Hello beloved readers of Fortified Journal. We had a long break, fiddling around with half-formed ideas, slightly fatigued by a multitude of options we can do in this space that only tilted and nudged the seed of imposter syndrome within me. We are (kind of) back!
We are tearing a bit of bread just for the sake of breaking the silence, starting something we aren’t sure where to, but it feels exciting. We do this with Kaiya. For this week, we will have Kaiya talking about her week with food and her life.
Kaiya sent us a document with the whole week of food journal and I savoured each bit of it as I made my way through a watermelon salad, a bag of hoola hoops with Ting in a park and dinners with random bits and bobs of things in the fridge. You might want to do the same. Pacing your feeding with each dispatch from us and Kaiya. Enjoy!
Sinae (she/her)
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Kaiya Waerea (she/her)
@kaiyawaerea | kaiyawaerea.com
Kaiya Waerea (she/her, Ngāti Kahungunu) is a chronically ill writer and designer from Aotearoa, now living in London UK. Her research is concerned with knowledge produced through marginalisation, particularly as it is produced through moving through this world in a disabled and indigenous body. Kaiya is gluten-intolerant, (mostly) vegetarian, and prefers to eat with others.
Her writing has been featured in Counter Signals 5: Systems and their Discontents (forthcoming), Errant Journal: Learning from our Ancestors, AIGA Eye on Design, Ache Magazine, Sick Magazine, DreamsTimesFree and others. Kaiya co-runs feminist press Sticky Fingers Publishing and teaches on the Graphic Design programme at Camberwell University of the Arts London.
4th June
by Kaiya Waerea
by Kaiya Waerea
Like most mornings, I wake up hungry. Like most mornings, I wake up with my bones aching, pain gathering acidicly in my spine, shoulders, elbows. As my mind begins to drench itself from dreaming, I lie in bed, trying to remember what food I have in that could make for an easy breakfast – clumsy chains of thought that keep circling back to puckered and browned asparagus – while I make small movements to my body to try and gently drain the pain from the places that won’t move.
The light is bright through my thin curtains and I know it must be late in the morning. When the doorbell goes I remember I had a grocery delivery coming at noon, and shortly after hearing S gallop down the stairs he sends me a text telling me that I have a shop here. I can’t get up rn, can you bring it in pls I reply. Five or ten minutes later there is a knock on my door, and S brings me in a coffee. Sorry it’s instant he says, and I am sure he actually is quite sorry. I thought you might want to go out for a coffee but I guess not. Well, I won’t be out long so let me know if you need anything.
A while later, after sipping my coffee and coaxing my legs I sat myself up, and made my way into the kitchen. S had put all my groceries away – not in quite as touching a way as H did last month, but still – and I peered into my cupboard before taking an oat bar back to my room. I rely almost entirely on grocery delivery these days, and although I despise supermarkets, my current pattern is to alternate between Ocado, which have all the best gluten free things, and Tescos or Sainsbury’s. We also get a weekly Oddbox, and it is part of my chores to order oat milk and coffee for the house too, which I either get as part of my own delivery or through Bother Box if we need cleaning supplies as well. When we are all home we can go through a bottle and a half of oat milk a day, and easily a 500g bag of ground coffee in a week, so it’s quite a task to keep up. We used to get Pact coffee on subscription, but the postal system couldn’t keep up with our consumption, so half the time H was in distressed correspondence with a poor customer service agent called something like Rebecca or Natalie, trying to find out where our coffee was.
*
After doing a bit of work on my laptop, I gave in to the pangs in my stomach that the oat bar had barely placated. In a glass baking tray, I threw in some cherry tomatoes, asparagus, and garlic. As I was doing this S came in and commented on how good it looked, and so I offered to make some extra. After throwing in more of everything, I drizzled oil over it all with a good pinch of salt, pepper and chilli flakes and put it in the oven.
