Citrus
or: I'm scared of needles but if I ever got a tattoo it would be a bundle of oranges and here are my half-baked reasons why.
note: this wonky little stream-of-consciousness piece is a response to a prompt from this week’s Call and Response: “Write about love without once using the word love.”
In the poem I’ve been trying to write about this feeling, it’s early August. Chicago after the rest of my fellowship cohort left, and I moved from the hustle and bustle near Millennium Park to a room in an Airbnb a few blocks from the White Sox stadium. My host was an elderly Chinese man who clucked his tongue when I showed up at his doorstep with the two suitcases I’d lugged from Florence to Chicago to New York City and back again—hěn dà, he muttered, then insisted on helping me carry them up the stairs. Some of my Sunday school training came back, enough Mandarin for me to ask what’s the wifi, do you have children? He handed me a pamphlet; his daughter lived and worked in nearby Chinatown at a boba tea shop. I pointed to myself and said Vietnam. He nodded. Ah, yes, we are neighbors.
At night, I no longer had a roommate or friends to text I’m on my way back, so instead I played Norah Jones’ “Sunrise” on repeat and walked faster past the shadowy parts of the park. There was a little Italian restaurant that always had customers in their outdoor dining area, and once I could see the light glancing off their wine glasses and hear the clink of plates, the knot in my chest would loosen. My host had said I was welcome to use the kitchen. Too nervous to move any of his pots and pans, I lived off sandwiches and Trader Joe’s microwavable Japanese-style fried rice for two weeks in lieu of cooking. At work, my manager would look over pityingly and say, “That again?” I joked that if they paid me more, maybe I could switch things up. They took me on a boat trip instead. Six hours with nothing to do but schmooze and booze and watch the pilots practice their maneuvers for the Air and Water Show. I don’t remember how I got home, but when I closed my eyes and fell into bed, I could still hear the planes roaring.
I branched out from the L and started taking the bus, too. When the trains pulled into the station, the hot air would swirl around my legs and tunnel through my hair. I went to an open mic and thought of someone I hadn’t spoken to in ages and started a text and didn’t hit send.
It wasn’t loneliness. Or, if it was, it was the sort that cracked your heart open so the rest of the world could rush in. Unbearable fondness: I like that better. For the way the store clerks smiled and asked if they could help me find anything, and I knew it was their job but it still felt like a kindness. For the night my host surprised me with not one, but two oranges. Do you think the fruit is named after the color, or the color is named after the fruit? a friend texted. I think the fruit came first, I replied, though I have no basis on which to make that claim. Order only matters if someone plans on leaving. In high school, I’d written a college application prompt response about the word “sillage,” the degree to which a smell lingers in the air. Ghosts and memory and where we live after we’re gone. When my fingernail dug into the bumpy skin, sending a cloud of citrus particles upward, I thought of my grandpa in the kitchen, the grapefruit slices he dipped in salt and chili. Probably I had been three or four the first time I asked for a taste, my mouth puckering immediately afterward. And he laughed, holding out the next bite, knowing that I’d ask for more.
More than anything else about that summer, I miss the strangers. The waiter who made me feel like an insider because I ordered bún măng vịt instead of phở. D, whom I barely knew but who agreed to accompany me to Pilsen anyways, where she asked if I believed in marriage as anything other than an economic proposition, and we debated it very seriously while our paletas melted in our hands. I thought: my whole life will be this, seeing myself reflected in the eyes of someone else, and I am learning to live with that. What I mean is: I’m no good at being a hermit and I can’t quit people. One of the creative writing teachers I had told me, you use a lot of the imperative in your work. There’s always an invisible addressee.
I don’t know how to admit anything true to myself unless I pretend someone’s listening. I don’t really care for Cubism but I saw some Severini paintings of dancers, their bodies broken into planes of motion, kaleidoscopic, and that’s the sensation I’m chasing when I see snow piled up against a house a certain way or stop and watch the birds cleave the sky. Fractured and on the verge of breaking into light. Here’s the poem I’ve been trying to write. Here’s the text I never sent, which went something like: wherever you are now, I hope that one day you get the sort of breeze that feels like a postcard, a whiff of someone thinking of you from a distant place. I hope there’s plenty of fruit on your plate.
this captures so well that feeling of savoring life alone but feeling the presence of an "invisible addressee" missing. i felt like this a lot when i was traveling alone in melbourne:
"It wasn’t loneliness. Or, if it was, it was the sort that cracked your heart open so the rest of the world could rush in. Unbearable fondness: I like that better"
really reminds me of linda gregg's "grinding the lens" about being "alone and happy." https://comraderadmila.com/2020/06/18/grinding-the-lens/
"Order only matters if someone plans on leaving"