I wake up from dense sleep and the bridge of my nose feels like it’s being held in a vice. At some point, I pull back the sheets and roll out of bed, pick up yesterday’s clothes and slump back into them. I can already feel the days beginning to slacken, to lose their shape, the way they always do when I get ill. The problem is, I think, that I’m a creature of habit but not of routine. I can wake when I’m required by the demands of wage labour to wake but, left to my own devices, I don’t create a schedule to replace that of the working week: I do the same things I do with my spare time now—chat to friends, cook, masturbate, eat, write, bathe, read, lift weights, flirt, walk—but instead of cramming the stuff of life into the working day’s interstices, I do it all whenever, I sleep when I like and for however long I like.
I’m the same about food. I often long for the lunch break when I’m at work. And, although when the others aren’t around I’ll sometimes delay eating so that the period of labour after lunch is shorter than the period that preceded it, I do usually join my colleagues in the kitchen and eat at around 1pm. Between jobs, though, or when I’m ill, or on holiday, I can graze my way through the day or forget to eat until 3pm. Absent my usual routine, what I eat changes, too. Most nights at home with Klaus and our housemate Amy, I look forward to making something I’ve not made before or making something I have, but using a new method. But if either of them are out for the evening when I’m in, I don’t enjoy cooking nearly as much. I usually eat instant noodles with frozen veg and an egg, as I did for dinner last night, or a lot of fish fingers maybe but not necessarily sandwiched between two generously buttered slices of bread. I could but don’t want to overanalyse my preference for cooking for other people. I think it’s fairly common and I feel sure it’s more vanity in one direction than self-flagellation in the other: I just want to make the people I love or might come to love say ‘yum’. Today, at some point before noon I eat two dippy eggs with soldiers. Mostly when I boil eggs I scoop everything from the shell and mash it across buttered toast so it’s more like smørrebrød and less like food for children. But what else have I got on today? Who do I need to look refined for? I toast the bread, butter the toast, and cut it into roughly even slices, remove the top of the shell with my spoon, revealing the glistening, bright orange yolk as I do, and grind in some salt. It’s too cold, really, and too blowy to eat on the balcony, but I do it anyway. I break the yolk with a soldier, watch it open and spill out over the white. Take a bite and use the back of my hand to wipe butter from the corner of my mouth.
Dippy eggs and soldiers
In the afternoon, I disconsolately snack on salt and vinegar McCoys, a satsuma, and two ginger biscuits. K pops round to deliver books and some soup I made and froze last month. I can’t remember what’s in it but it’s very red. Mirepoix, I think, for the base, tomatoes, roasted red peppers maybe, and perhaps some crème fraîche. At the time it was bubbling on the hob, I was making two loaves for the week ahead. I made banana bread that day, too. I feel exhausted just thinking about it. K has brought most of the books I asked for, plus a couple more, but they are the wrong books by which I mean they are not every book we have in the house. I packed in a rush, didn’t think about how long I’d be here, and didn’t pack a selection large enough to sufficiently account for different reading moods. I am grumpy and rude to her about it. I'm kicking out. I am lucky to be here, in my friend’s warm flat, but I don’t want to be. I am extremely lucky that K is willing to bring me things I need as well as things I like, but I don’t want her to have to. I don’t want to be ill, again.
Satsuma, McCoys, Ginger Biscuits
What do I want? I want my flat. My new red enamel coffee jug, my vibrator, the cold concrete floor we poured ourselves—the colour and texture of printer paper—under my feet. I want to convalesce in a square of sun with the cats. I want to browse the shelves that I sanded and oiled myself and pull out something new to read, make my TBR pile raise its eyebrow, I want to crack the new book’s spine. I want someone I have a crush on to send me a letter. I want to get to know someone I don’t yet know very well. I want to have not read the book I read over two days last week so that I can read it in one today. I want to continue the conversation that was supposed to last for the whole weekend. I want to make good on my dinner invitations. Before yesterday, I was feeling so dialled into the world. I wanted to make friends, wanted to draw my loved ones closer, couldn’t stop thinking about being shoulder to shoulder with people I miss. It was exciting, an ancient feeling renewed. I said to K ‘I feel very turned on’ which I did and didn’t only mean sexually. I feel like distilled longing. I place four medjool dates in a blue bowl, warm them for a while on the windowsill, and pop one into my mouth. Push it against the roof with my tongue until I feel the hard stone break through the fruit’s flesh and press against my own.
Before long, all this and more, I think and have to hope. Until then, until the day’s waystations are returned to me, I’ll try to relax into the lack of structure like I relax into my softest clothes after a day of work. I am not, I sometimes think, particularly good at nourishing myself, especially when I’m feeling subpar, but I will try not to be too hard on myself. I will eat the very red soup and try to remember that I made it and stored it in the freezer for an occasion such as this, a time in the future when I knew I’d be unwell or short on time or fatigued. So that I could eat and feel full with very little effort.
Very red soup
Cornelius Prior (they/them): I’m a writer and an editor in the cultural sector. I write about books, homosexuality, cities, and occasionally art and moving image.
Klaussie Williams (she/her): I’m an artist and bookseller. I make abstract water colours, book jacket illustrations, and draw the places and things I like.