It’s cold now and the days are miserable, so I find my comfort in regular pleasures. Grief is the purest entry point to sensation for me. It’s not escape; pleasure is my regulator, it’s the ground itself. You could say that I’m massively Taurean, that I’m Aphrodite’s bitch (I am both!!).
Anyway, here are the week’s pleasures:
My friend came over and we drank a bottle of red wine on my couch. It’s my favourite red, a Nero D’Avola, which is a name I love because it sounds a bit like nero diavolo, or black devil. It’s prickly and dry and hot (it’s Sicilian) and I never feel sick afterward the way I usually do with wine. My friend leaned back on my couch and crushed a leaf of my monstera deliciosa which had spread itself over the armrest. I’ve had the plant now for two years in two homes where I’ve lived alone. The perfectly fenestrated leaf ripped apart under her shoulder blade and she kept the broken piece on her chest like a sleeping bird. The fresh chlorophyll combined with the smell of red wine, and they were perfect together, the sedation of burgundy and the alertness of green. Downers and uppers!! I treat a lot of people with addictions, so this makes sense, they chase each other naturally. My friend played with the ripped leaf for an hour while we talked and left it crumpled on the coffee table, wet-looking. After she left I gathered the glasses but left the leaf there for the next day, to see how it would smell in the morning.
I remembered last month when it was still warm I walked in on one of the neighbourhood cats in my backyard, a muscular grey boy-cat who I call Alfonso, hunched over and chewing. From far away it looked like bark in his mouth, the soft kind that fills up little kids’ playgrounds to protect them from scuffed knees. As soon as Alfonso saw me he dropped the object and jumped the fence. I stepped closer and saw it was a sparrow’s wing. The severed head was six inches away, and I went back in the evening and the head and wing were still there.
I was having a particularly rough day this week, the snow wasn’t melting like I hoped it would. On my way to work I saw a man in a little electric scooter chair, the burgundy one every old man uses, and he was backing out of his driveway. To be clear: he was Backing Out Of His Driveway in his little electric burgundy chair, like it was a car. He had the whole driveway to turn himself around to avoid backing into a busy street in his chair. I loved him so much. I clicked ahead to the next song on my playlist to make life feel less depressing.
There’s a song by Fred Williams called Tell Her which was released as a single with a B-side called The Dance Got Old, and that title is honestly devastating. The dance got old. Fuck!! As a song I much prefer Tell Her, and the guitar on it has the most beautiful tone, it’s ripe and firm and sweet. I’m not a guitarist, I play synths, so listening to what a guitar is doing is like hearing a language you barely understand and it just sounds so beautiful in the mouth.
An update on the leaf: it’s dry now, and the scent reminds me of oregano even though that’s definitely not right. The leaf has lost its heaviness, like all the blood evaporated once its insides were exposed. The torn ridges are quite brutal actually. That’s what therapy felt like in the first six months, hah — I look up to my therapist now. Actually the scent is not like oregano at all, it’s like an unripe fruit. It feels like Crete, where my grandmother died, and I’m smelling this smell everywhere. It’s olive green and goes well with tsikoudia, my favourite drink. We also call it raki: a clear alcohol made from fermented pomace, that comes in little carafes for free in Cretan restaurants at the end of every meal, like doing your cross every time you exit a church.
xo,
E