When your eyes are open, what you see constitutes the world. The sink in front of you. The window beyond it. The trees beyond that. The counter that runs to the left of you. The waste bin to your right. The world is clearly, the spatial interaction of these objects and what lies between them.

When you close your eyes though, the world changes. What’s right in front of you is not necessarily what’s most immediate. You can hear the traffic below you. Someone speeding up to catch the yellow light before it turns red. Someone pulls out of their parking spot abruptly and another car’s horn erupts. Your upstairs neighbour walks from the bedroom to the bathroom. The world is no longer objects in space but bodies in motion and the cries they make as they connect.


You are permitted to be sad and self pitying for 5 to 7 minutes a day. You choose to take these moments in the shower each morning. This is an acceptable place to experience the full weight of these emotions. Shower yourself in tears. Allow the sound of your weeping to be drowned out by the water hitting porcelain and draining down a lead pipe, unbenounced to your roommates. Some days the misery may not surface immediately upon stepping into the shower, but it’s important to make an effort to find and express these feelings in an act of self preservation. To prevent a burst of unregulated emotion in a less controlled setting.

Your back hurts. You aren't sure why and this frustrates you. You lay on your back staring at the ceiling, jaw clenched. Once you realize that you are grinding your teeth you make a conscious effort to stop. Your back really hurts. You lift your arms and let them drop back to the bed. Even that hurts, although in an unsatisfying way.

“Fuck.”

You try to reach your phone without moving. You stretch out your left arm towards the nightstand. The tips of your fingers make contact with the cable running from the charger in the wall socket, up to the phone. You grasp the cable and tug a little too enthusiastically. The phone slides off the nightstand. Your still holding the cable and you can feel the weight of the phone dangling precariously between the bed and the nightstand. You try to reel the phone in slowly, careful to remain flat on your back. Thump – the phone disconnecting from the charger falls to the floor.

“Fuck”.

You are going to have to get up to reach your phone. You're not sure what time it is. It had been raining so much lately that you had trouble judging the daylight that bled through your curtains. Your grinding your teeth again. You take a deep breath and take stock of your day. You need to e-mail your sister. Before work you wanted to print out your passport application forms. Hamza wanted to have lunch. Momentarily, as you itemize the things you have to do today the pain subsides. Oh, you have to send that e-mail to the insurance people - before noon. You start, moving to grab your pho - and the pain halts you immediately.

“Fuck.”

Kitchen:

In an instant the entire contents of your freezer flashes before your eyes. There's a chicken in the freezer. It's frostburnt. It's been there since last autumn.

If you are what you eat; the contents of your refrigerator must be in some sense a self-portrait.

Beside the chicken 6 bananas. A bag of ground coffee. An ice cream container holding compost. A bag of frozen peas purchased once, not ever really with the intention of eating but because it was cheaper than an ice pack at the dep. And a stick of butter, for making pastry dough obviously. Although it’s not clear you’ll ever make pastries again.

What does this picture mean?

You open the fridge door and pull out a pitcher of orange juice made from frozen concentrate. You pour yourself a glass of orange juice. Sipping on it while going through the motions of making your morning coffee. No, actually, you’re not drinking coffee this week. Instead as the kettle boils you reach to the back of the cupboard and pull out a miscellany of tea.

There’s lemon ginger for sore throats. A peppermint nettle blend, other stuff too – wild foraged – in a brown paper bag. Probably too dry to have any noticeably beneficial effect. Raspberry zinger that you purchased one summer to make ice tea but you found that the flavour too closely resembled that of kool aid. And 1 loose sachet of Tim Horton's earl grey.

You briefly consider making a more elaborate breakfast but settle on a banana and a cup of tea.

Bit by bit the obligations of the day begin to weigh upon you. You find yourself moving away from those raw animal tasks like feeding and relieving yourself. Up through the bare human feelings that motivate everything else. Slowly getting swept up by the modernity of your every day.

One last thought before you sink into a pool of notifications. Caught in a whirl of likes and faves and other more important things like emails from the régis de logement and calls from the employment office.

One fleeting thought before all of that.
You are what you eat.

Taking into considerations the contents of your fridge and what you've chosen as a first meal of the day. Ponder that question. What if you are what you eat?