I stand at the ceramic sink and it’s deep enough to cover my elbows. I half-heartedly wipe egg away from a bowl with a sponge. I’ve wrapped you close to me using a ring of rust coloured fabric from that bag on the train, but have done it wrong, I think, because your little toes, little nails, peek out and brush against the ceramic lip. You sleep, and as you sleep the patch of warmth where your breath is, makes my top a little bit wet. The sink water my hands are in is bright blue with washing up liquid, and it feels almost like a holiday, with my skin softening. I like feeling like a new person, and I always feel like a new person when I’m on holiday. Trying on a different character.
This man, tall, comes over and stands to my left. He has resin eyes and a smile that interrupts his face, and he is talking to me about running away to the middle of America, where horses go their whole lives without seeing tarmac and the men catch their dinner with their bare hands. He doesn’t offer to help with the dishes, and won’t at any point during this conversation. Really, he’s talking to me about what, to him, it means to be a man. Denim jeans and salt sweat. Visual mood-boards swallowed from cinemas and billboards and shaving foam adverts.
So what do you write? he asks.
Giorgio Morandi painted flowers for his friends sometimes. He also painted vases, bottles, glasses and bowls, with bits of blue and yellow, and shadows that lounge on their own canvas comfortably. In the gift shop at the Estorick exhibition where a major collection of his works are shown, someone replaces the postcard rack with more reproductions of one of Morandi’s paintings; on the back reads the words ‘Still Life’, and underneath it, the original title from the Italian; Natura Morta. A woman in a long coat with a pram to her side comes up to the rack, picks up one of the postcards and shows it to a sprawling child. With her eyes looking at the back of the cardboard this woman says, tired and in a baby voice —
No matter how dull or how gray it all is — it’s still life, isn’t it, my peanut? It’s all still life.
I wrap the positive pregnancy tests in toilet roll like actors in scenes I’ve seen, and put them in the waste paper bin. I can hear the writer in the room over singing to herself as an old printer darts out page after page of words. You’re on the floor, a leg kicking prophecy, and I laugh, and you laugh too, as I try to figure out where this image ends and the frame begins.
such incredible writing ❤️
stunning X