grey and yellow and monochrome. How awfully we bring out our Sunday best. I have no rizz left to warm. The peas are frostbitten teeth chattering in the freezer.
A jar of something that might be cranberry preserves, or a memory too old to verify, sits sticky in the back. Even sorrow goes off if you leave it open too long.
I think of how many things I’ve let rot. Cabbage. Fried rice. Salted caramel. Intimacy. Friendships. Sex. Hope.
Decay is rarely profound. It is sluggish. Methodical. It chews itself in silence. A black lipstick worn to the bone. A cold lead-graphite circling the nipple of an unread message. An ambition moulding beneath the bed of youthful moans. I wipe the drawer. Drag myself to vomit supper into the toilet. Buy more herbs. I lie to myself that soon, next week, will be different.
This is how we manage hopebreak. With lavender air freshener and wet wipes. Spotify playlists and handfuls of to-do. Some people mark us for conquering. Exercise discretion and invoke gut-discernment. We, in outsourced thrill and excitement, kneel at their altar of statistics. How helplessly we can’t always protect our loves from bites. Even our own. Mellow pop songs in the background and grief in the butter dish.
The house. It absorbs it. A sponge by the sink never dries. The faucet sings in its drip. The tiles wear our dry jokes.
I used to think homes were made for safety. Now I think they are sanctuaries for beautiful ruin. I once asked my grandmother why she kept food past its prime. She didn’t look up.
“It’s not that bad,” she said.
Sorrow has a smell. It wafts out with every door opened. Rot is penchant. It has actors. A garlic clove turns yellow and split-jawed in the drawer. A tomato rolls across the counter. A woman remembering the one thing she swore she’d forget.
At the sink, washing a single spoon for hours, I think of love. How it goes rancid when untouched. How affection, like milk, curdles undisturbed.
I remember her kissing me like she was starving. She didn’t stop. Only frog-leaped into another pond to cure her hunger. I used to believe love was eternal, sealed by our unselfish ironies. I know it’s like a loaf of bread. Fresh, fragrant and fleeting. Bruise isn’t death. It’s proof of having been touched. Mould isn’t sin. It’s just life reminding us that nothing escapes change. Even me. Even this.
I begin again. I water our plants. I hold her. She’s brittler than paper-glass. Ink her skin to mine. I scrub the mug. I open the windows and find a clove of garlic in the drawer still firm, fragrant and waiting to be peeled. I fix her a huge ngege nyamami and knead a big round ugali. A side of coconut cream seasoned osuga. I watch her eat slowly. Later she kneads my back with her gentle fingers. This is where it hurts. Some parts are only mine to mourn. She soothes me anyway.
Some mornings, I smell like my grandmother. Her cardamom and lemon grass and eucalyptus and ripe bananas. A scent made of soap, smoke and something overcooked.
A habit of trying. I forget birthdays. I forget to water the fern. I forget what I walked to the kitchen for. I remember the cruel thing someone said to me in 2016. You waste money on what doctors have no idea how to save. Memory has roots. That is why it spilled butterflies out of my stomach that night. My wild thing. Electric charge for the attraction gelling us inevitably. Some thoughts spoil fast. Hope, for example, curdles if left open. Optimism sours.
Bitterness or melancholy? Bitterness is shelf-stable. Melancholy is romantic. You can keep it in your spine. You can drag it across the glassy cities of your pastures. On quiet nights, the refrigerator wails for a mourner.
I open the door. Its white light baptizes me and for a moment, I think I might throw it all away. All of it. I don’t. I know this, too, is how (a) man stays alive. Keeping the jar open, sipping the fermenting broth and letting things rot on their own terms. A cage pf worms singing their ballads. Finding, in the crisper drawer of life, one clove of garlic still spicing me with her love.
Omondi Ochuka | Proof of Life
#Usiblues #chestains 🖤
