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.
7th June
by Kaiya Waerea
by Kaiya Waerea
My alarm went off at 10am, and I turned it off and went back to sleep for an hour. When I woke next I had a distressed text from A on my phone, and sat up in bed absorbed in that for a while. It was around half 11 that I slunk up, opened my curtains, went to the kitchen to find a pot of coffee on.
I couldn’t think what to eat, so I put the oven on and took a large mug of coffee back to my room. I started working on some writing, got a call, and before I knew it a couple of hours had gone by. I needed to jump on Zoom so I quickly got dressed and refilled my coffee, the oven still humming away. I thought about putting something in it while I was on my zoom but I am terrible and remembering things are in the oven so thought better of it.
After my call I had about 30 mins before I needed to leave for a meeting at Camberwell. I put in the oven my leftover pizza from the Ivy House, and chips from Brockley Rock. Taking it out I drizzled crunchy chilli oil and more salt over everything, and ate it all quickly except for one slice of pizza which I left on my desk.
*
The meeting was in a strange meeting room I had never been to before on the first floor. I sipped a coffee from SLL that I had got on my way in, wishing I had brought some water. Several jugs, some of water and some of orange juice, sat on the windowsill, looking as though they had been there for days in the heat. The juice had separated, and the water looked stagnant. Once my coffee was finished the dryness in my mouth increased. I waited for a break in the discussion to ask if everyone thought the water was drinkable. Everyone said no! Except for D who gave an enthusiastic yes!
J who I was sitting next to handed me his water bottle instead, and I had a few sips.
Afterwards I went back up to the office with everyone, and ate an apple, chatting away with no real reason to still be there. I said goodbye to A and J, and sat out the front of the building waiting for a taxi to take me home. I wrote out a text to N and then deleted it.
*
When I got in I ate the pizza slice I left in my room, now body temperature but yummy nonetheless. I took myself down to the living room to do some writing. S made me a cup of tea and joined me for a while, and we chatted about a project he has on.
We decided to make dinner together. I had some vegan sausages – Plant Pioneers Cumberland Shroomdogs – and a jar of chickpeas. We decided I would be in charge of the sausages and he would be in charge of the chickpeas and something green. In a frying pan, he cooked down a load of onions and garlic. Putting that aside, he put the whole jar of drained and rinsed chickpeas in the pan, frying them off in oil. While he did this I got the sausages in a pan next to him. In with the chickpeas he squeezed a dollop of tomato paste from a tube, a broken up stock cube made into a paste with a bit of hot water, salt, pepper, and a lot of smoked chipotle chilli. I tried to tell him it was going to be too spicy for him but he insisted it would be fine. The sausages browned up nicely and we steamed some broccoli so it was still crunchy. As we were plating up S found an avocado on the turn in the fruit bowl and we halved that too.
The sausages were nice but the chickpeas were delicious, especially with the avocado and broccoli. I packed all the leftovers in tupperware to take to work the next day.