something about still lives, and scraping

By Eileen Rae Walsh

It should be noted that I am, have always been, a person of ritual. I am in love with small gestures, holding the fruit in my palm for several moments before biting. It is an effort to stretch the space between extreme moments of feeling. It is a preparatory pause, a way of marking time when otherwise obsessing over temporality.

In a moment when everything feels quite slow, when time feels murky and blob-like— I find myself turning to the rocks laid carefully in a row on the sill, to the scheduled reading hour, to the theater of the dinner table— whose characters are dimpled taper candles, mom’s napkins, and roses snipped from the alleyway. This effort towards beauty in the face of global trauma is a personal language of preservation, and a privileged one, but a way of being I have held close for some time. When I moved into my first apartment in New York City (having arrived with two suitcases on a one-way flight), I slept on a blanket on the hardwood floor, next to a single peony in one of two cups I owned, and the few books from my suitcase in a stack by the pillow. And I was immediately home. 

*

“It is what we should be doing right now. Scraping for joy.” This fragment from the end of a Matthew Dickman poem rests in the space between my morning run and the ever-thrilling-what-will-I-cook-tonight-pantry-roulette. Stuck, echoing, it has not left my mind since March 27th. 

*

It is May. I send my mother a selfie every day when I get out of the shower, my hair wrapped up in a towel in a different terry cloth shape. She responds —describing what it looks like. We do what we can to crack open, laugh at ourselves, we are scraping.

*

I move through the rooms of our apartment as the sun does, crossing the boundary between morning and afternoon by leaving the bedroom and walking into my orange orb, a small sunroom studio I designed for writing in January. Several slips of paper are stuck to the desk with my favorite watermelon-red-tape. (The wind blows them to the floor otherwise, as I maintain that the windows must be open). The impromptu desk faces West and is crowded by plants on the floor and on stools, books on the desk and the sill, and a daybed that belongs to the cat. My favorite sunhat is nailed to the south wall between two windows, below it: a bone, the potted infant camellia, an oyster shell from Provincetown and a smooth tri-colored stone from the North Sea shore. A picture of a gardenia sent from my mother’s garden is taped to the west facing wall, along with a note from January that reads: “Finding the yellow: it is dawn, my torch, beam breaking gray.” 

I chose an album, Dorothy Ashby. Untape my notes, re-write the notes. Try out a poem, realize it is a fantasy in the form of a list: crab legs in styrofoam, butter powdered napkins, the sensual shape of dunes, rum-sweat-slather and swimsuit straps...I want what we all do: the summer I imagined. I pick up a rock and rub the smoothness in my palm. I close my eyes and imagine skipping it (it never stops, just keeps skimming).

*

The afternoon slips, I am squinting. Sepia sun beams ping off arm chairs and soak the bed. Reading Hour. I move to the chair on the back porch, placing it at the end - facing West, again, my body in the shade. I slip off my shoes and push my feet over the edge of the rail into the sun. Between two brick buildings, I have an ideal slice of sky and trees looking on fire at the tips. I feel myself unfold, unburdened by attempts of making or making sense. When a bird darts into view, I’m startled— like I have witnessed something I shouldn’t have. I unwrap the gift of unread pages, rub my thumb over the top right corner of a dogear fold and wipe the sweat from a glass on my knee.

Reading hour is dinner’s foreplay, a pause before the cutting board and heat from the oven, greens doused in oil and salt and pepper that I “grind” with a hammer between two linen cloths. Coarse pepper and the smell of it while smashing: an isolation flavor. A friend of mine recently spoke about this time becoming a skin. I said I can’t really imagine what it will feel like to move on. I lean into dinner, press the side of a knife on garlic cloves, wet crush, slide off their skin. Slip a lemon rind into my glass, maybe gin. I dress the table, bring in the flowers from the mantle— fold little triangles under forks. I am scraping. He puts on a record: The Beatles, a sound we can sing along to, a sound our parents sang along to. I eat slow, I clear the table, I boil water, I make tea. 

*

I lay in bed and try to quiet my mind. I ask my partner to feel my heartbeat. I push his nub-nailed fingertips deep into the tissue between two ribs and ask if he thinks something is wrong. When he assures me my heart is okay and rolls over to his side of the bed to sleep, I keep my fingers dug into the same spot and try to breathe big and slow. I attempt to surrender, take my raging anxious heart as a gift. I wake with the sun: tying my laces and leaving through the back screen door.