escapril day 7: chemical reaction
Some days it takes me a half hour to wash the breakfast dishes.
Not because there are lots of dishes, but because
there is no music playing and the day is still new so thoughts
are still young, and my hands are submerged in hot water
that makes warm blood run through my veins, and I can feel
the soap bubbles pop against my skin as they make a soft
fizzing sound that make my breaths feel like they’re floating
while my feet are steady on the ground, and the golden morning
sun is still shining through the window – and somehow that is the
perfect recipe – the perfect chemical concoction
for a potion to brew in the back of my mind, waiting to erupt, and
suddenly the fizzing is coming from my brain as bubbles burst
on the inside of my skull.
They surface in quiet moments. Starting small, with a spark,
with a glimpse into something else, a flash of mind,
like a blink going the other way, but they build in an exponential
crescendo and soon I’m stopping every minute to take my gloves off
and write something down because the thoughts just keep coming,
and by the time all the dishes are clean, the bubbles have all disappeared
and the water is only on the verge of being warm.
But I remove my gloves for the final time, with fingertips brimming
with electricity – the buzz of something new.
This is a special state of mind. It either happens in bed at 1am
in a good kind of can’t-sleep state where the dark doesn’t scare me with
its emptiness but becomes a blackboard of possibility to fill the darkness
with scrawls drawn in thought chalk and sometimes it feels like I can see
more in these moments than I ever can because I’m seeing with my mind.
And my mind is free to wander and breathe when all my ears hear are
the hums of night life or rain or the quiet of a peaceful Sunday morning,
and all my eyes see are the dark, a blank tiled shower wall,
or a sink – full of almost washed dishes.
Lauren Kathleen 