A step in the Right Direction

A step in the right direction, we’ve painted the kitchen chairs blue and white and an inadvertent brown. It’s all right and fine, we say, it’ll work with the natural earth tones of the room. The natural earth tones, a drunkenly potted plant with aching roots that can’t touch the planter. I go to it with a glass of water, lifting parched branches to reveal its crippling insecurity, and I pour. It’ll just die someday, I think.

My brother comes to visit, for the first time. It’s a new house, but worn enough, and he says my room smells the same. The same as what? I ask. He’s backlit by a hazardously slung clamp light, he looks older. The same as back home. I feel younger. I can’t quite place my own pulse to the feeling, where I lean on it as I fold at the shoulders to the bed. He sits beside me, folding into the feeling before I can - we look down, and I wonder if someone would comment that we look alike, now. It pulls me out of the decay that came with home, home, so stupid. My brother was younger, he still was home. After he had driven home, I wondered if he smelled like home. I came down with a sinus infection the same day, and suddenly it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. 

Before the painted kitchen, in the old apartment with green halls and staircases and carpentry. Padre Pio lay peacefully against the entry wall, despite numerous altercations with oversize boxes and rowdy descents, he lay firmly. Dragging a shit mattress down everunswept steps, I pass Padre for what I reckon to be the last time, and my kidney aches like I’m dying. Up the stairs, a mass of glass in my bedroom, old bedroom, lay forgotten and thank God, thank you, I sweep it knowing I’ll pass him again. I think a moment, of what I’ve left in this space. Isn’t that all it’s made out to be, existing and making tiny blips and marks, becoming the space and birthing a new one for the next? My head is a bulging oyster, and my hand rips blood from leaning plainly against glass. It’s all right, it’s all right, I think, shying from latent symbolism as I press palm to palm. Leaving is good and right, like oversleeping and brain freeze. Leaving is changing for the better, I think with my big oyster brains. Leaving is letting something remember you after you’re gone. The pearl! I write my words on a bloody piece of paper, I look to the sky to send a kiss to Lowery, and I shove it deep within the skirting board. I slip down the stairs, forgetting Padre entirely, desperately attempting to push the pearl from my mind. 

We drag the dried chairs through the window from the roof, down wood steps to the kitchen, smashing against railings and protruding wall panels. Maybe they should’ve all been brown, maybe it’d have been more sensical. Who knows what color the next kitchen’ll be? Well, that’s a further look at loss, my skull voice clicks memory buttons on its tiny switchboard, the reprisal bitch. I’m sitting in a dozen windows that feel less and less near, getting older and further and closer to the frame. I’m pulling for a new floor on the elevator, a separate memory than this; it settles funnily on my chest as I’m suddenly facing blue and white and inadvertently brown chairs, hand painted and maybe not dry enough.

I miss the smell of home, unfamiliar and remote as it was, it must still drag at something innate - Six odd years of distance and familial aphasia, I feel for a narrow hallway and earthy basement, a furnace room with mildew and a staircase with red carpet stains. It’s fabricated, it must be, with gaping holes like light and smell. The smell of my bedroom, the smell of me preserved, the smell of me carried and rebuilt and unstrippable, oh God, I’ll throw up. I haven’t the need to remember anymore, it’s passed like any other perfect detail that’s escaped me - pearl from my mind.

It’s not too bad. It’s actually all right. The chairs feel smoother to the touch, glow against the red light, tuck into the earth tones of the room, they all fit in, all right.

Art :

‘ The Refurbished Kitchen ‘

Gabriele Maurus, Canada

Acrylic, Gesso, Paper on Wood.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-The-Refurbished-Kitchen/4532/7833514/view