In the name of self-soothing
Recall our nature and know that I am not talking of pleasure activism.
I am seeing the film over everything, I am peeling it carefully with cuticles intact, I am swallowing it selfishly and walking away from the rest.
If you were to ask me what stirs me lately, what is the worthwhile of recounting to you I would scatter our floor with reams of [negative] film, my proof of self as everyone’s proof of themselves - the moment to moment of it:
Monogrammed notepads - one bearing my name and a blue table of decorative croissants, the other Daughters of Nix and an early 20s silhouette darting across the page with a shopping bag and open bottle of red wine. Lists forming chronicles of mundane interspersed with subconscious (“tulips - check, laundry - check, finish the afsos poem - [blank], meditate after workout - [blank], call Pun - [blank]”).
I have not been reading but I have been listening - Ottesa Moshfegh’s My year of rest and relaxation was aurally devoured while practicing many a Punjabi recipes with the new instant pot and feeling every bit guilty for how the seva for Nikki’s langar felt less like service and labour and more of satisfaction of short cuts in cooking time - do they use instant pots at gurudewaras in America? In Amritsar?
Contradictions in self-amusement - I oscillate between whip smart legal dramas and mindless YouTube apartment tours by women who appear to spend most of their paycheck on their rent and the rest on thrifting furnishings. I like being inside their homes and listening to the babble of how a shopfront lingerie display was repurposed to a wall shelf and why a DIY repaint to Madagascar Mustard was essential for mood elevation. I don’t want the clean lines of Architectural Digest, no I want these girls with their split ends, their self-absorption, their efforts to emulate and infect a space.
Dead flowers - all my life I referred to them as dried, but back in New Orleans the jolly hearted Margaret exclaimed “I love me some dead flowers in the house”. Though I do not regard them as beautiful corpses by any means, while I dry tulips and wax flowers upside down I cannot appoint them as departed. I see them as frozen and fluid, their colouring wanes in slow motion and gives pause for how we choose to ornament the remains, for pleasure, for self-soothing, for self-convincing. These days I am returning to the fork of burials and cremation - “There won’t be enough room for everyone.” “It’s so expensive we ended up cremating”. We fire and release ashes or we lower the embalmed in their entirety, either way in someone’s honour the remains are fed back to the mother that is soil. Sometimes they are planted at the bottom of new trees. I sent screenshots of Gay’s “To the Mulberry Tree” to my siblings as our group text shifted to guava trees in her memory.
Café au lait - it is something of a daily miracle to 1) have the mouth feel and taste hot water, cream and espresso as separate entities in the one swirl; and 2) finally be able to get my lips on a coffee in new york city that arrives hot and has at least a 20 minute lifeline on ideal drinking temperature.
“Si, si, signorina, molto caldo , ho capito!” -
I recall Maya in Bologna circa 2011 on our lecture breaks at the closest al bar would emphasize “molto caldo - per porta via!” and curl up her fuchsia frosted lips in the most anticipatory manner as she relished the scalding temperature of her fourth cappuccino of the day, “Molto caldo!!” - I’ve repeated in my head but have been unable to work up the courage for that level of arrogant insistence into my coffee orders here - which by no means have been daily given the prevailing quality but which as of now may very well become regular in light of the café au lait revelation. Flat whites, lattes, cortados, and even the odd espresso have always been disappointingly lukewarm, overly creamed or not creamed enough, all of them subjected to the lower grade milk options of American capitalism and yet hiked up to the startling USD6 for the pleasure. No one wants a bitter coffee drinker and no one asked for that pun or coffee rant but the moment-to-moment delight of a beverage to rise to and walk to and look forward to and prepare the day to has a way of filling up these adult days and leaves excess air in my orbit. Of course both Australians and Italians alike would be appalled at my gushing over American made coffee and at that the french design but the exception to the rule, the rebellion of the stereotype, the unlikely delight across the constant mundane deserves praise.
Bright blue square toed Bottega Veneta mules - the internal dialogue of what it means to expend on self in a way that contradicts the careful lifetime art of Nikki in foregoing luxury while preserving the aesthetic and emanating the having of it. What she did with what she had. What she had because of what she did. What she accomplished and whether she ever imagined in her windowless break room that her youngest child would grow into a woman who navigates 21 open tabs to find the perfect hue, heel, texture, height, shape then abandons as she herself tries to imagine the walls of the breakroom, the teabag in the foam cup, the tiny square photographs of the three of us in a row as she opened the faux crocodile pattern wallet. I still remember how the black contours felt. I still remember finding stray lachia in her coin pockets.
I am not scratching at surfaces.
I am not skimming the tops.
I am cupping the wrinkled malai and understanding its density - her favorite part of boiling and sipping warm milk before bedtime.