Bread and Lard

A little girl in a frothy tutu in the Bread and Lard Island Cafe is deliberating which chair to climb onto. The four adults accompanying give too much oxygen to her indecision until she becomes a blaze of theatrics, each adult suggesting which chair she may be most comfortable in, as though they are throning Royalty. 

The window view, Tilly, perhaps, says the mother. Father suggests no, sit her near the pretty lights, darling. Mother gives father a pointed look, then checks her audience.  

Other diners look on silently as Tilly tests each of the six chairs around the table and the four adults guffaw when she says: Thith one too hard, thith one too soft, this one jutht right; miniature Goldilocks with a lisp. The four take their seats, each one is stylishly bland in white or black tees, linen beige slacks, wheat-hued jeans. The females have matching sharply cut geometric fringes. If I were to personify them as a food, they would be truffle-topped macaroni or loaded fries with queso, their aesthetics scoring luxury by virtue of branded threads.  

We are waiting for coffee and eggs on that artisan bread so difficult to navigate with a knife. I anticipate that the full palate of the egg's yin and yang will be obscured by unneccesary shit tossed on top like chilli flakes or walnut infused pesto. We do not really speak other than to order. I am uncertain if it would be rude to read a page of my book, but the silence feels like it is being incubated. I consider sharing my food caricature but I have lost the art of feeling witty.

The whole of the eatery have to endure Tilly choosing a drink. Tilly is unsure if she wants pink milk or white, but her mother points out that she cant drink moo moo milk and she doesn't like reindeer's oaty milk either, so it better be fruit juice. The mother's friend says I used to mind awfully about the girl's teeth with apple juice, why dont you try this tropical mango, Tilly, it has much less sugar.

I read a page or two of my book at the table. I cannot process one word. Inside my stomach, I feel there are thousands of tiny jags of sea glass making a vivid mosaic of hurt. I feel wordless. Outside: Sunday drivers, a rush of light clouds, good light for long walking. I pine for our companionship of walking.  

When the food comes I feel conscious of how ugly I look when I eat and it makes my hands slippery to hold the cutlery, and I try to eat even quieter because we are not speaking but my throat keeps closing up. I know I am off-putting. I cannot control the punctuation of my swallowing with its fullstops and commas, its exclamation marks. It is a quiet breakfast, apart from my chewing and the red noise of Tilly. 

Silence can be all shapes. It is very willo the wisp by nature and it colds in to fit the spaces around people who lose the arcs of meaningful conversations which once rainbowed from one to another in an intimate prism of colour and connection. I can sit in all silences but it is a shock to me that there is so much silence. 

We walk, but he isn't feeling well. I obsess over whether to hold his hand to the point that I feel I might be sick, purging my hot mulched eggs on the concrete [with bile for a side.] I opt not to. I feel I am a physical hindrance, despise my own shyness. There is a heron who leaves when we pause to look as though we represent menace. Cormorants haunch their wings up to dry like creepy Samhain accessories. The water is still, the greying colour of last week. 

Lately, I panic in the blue dark of night, condemning myself on a hopeless loop. Mutual love beyond that early, temporary state of lust is this mirage I can never reach. I try to adapt myself to please as a chameleon does. I learned to understood, as a teenager, that I am not likeable as I am, I cannot be a finished work without external modification. In all relationships I am obligated for proof reading, subject to track change suggestions. Over time, I have learned to click accept, by default, without even reading them.  

Nights, I startle-wake after the first two hours of sleep, try to grip on to the edge of him like when you are too far out in foggy water, surfacing temporarily, the relief of it an exhale, but then the torso of the boat moves further away and the slow horror of drift slinks back in. 

I have these dreams that we are completely us again. He is turning my face to him and his gold eyes have no question and he looks at me for far too long, and I cannot look away, but I can never see where we are. A coffee shop, perhaps. A terraced house near where the trains bolt by. A forest with red bark and carpets of spines. All I know is that if there are any other people there, I don't see them. I only see him. And we are back, to that strange swimmy place where we started, when we poured into each other like hot wax, when it seemed we shared the same tongue, the same skin.