i wondered how i looked then - facing the shelves packed with discount junk, wearing nothing but thin slippers and my greasy pajamas. i had a scrap of paper torn out of a catalogue crumbled in my fist. it showed a small electric kettle in five color variants. one of them, the cyan one, was circled in bright red marker. underneath, as an added security, my mother wrote in her tiny, neat, schoolteacher’s handwriting: cyan.
they did not have the cyan one.
now, my options were limited. i considered them while sipping cold coffee obtained on the shelf behind me. i was either taking a pastel pink kettle home, hoping the cheerful colour will appease my mother to the loss of the cyan option; walk the two kilometres to the next supermarket hoping to snatch the cyan keetle;
or, my number one contender, returning back to our street, getting inside the rental and driving straight ahead until i hit the ocean.
"this is fucking ridiculous," i told myself.
she is fucking ridiculous. true. what but was i going to do about that now?
i groaned, pulling my phone out of my back pocket. it was half after eight. i was supposed to start working at nine and my hot cup of coffee, shower and peace of mind depended on a fucking cyan kettle that was not where it was supposed to be.
“i have no fucking time for this,” i breathed, snatching a box off the shelf and made my way to the empty cash register.
a smiling lady rang my purchase, asked me about my opinions on weather and, not deterred by my discouraging grunts and deadpan expression, mentioned the kettle i was getting was really amazing, she had it herself, and it looked so nice in her kitchen, she tried to have everything in her kitchen in pastel pink, it brightened up the room so much and made it so lovely, didn’t i think so?
“that will be thirty five euro, love.”
i wondered if i was too czech now. it’s been ten years of cloudy faces and getting snapped at in the shops. a lady at imigration made me cry in my scond week there. ten years later, whatever was happening here, was making my skin crawl. i was no longer used to happy faces and polite chatter. my first instinct was to use the kettle box as a shield and push my way out of the door, overthrowing old people and babies for bonus points. i felt like a stranger in my own home.
the unsettling through followed me down the road to my parent’s door. i tried to block it’s weight with my foot before slipping in, but it clung to my grey leggins. it followed me down the hall to the back sunroom/kitchen, right at my heel like an eager puppy. it was there when i put the box down on the table, there when my mom looked back with a smile, closer when her round wrinkled face fell noticing the delivered goods.
“oh, it’s the pink one,” she said, covering her sadness with cheerful politeness.
“they did not have the cyan one,” i said. “only pink and black. the pink is nice.”
she nodded, taking the box and placing it, very carefully, on the floor by the door. “sit down, i made you some eggs and bacon.”
i sat down in an empty place, facing the back door. my eyes kept returning to the box while my mother chattered.
one time in prague, not much longer after our move, my irish girlfriend got me this vintage jacket at a traveling thrift marketplace. it was the worse wine red colour, with tiny reflective flakes and shite-load of colourful beads strewn harphazardly across the back and it’s too short, not quite three-quater sleeves. she said the second she saw it it reminded her of my “free spirit”. by that she must’ve meant the long dark nights spend getting blackout drunk, shying away from phones which could at any time remind me about your existence.
my “free spirit” jacket became this thing hanging on our dresser door, obscuring a fair amount of the decorative mirror embedded in the frame. everything unsaid between us seemed to cling to it like lint. every argument we had was another bead sparkling in its sleeve. every bloody fucking thing that pissed us off about each other was this tiny reflective piece of plastic that, if the sunshine streamed in through the winddow at just the right angle, would hit you in the eye and scorch your pupil.
i would wake up and see the jacket and all the bad things about our relationship would be right there, reflected in that ugly, dusty piece of second skin.
after a while it became sentient.
it would walk into the room when we argued and point its too short arms at us, throwing out beads to jog our memories. that summer you kissed that other guy when we were dating; i can’t believe you told me you were quitting and lied to my face; the way you acted when my mother came for a visit; why do you never want us to travel home together, are you ashamed of me?; and finally you, you, you, you - but she kept calling you him, like she couldn’t quite remember your name. she called you him and the jacket kept throwing all the beads the colour of your eyes at me until they cut my skin.
finally we broke up and she packed everything she owned up into these huge suitcases she got online. she rolled them across the oak floor-boards that moaned in reply and when she stopped in the doorward for the last time she said: “you know, all you had to do was say was you didn’t like it.”
it took me a while to realise she was talking about the jacket, not us. she left it there, hanging off the closet door, so dusty it looked more grey then red by then.
i looked at the kettle in its snug box now, lying by the canary yellow wallpapered wall, enveloped by a soft pool of light. in wondered if this was the same thing. i wondered how long it will take until all the things i do wrong burst out through the colourful packaging and flood our kitchen floor.
