izzy

When I was small, I believed I could bring things back to life. If I just tried hard enough, if I poured enough love towards something, I could bring back the spark of life. I had evidence to support this. I would fish drowned bees out of the swimming pool and cup them in my hands, cocooning them in the warm dark space between my bony fingers, whispering through the cracks, envisaging them flying through huge forests of dandelions and daisies filled with pollen my face salty and wet as I peered in to see if they would rise. They did. This worked with all kinds of small animals. I’ve saved baby birds, sick birds, skinks and all manner of insects. Standing in the mineral blue of the mediterranean watching small fish shimmer in the shallows, I’m reminded of the fish I couldn’t save. The tiny bait fish I found at the bottom of a fishing boat. Convinced it was still alive, or could be saved, I put it back in the water, again and again, held its little body in my hands and tried to find a spark in its glassy eyes. The fish darting through the water here are sand coloured and barely make a shadow. Little sea ghosts made of light and air. The swell of sea lapping at my ankles now reminds me of the day the ocean fell on me. The day you ceased. Garbled sounds of speaking underwater, and the slow push against the water’s resistance as I tried to walk on the ocean floor.

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sarah

Banana eating for beginners:

Step one: Stand in front of your shelf in the pantry and try to will some sort of packaged snackfood to appear.

Step two: Upon failure of packaged snackfood to appear, notice solitary banana. Wonder how long banana has been there. Inspect banana for squishiness or blackness. Decide that banana is edible.

Step three: Open banana from the stem end. Immediately reminder Buzzfeed article explaining that this is the WRONG way to open a banana, and that monkeys know that, and that you’ve been doing it incorrectly all your life and god, how could you be so stupid, you are less intelligent than a monkey when it comes to banana opening (although possibly more intelligent in the realm of crossword puzzles).

Step four: Raise banana to lips. Immediately think of cocks. Almost as immediately feel a sort of feminist disappointment at yourself for thinking of cocks. Get into a confusing sort of out-of-body perve experience with yourself, where one half of you is thinking ‘Yeah, put it in your mouth’ and the other half of you just wants to eat a goddamn banana. Wonder whether this is you internalizing the male gaze.

Step five: Find a stringy bit of banana peel on the banana. Think back to the Buzzfeed article explaining about how this wouldn’t happen if you opened a banana properly.

Step six: Register that this banana is not particularly ripe. Marvel at how this banana could possibly be unripe, given that it has been sitting in the pantry for at least a week. Consider the fact that bananas are good at ripening other food. Wonder whether you need two bananas working in tandem to ripen each other.

Step seven: Discard banana peel into compost bin. Feel mildly smug about compost bin. Hold banana in left hand. Think about cocks again. Wonder how much banana porn exists. Imagine a montage of the places it would be possible to insert a banana. Feel mildly unwell. Finish banana. Wallow in existential dread.

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