Your Sunday Sip

There’s a lot I could say about you. Almost too much. The last time we saw each other, we shook hands as if it were the first time we had met, as if you hadn’t snuck into my mind and had a look around with your arms crossed already. I can imagine my brain must have looked like a disorganized desk: scattered tickets, monopoly bills, plum-stained napkins, store receipts, scribbles underneath uncapped pens, a green and black rectangular camera. The kind of desk that breathes at you, that makes one person reach for the waste bin and another for the chair.

I wish it hadn’t taken me this long to talk about you, but after we met, I became the person that reached for the waste bin. Dragging my forearm across the desk and sliding everything into that void was natural, routine. I had lived 9 lives in the season preceding our encounter and I was still living in 8 of them. But I couldn’t anymore.

I bet the first sign that I was losing it was that camera. That damned camera. It practically lived glued to me, my hand being its source of nutrition for months, it’s no surprise you saw it the moment you held my head between your hands and looked inside. It had survived the bottom of that piece of beige cloth I called a grocery bag, with its squiggly sketch of the Teatro Italia, the rotting wood of my nightstand drawer, courtesy of the Venetian humidity that rose from the lagoon and floated past the emerald green shutter of my window, the hard walls of the black plastic storage compartment of a milk white Maltese moped whose back wheel jerked from side to side at every left turn, the Mediterranean air that made my hair stick together like sugar cane.

Then it would have been impossible for you to miss the gold-edged leather journal, its covers the same shade of green as my window shutters. Suspended above the cobblestone in that ragged cotton grocery bag, it would spend its days bouncing lightly between a curvy, cerulean bottle of water and a mountain of wrinkled brown paper bags stuffed with cherries, apricots, dates. It was entirely impractical, placing an elegant journal in a bag that shriveled up as soon as it touched liquid and that was filled to the brim with fruits that couldn’t wait to drip at the first sinking of teeth. At least something would stain it. After hours of waltzing under the stinging sun, the night promised silence. In the darkness, it rested shut on the emaciated white pillow next to mine, like someone who stares hopelessly at the back of their partner’s head. I rarely turned over to face it, but I wanted to, I wanted to twist around and hear the thin mattress squeak under us as I reached for it, ripped it open in a drunken craze and left it vandalized by my scratches and beads of sweat, but instead it lay there, smooth and untouched, a shiny reminder of the time that would always remain immobile.

You saw all of that and asked me how my flight was. Opened the door to the back seat for me and shoved my bags into it with me, crushing me rib by rib. Hands stacked in my lap, red-rimmed eyes toward the rear-view mirror, I forced the corners of my mouth to curve up as I said, “It was great, thank you,” as if I were assuring the server at a restaurant that my food was up to par. The one who had offered me sanctuary had now shut the door in my face.