the simmer

ode to thoughtlessness, italian hills, hometown ennui

You have to leave at peaks, before places dawn on u with your/their/ur mutual unbelonging. Back home, the streets carry an endlessly fizzling sound. People wizz and buzz similarly to the way summer wind irks the braced shutters surrounding my balcony, closed off for most of the 37-degree day. I stay in most days. Everyone outside of these bounds is simmering in a broth of incertitude, a broth of weird imminence. There’s a sense of death in this town. When i was still using my other instagram, i posted a little series from my hometown, the visuals of which i forgot, but the little description having stuck with me: “in my hometown, all songs have already been sung”. there used to be some type of magic, some type of intangibility as we were growing up here. We carried ourselves like outsiders, while there still existed a prospect of emancipation from our self-inflicted loser-ishness. There was the magic of going unnoticed on the one street that crosses town, perennially anonymous, being yelled at in the creative ways Romanians acquired thru centuries — they are a willful people after all, and they want to make themselves heard. We used to play Grimes on our phone speaker really loud, as if to disrupt the quiet of our brooding teenage minds, the tiny sound of our own shared simmer. We still listen to music down the streets now, our hands cupped over the phone speakers. Girls should have a state-mandated JBL to blast music down their hometowns. As we’re back now, there’s been a breach in the elusive hierarchies we wanted to transcend as kids. We no longer want to prove anything, maybe neither did we back when we were walking more timidly. We turn on the volume on our phones (we play that one Major Lazer song), we go to town to talk to nobody, we write little poems on receipts and medical leaflets. We talk until our talks are consummated, we’re not scared of saying we love each other, of falling into the stale and unimaginative soup of adult years with a big, collective sigh.

I came back now to reflect on my compendium of comings and goings this summer, of places less death-like. M’s house had yellow walls, a nook, a terrace where time, again, fizzles like his parents’ rose wine they serve with every meal. it’s a vantage point i associated with the nuclear family and a pictorial sense of prosperity, where the mountain (i learn to be monte cimone) clouds over us as we talk about the fig tree in the downstairs garden. I look at him and i’m reminded in ways of my own boyishness, of my own chair that i sat in and talked to my parents the way i did all this time, ignoring the quiet that followed our every conversation — diffident but sort of proud, sort of ultimately ironic and scarce with my words. This year, I am happier than I used to be when i still lived home, but I am also a lot more insulary and silent in ways unconceivable prior. I matured in the sense that I think of recipes and scents more than disappearing off the face of the earth. I ate my mouth and trachea away. I sipped them all in greedy gulps of matcha, of the banana bread I made with my parents’ cooking robot. I made lavender syrup; it took 12 minutes for it to reduce …. sssshhhh went the robot, simmering and evaporating. It even talked to me sometimes, but I didn’t respond.

B’s house is up a hill, a 30 min bus ride outside of every palpable sense of a city. Her parents grow lavender, of which I send a picture to my own parents; I need to grow this lavender. Her parents, again, are attentive to her the way mine are to me. I have been every house I stay in for a few days this summer, I felt myself growing limbs and rhizomes to their wooden floors and nooks. I talk to her mom in hungarian and i tell myself, i need to speak it fluently, i need to effuse it, i need to be a hungarian air purifier.

I feel very in love but very dissociated (ew what a word!) these days. I finally feel at home, and with that i feel like I need to sleep so much. I smell my own sweat periodically, i’m contorted in the plane seat, i live without the necessity of taking anything too verbatim anymore. I stretched in the mornings for 2 days in a row, and I’ve been having breakfast I time quite poorly. I read everything my eyes hover over, but every beautiful word is filtered through my body like salty water. So often, one’s body won’t absorb it, it won’t hydrate the body, won’t be too nice to it either. At home i tell J that I, as often as possible, don’t really think thoughts. I am an overgrown, overexhausted teenager body that ran out of thoughts to ponder over. I’d rather just traverse this house like a gust of A/C than think away any longer. We kiss while washing our hands in the downstairs bathroom (you should try it out, best sensory experience ever!). We celebrate our anniversary. Anniversary champagne fizzles like algae. I think of how humans cant live in doom for too long, and how I rescinded from my defensive position of doom into the sort of continuous levitation I live my days in now. I am lost in the space between one’s body and thoughts, unmoored from either. I still can’t tell if I feel comfortable, but once again, I haven’t thought about it in a long, long time. I loom over my neighborhood in heat the same way i did over the italian hills, S says i’ve been mapping out the world with my body, a body that feels as free as it feels empty. You have to leave your body at peaks, i think.