Today was home-food and stuff scrabbled from the cupboards of my parents kitchen. This kitchen is a place I love. Everything here has until recently been covered in a fine layer of dust from when they decided to knock the plaster off the far wall. Everything is slowly being painted a shade of greyish green called mizzle. This shade is slowly coating more and more of the room.
Days like this I have various calls to answer and bits to write and organise, but nothing major to take up my brain space so I drift in and out of the mizzle-painted kitchen re-opening the cupboards in case something exciting has appeared since I was there last.
I ate a stale pastry for breakfast that was still very nice and two cups of milky tea. I cut a nectarine into three parts and try to eat it without the fruit touching my lips – I have an allergy to stone fruit, but nectarines are worth it. I eat my breakfast sitting at the table in my parents’ kitchen, which lately has been a rarity so it feels nice to do something properly.
Later I scrabble some dried mango and some cashew nuts and eat them stood up leaning against the counter. I find a flatbread left over from yesterday’s tea, tear it in half and eat it with some salami and wensleydale cheese. This is a bit of a weird combination, but it is unoffensive enough that I do it again with the other half.
An old end of bread with butter, a teaspoon of Nutella, a small bit of reheated gnocchi from the other night.
A packet of sour cream and chive baked crisps.
A banana.
A hasty gulp of water when I realise I haven’t drunk anything in several hours.
The day passes in this way, and I answer calls and get a haircut and look out of the window. An empty suitcase on the floor and a stack of untidy books at my feet – I dip in an out of Paradise Rot and read:
“Carral nodded and sipped her milk slowly; as she swallowed I felt something warm, slimy white in my throat. I coughed. She turned towards me.
‘Don’t get rid of it.’ (Jenny Hval, p.104)
All the various grazings I have made gloop delightfully inside me in strange and slimy combinations and I think, the warm slimy food inside me becoming mulch becoming acid becoming bile will be the same phlegm coloured grey green as the cupboards.
(This is only a bit true, but for the sake of artistic license, sit with it for a while.)
Sophie Paul (she/her, b. 1998) is a designer and writer based across London and Oxfordshire. Her work intersects critical theory, trashiness, and eroticisms.
Alongside Kaiya Waerea, she is one half of Sticky Fingers Publishing, an intra-dependent feminist publisher based in London.