Sarahribu

Oh! Emancipation of the body does not equal that of the mind. I may have a salary and pay my way in the world but a Sunday is a Sunday is a Sunday, and I wake nervous my Mother will yell and tut for my deadly sinful habit of gluttonous sleep. But my mother isn’t here, I’m a modern girl with a house and bills and housemates who would never violate the sacred space. Privacy is the main currency of shared living, something I have never been very good at. At school everyone knew of my gossiping tendencies, and I used to follow any thread that sounded interesting with a ‘what-what-what-what?’ badgering poor girls until I knew their crushes and secrets, which I could then attempt to sell on the open market for a modicum of cool. I’m older now, sneakier, but sometimes the gossip hound resurfaces, crass and awful and greedy for illicit knowledge.

I have a childish craving for pancakes. I made them a lot as a young teenager, my party piece for making parents proud, breakfast in bed on a sleepy Sunday, tropical sunlight and lush greenery against good old-fashioned crepes Francais, mais oui, c’est delicious. I shouldn’t have them for the sake of thighs, but this is what emancipation is about, doing the things that are bad for you with no one to answer to but you.

They are gelatinous in the middle, and my tea is cold by the time I’m done, but I can only eat them with relish, or at least with syrup and lemon. Defeated, I retreat to the whirlwind. My housemates dominate the rest of the house, but this is my corner. With each iteration phase of my life the space I occupy gets smaller as my dreams become grander. It is as if the space around me contracts as I aspire, so will I live in a singularity once I am truly successful? The cleanliness I practice outside of it; carefully clean plates and neatly stacked game boxes, shoes squared by the toes next to the door, makes the horror behind it all the more distressing, I live like a chaos junkie, everything askew, piles everywhere atrocious and distressing. It makes me tired, but facilitates useless sleep, fetid dreams of quiet fiction lives and broken electronics taunt me before I wake, stepping on things that go crack in the night, slamming the door behind me to hide my shame and trap the chaos within.

But it is Sunday, and that is the habitual day of cleaning that maybe later in life will become traditional, folding and hiding and smoothing away my possessions so I can ruin it all again during the week when my head is mad with tiredness and I throw things into piles past caring. There are plastic cartons in plastic bags I have been meaning to recycle and expropriate from the trash, but today I feel failed by my ambitions and I lose a few hours in a book and new feather pillows, calming the anxiety by turning my face away and into a swamp world. When I arise later, the girl in the mirror has her girlishness disguised as a column, patterned cotton extending the swell of my hips to the floor. The writhing of my near-sleep have taken my hair and whipped it to a red crumpled storm, as per usual. My friends and lovers who have shared my bed tell of nights where I by turn mumble and enunciate unspoken desires, working my head into frenzy in the cheap softness of my pillow. I wake to find again an impression of Einstein staring back at me, eliciting laughs when I stumble onto the cold tiles of the kitchen for the morning’s infusion and satiation.

For all of this I am a pretender to the art of the sleepy weekend. I boast loudly when questioned about it, claiming a past of hedonism and obscene lumps of mouth-watering meats and cocktails prepared in the tradition of the Empire. In fact, I am a pale pretender to the crown my Father will never relinquish, for he is a man with a ruined liver whose main love in life has always been making people happy through the application of spirits and bawdy jokes. It was years before I realised his childhood stories about ghosts were really about alcohol, because children are inherently more open to speaking of the spirit world than adults, who are wise to wordplay. A sign of the loss of innocence is the sudden understanding of puns. I fail to cook properly, manage a few seconds of blissful relaxation with the paper before something in my head whirrs into action and I clamber for a pen and paper, a line stray in my mind that maybe might be the key to my eventual salvation, but by the time it has evaporated and I cannot relax again.

Instead my weekends left to myself are like dreams in themselves, unstructured parries of neurosis and accomplishment that ultimately are for naught by the time the alarm sounds Monday morning, and I drag my feet from their warm cocoon into the real world. I force oxygen to push down the anxiety that bubbles, cauldron-like behind my lungs. I pound away the worries with water pressure and floral suds. I slip my now-cool feet into plastic dreamboats and drag a brush through Einstein, banishing him for a day.