Watching it dissolve into nothingness

If we could throw this voice into the past, I wonder if my heart would still ache like this.

Like this.

–

What is emptiness if not a sign that you are lacking something, missing something. But is fullness and richness always good?

I am full now, of an aching emptiness. But this hollow vessel is silent.

Shouldn’t full vessels explode with noise? How is it that physics has laid down the rules of the physical universe, conforming with the observation and not emotion.

I guess that’s also why this doesn’t match the things that I wanted to say, not at all.

–

Like Wordsworth trying to write an epic about a hero and then going into a neverending spiel of himself – I wanted to write about the happiness that I should have written about so much closer to the time that I felt it.

What is left of that happiness is my longing.

If happiness is a drug then this is past a hangover, straight into the throes of withdrawal. If we tried to think about this rationally, there is some link to the way that our body reacts with various chemicals.

Emotions, however, are not things that we can think rationally about on days full of them.

To be cold to study the way that we feel. I would like to reach back to that peace, before work starts again.

Wait for me.

Though I know that it is much to ask.

–

5.29 am and I watch my relaxing holiday dissolve like salt into the sea called time, without a nary hint that it truly existed apart from to taunt me.

It’s not as if there’s that much work – but that there is, means that I cannot be in peace, only bits and pieces where everything takes a chunk of my life force.

To stay on top of the few things, even though I have already done it during term time. Suddenly it seems like too much to ask.

My holiday.

I must get around to the documents, to preparing documents and checking documents, then I must write documents and then be responsible for myself my things my keys.

To check in and check out and spin myself into a whirlwind.

She remembered, but that all the plans were tossed into that wind made my head (and not my heart) hurt.

Since I know full well, that one week ago I sent a letter a year into the future asking about what now will not come to pass.

–

Sepia toned girl with your closed eyes,

she burst into bloom, one eye spilling with hanahaki disease:

the way one imagines a one sided love might be.

This is not one sided love, but sheer longing.

I long for freedom.

Please, give it to me, for me to sit here, emptied of beauties to not seek out more

or to have the need to be filled up and busied.

No.

I do not want this, and it was unasked for.

It did not bloom out of sheer love, but of that cruel desire to toy with us.

The anxious flowers like tendrils creeping slowly,

from my stomach up my oesophagus then past my epiglottis,

down into my trachea and into my bronchi – my bronchioles

(for a moment I cannot breathe).

There is no reason to panic for these are plants.

Part of me, part of what I love.

Oh succulent in sepia tones,

if the past week had not been blazing hot, would you be able to live?

–

There are 3 more days of fast that I will make up for this year.

It was a coincidence that the one and a half days my beloved ones stayed over, I was the only one on my fast.

But I had enjoyed that as the start to my holiday.

Now that they are each home, and I never left, the work has come to me.

Today, since it is my younger sister’s birthday, I’ll finish my portion of the cooking.

Lemon cake with lemon curd and cream filling. What should I do about the cake that is in the fridge, slowly hardening overnight?

Since in this temperamental weather, if I leave it out it will either spoil or be eaten the way it is.

–

Eating the fruit of labour, enjoying it but not fully. If I became a proprietor of the harsh F&B industry, then I know what I would call this dish.

Longing.
A moreish dessert of butter cake with lemon curd and lemon cream.

Don’t expect one serving to satisfy you, but woe betide the one who attempts a second serving.

Anyway, I still, do not know the trick to get a nice slice from the actual cake without losing the picturesque white layer of cream. Longing is bowl of, though no less delicious, scraps.

Maybe that is what longing is. For the scraps that taste good, for the bowl which the curd and cream were mixed in.

Lemon curd:

2 lemons worth of juice and zest

3 small eggs

1/2 cup granulated sugar

50 g salted butter

Lemon extract

Heat lemon juice and zest over a double boiler, add the extract if you have any lying about.

Beat eggs and sugar, then add a little of the hot juice at a time while whisking, tempering the eggs (raising the temperature slowly).

Eventually, everything back into the double boiler (or glass bowl over boiling water as we do) and whisking, whisking.

It’ll thicken under 15 minutes over a low flame. You can do a larger flame if you’re confident – with custard things, I am not. For this recipe, I originally only had two eggs and they didn’t thicken. So I added my last egg and tempered with half-done curd.

I guess you could always do adjustments with cornstarch and water + sugar, that would be less dangerous.

When the curd is suitably thick for your purposes, take off the heat (still whisking), and add the cold butter in gradually. You don’t have to – and you can probably put less, but it makes the curd richer and more glossy to look.

I like butter, so I’ve never asked why we put more rather than less.

Lemon curd cream is just cream half whipped with sugar, then mixed in with curd and whipped to the final degree.

No recipe for the cake, since I didn’t like how hard it became in the fridge. 1:1:1 of butter sugar flour is definitely too much butter for a soft cake.

–

I have a headache again… Yesterday I accidentally broke my fast with a lemon sac. After squeezing the juice out of the lemon, unthinkingly, tasting the lemon.

The sourness was comparable to the surprise of knowing that I invalidated the half-a-day of fasting.

So again, it is three more days.

Advertisement