If there's nothing to keep it moving, it comes apart. |
Milks And Oils Here in the kitchen, is a bowl of whipped egg and another with sour cream, and I am reeled back, like a salmon on a hook. You hated any combination of milks and oils, spinning your mind with viscous pictures of the unborn spread out on a plate. Your face would contort with a jellyfish madness at the thought of them, so I took to hiding them in your food; I did not know that you cannot force a change. It was a selfish time: I worked to convince you that you loved mayonnaise, you slowly became more of what you wanted to be, growing into it like one would a sweater or a love which is hidden behind excuses, all the while thinking that I would never notice. It went on for years, me hiding things in the food and you trying to conceal your nature. We told ourselves it was to protect the other, an act of artless love, never acknowledging an unspoken resolution to win. We were unwilling participants in our own deceptions, losing balance with each finished year until all good intentions went green. I stopped cooking; whatever had held us together, blending us into a whirling, fluid emulsion, gave way, leaving all to settle where it stalled, moving from the violence of rhythmic flurries, into the slow, balletic disengagement of two elements which would never mix without constant stirring. Back in the kitchen, with whipped egg in a clear glass bowl, beaming up like the froth of the winter sun and the sour cream, glistening with purity like glossy, lacteal snow in the bowl with the chip on the green-striped brim, I am cooled with a hush of stillness. |