“more tea?” asked my mother in her cheerful sing-songy voice.
“i don’t like tea.” i wanted to say.
“sure.”
from the box by the door, you could hear tiny plastic screws click-clacking in vicious enjoyment.
driving in the dark, all i see is golden blue sunshine filtered in through green glass and it all feels fucked. the boxes in the booth chitter about loves lost. kitchenware keeps bumping into chipped mugs, some old CDs nobody has listened to for years lay spilled across rubber rugs. why did i take the CDs?
why did i pack the fucking kitchenware.
who in their right mind moved back to their parents place with two boxes of aged kitchenware? most of the stuff was originally brought from there. it’s like a big kitchenware homecoming. all the mismatched plates and cutlery meeting up with old friends. you will never believe the mess we have been through, they will say, filth and disgrace. she used one bowl for like everything. soup? bowl. salad? bowl. cereal? bowl. crisps? you guessed it, fucking bowl.
i curse, glaring throught he dark windshield. claire at night is rolling silvery hills, endless expanse of black ocean and stone walls as far as the eye could see. it seems unnaturaly silent after the flashing lights of the city. post-apocalyptic scenery, world brought back to nature, a goodbye to arms and humanity. i look at the dark land and all i see is sunrise.
i think i was born here.
just down the road. somewhere in a place with the same rolling hills that looked brilliantly green in muted daylight. all the places here, they look the same. you walk through them, meeting different cars, breathing in cold atlantic breeze and wishing you were anywhere but here. dublin maybe. i remember dublin. not as much dublin itself, as dreaming about going on the golden beach, bumping into your shoulder with mine, spinning these wild stories about dublin which were as far away from the real thing as two small town kids could get.
that year you discovered deadly.
every bloody fucking thing was deadly.
dublin too was deadly. getting there would be deadly. last time i saw you in a crowd before moving away from the island you smiled and mouthed deadly again.
i have not heard anyone say it since . i all but forgot the meaning until my plane landed. fuck, the second the ocean turned to black cliffs and green hills my mind went blank. all i saw was sunshine & summer sky, filtered through the broken green glass…
there was this band that played a small music club close to our dorm in dublin. they mostly did covers of old irish folk songs but, you know, metal. they were the worst. perhaps the absolutely worst song they ever covered was “i’ll tell me ma”. every time they started playing that the whole club - including the staff - uttered a tortured groan. and hidden there, behind that groan, a groan that turned the air solid with anguish, was a single excited whistle.
i used to mock you about how much you liked that blasted cover. i spend days thinking about new ways to torture you about it. then, one day, after a particularly vicious joke that made all our friends cackle, i looked at your face and in your eyes i saw a spark of truth. you did not like irish new boys’ rendition of “i’ll tell me ma”. you just liked watching me laugh about it. you just liked… me.
in my mind i left the next day.
i didn’t. there were things to do. finding a flat. buying dictionaries. hugging niamh and promising to stay in touch. but that night, sitting at that club, seeing it in your eyes, that was the second i really left.
two months later, as I was unpacking an ugly vase from a bag, through tears, my phone beeped and recomended me to view your wedding pics. someone was shouting under my window in a language i didn’t understand and i wondered… what if they are shouting "fire"? what if they are warning me to run and i don’t even know.
i deleted all my socials and got used to the strong beer and learned a new language and made new friends and had niamh over for two weeks in summer. she posted some pics of us sitting by the river in the setting sun. you liked it and asked her to say hi. her face fell a little and she tried to hide her phone. i’m not sure whether it was for my benefit, or my girlfriend’s. i think maybe both. not that it made much difference.
back home though.
bringing some heartache, foreign books, ten years worth of baggage. somewhere among the kitchenware there is a mug missing its ear. it says “greetings from prague” and when my last boyfriend gave it me he said one day when i leave him and move back home i will have that to remember him by.
back home, just a few kilometres off now. there is this beach where the sand was so very gold at sunrise. it was very cold when the sun went down, even with the winter sleeping bag. you whispered in my ear and your breath was accompanied by a white puff. in the morning everything was so bright. i woke up first and walked over to the very edge where the water was licking at the bay. i took some pictures on an old point-and-shoot camera. they all came out overexposed. i picked a piece of broken glass, not yet smoothed out by the saltwater. i watched the world through the glass walking back. small, green and peaceful.
throught the green grass your hair looked chartreuse. i stared at the tiny hightlight in it and the way your eyes were such weird mossy green and the smile you had and the way you leaned over to cover me and whispered deadly when our noses met.
ten years later, in the dark, the abandoned bay is silver and your hair in the moonlight would be white.
i extinguish my cigarette, get back in the car and drive back home and still...