I had a shower while this cooked – in the night I had woken up several times drenched in sweat, I suspect a side effect of my medication – and by the time I had finished and was dressed, it was time to put the spaghetti on. S came in while I was finishing cooking, and we chatted away while he got out plates and made us each some blackcurrant squash. I took the tray out of the oven to find everything dark and sweltering, and squished the cherry tomatoes with the back of the spaghetti spoon so they released their juice and mixed with the oil to make something like a sauce. I threw in the ends of a jar of artichokes, and then the cooked spaghetti, tossing it all to coat.
I plated us up with some fresh lettuce leaves, a drizzle of a nice olive oil S had, and another pinch of salt on my own, licking the remaining flakes off my fingers. We took it all down into the hot sunny courtyard – it is a total heat trap, concrete, surrounded by brick buildings – and ate discussing The Secret History, and a recent job rejection of mine, and our summer plans. The food was good, substantial. This is one of my go-to’s although usually I use courgette instead of asparagus.
In a document on my laptop titled ‘Mental Health Plan 2023’, this meal is listed under a column called ‘yellow.’ I made this document through a workshop by artist Abi Palmer. It contains three columns; Green (a good day), Yellow (a turbulent day that could go either way), Red (a bad day). On yellow days, I need to try and be kind to myself, so I don't turn for the worst. The first row contains lists of signs I am having one of these days, and then the following rows categorise parts of life (work, chores, and yes, food), with the intersecting boxes containing boundaries and ideas that pertain to that part of my life on that kind of day. It helps me give myself permission to cook lazily, to ask for help when I need it.
S asked if I’d like a coffee, and went upstairs to make some. While he did that I went in and changed into a loose summer dress that had once been my mothers and was now full of moth holes, but that was good for sunbathing in. I also brought out a kind of sarong and one of the sun loungers, and set myself up directly in the sunlight. When S came down he carried a tray with not only a cafetiere, a small jug of oat milk and a couple of tea cups, but also two more glasses of squash and a bowl of orange slices. We chatted aimlessly while I dozed and he half-read under an umbrella. I used my teeth to drag the juice and flesh out from between the thick sheets of pith covered skin, and in an attempt to prevent having orange and coffee in my mouth at the same time I made sure I had a sip of squash in between.
*
At about quarter past four in the afternoon I met N in Catford at my studio. We met there because he needed to borrow something of ours – a card reader and some book stands – and that’s where they were. After retrieving these things we walked to the lower park of Ladywell Fields, picking up a bottle of tropical juice to share on the way. We spent a few hours lying on the grass, watching a nearby sausage dog, and going down by the river which was glistening as the sun pierced through the thick green foliage overhead. I tried to go on his bike, wobbled for a couple of metres and then fell off grazing my knees.
As we walked home, once we got over the curly wurly bridge, N called Brockley’s Rock and ordered 1 Kids Gluten Free Cod, 1 Large Gluten Free Chips, 1 Regular Cod, mushy peas and lots of salt and vinegar on everything. At the top of the park he cycled off to pick it up, and I walked home. Before getting plates and cutlery out I had another shower, sore all over and my knees burning red, putting on clean, light pyjamas. I really prefer to be clean when I eat.
We ate in my room, at my desk, watching Merlin. It was the episode where Gias’ ex-lover returns to Camelot but is being possessed by a manticore. I ate all of my Kids Cod, and munched on chips until I felt sick. Before the episode ended we moved to bed, snuggling greasy-fingered as the last of the sun lit up my room, laughing, talking, digesting like slow tangled lizards.
*
Later that night, once it was dark and N had gone home, I stood over the sink washing my dishes from the day. The pipe that runs from the kitchen sink and down the exterior of our building opens out over a grate. This pipe is original, from the building's construction in 1860. Where it is cracked and leaking over the brick corner of the house the brick has turned soft to touch, like sand, and sludge has built up and been cleared so many times from the grate that it has eroded deep, inches, into the concrete. For all these reasons and others I’d rather not imagine, the kitchen sink fills up quickly and takes a long time to drain. I do the dishes in rounds, pausing once the sink is too full of dirty water then wandering off to do something else for 20 mins at a time while it slowly drains.