No matter where you turn, there’s always a fire in the distance. And you turn a lot as you walk up the hill, down the hill, up and down and up again. It’s been decades since you left the hills. You’ve lived in the flatness of the godforsaken city for so long, too long, your knees have morphed into knees for flat terrain, have unlearned how to walk the hills; downhill is the absolute worst. You try to tighten your core, slouch less, tackle the hill like you’re on a quest, walk into it with your nonexistent glutes of your nonexistent butt, lean backwards as you walk. All in all, this weight-shifting tactic only seems to delay the pain by mere minutes. You take breaks to turn around, watch the light break through the leaves, look over yet another hill of olive trees, smell the rosemary from a different angle, and there it is, another fire.
Once you‘re back, over the next hour or longer, you rest your knee on a cold water bottle you got out of the fridge (1.5 litres, sparkling) and unravel half of the sweater you’ve been working on for the last two weeks. Somewhere along the way, about a week ago, when everything literally went downhill between the olive trees, you miscounted, or you missed to count, in any case, you‘re a third of the sweater in and are missing 60 stitches, that‘s over 20% of this sweater‘s width, an amount that you can’t just sneak in. The soft pale blue, pink, green yarn looks pretty as it comes out of the stitches in tiny curls on your bare legs. The unraveling is a slow process; the yarn keeps its curls as you roll it back into a ball. There could be a metaphor in here, but for now, you gently fold it away. Over the next week, you’ll add five more colors, placeholders for arms, and twenty more centimeters to it. Seven days and six hours later, beginning at four minutes after midnight on a Friday, you will unravel it all back to almost exactly where you were on that chair with that water bottle a week ago, because you made another counting mistake along the way. You wonder if you’re starting to get too used to unraveling, and that’s where you veer too closely to meta territory and move on.
It‘s a very specific way to go about life working off of the deeply ingrained knowledge that something is deeply wrong with you that can‘t ever be fixed, something you haven’t found a way to self-actualize, think, argue, compliment, emote, therapize, tree-hug, head-bang against a wall, or run your way out of.
By the time you get away from the fires and back to what you find hard to call home right now, the whole godforsaken city emits this soft, warm glow that it gets at this time, the one right before the darkness hits that always feels like it will never end, until it eventually does, just when you’re about to give up hope that it will. It might be time to return to the hills. Not all those specific hills you just left; but maybe some hill, maybe somewhere.
You look for cute cat photos to send to D., photos of a specific cat you met five years ago that made biscuits on your legs for hours with his giant paws and purred like a long-haul truck. As you scroll, you spot a photo from a few days before the dozens of cat photos, you were driving a car on the most beautiful island and had to pull over on the side of the road because you were crying uncontrollably. You’d forgotten this picture existed; now you remember taking it to remind your future self of a time where the cute cats, pretty beaches, nice trees made up most of your camera roll, but didn‘t make up most of anything else. From that same week, you find screenshots of the video calls that you had forgotten about, their faces barely recognizable pixel piles between the poor internet connection and motion blur. They were at home. They were both laughing. They were both alive.
Things are moving too fast, it makes you nauseous. You try to breathe through it, make the most of it, enjoy it while it lasts, knowing that it won‘t be very long again until you struggle, again, to set anything in motion. You’re super stressed out at the pool, but at least you’re at the pool. You lie down on the bed to rest, your mosquito-bitten feet up against the weirdly pastel-y green cream red checkered headboard, looking at the ceiling like it was the night sky, like back then, well, only almost like back then, because back then he was still here. Well, at least it’s the same night sky like the one we looked at together, but of course, it‘s not, fuck, and it would really help if the bricks in the ceiling looked neater, but who are you to judge, you know nothing, nothing about knitting a sweater, nothing about creating bricks constructing ceilings building a house making a life. And around the old red brick tile bow in the white wall, the concrete starts melting, it turns all around them into liquid glass, soft bubbles emerging from beneath. It looks like the walls are crying, and so are you.
