On Living Alone for the First Time
It’s so quiet I can hear the electricity humming in the ceiling. I think of wailing cicadas and the way we know their sound to mean heat. The bulbs glow a color that doesn’t seem cool or warm, and the beige wallpaper catches it and warps the light into a palpable sick. The pattern is supposed to look like limestone–porous slabs stacked from floor to ceiling. I stare at it too long, notice how it repeats and repeats and repeats, recognize each place one sheet overlaps another by the way the blocks don’t match up, and the spots where corners have started lifting from the wall, arching their backs to expose the white underbelly. I tape bright postcards to the walls, hang up tapestries, anything to draw the eye away. I wander the apartment as though I’m haunting it. Everything is so pale–the glowing beige walls and cream-tiled floors–I wonder if I really have died and eternity is nothing more than the stale blankness of a hospital corridor. I keep imagining my fingers slipping between the sheets of wallpaper, peeling it back, tearing it into strips, ignoring the bite of limestone shards under my fingernails, and finding yellow underneath. I stride from my bedroom to the kitchen with a word on my lips, but it just drips down my chin, and I wipe it off with the back of my hand, go to the sink, rinse away the stick, blink, and wonder what I’d come in here for in the first place as the unspoken vowels slip down the drain. Hummm. I can’t decide if this is a sound I know to mean alone, or lonely. I think the difference is consent. I lie in bed and run my fingers through my own hair so I don’t forget what it feels like to be touched.
Kate Porch (she/her) is an emerging writer born and raised in South Florida in a family of seven. She holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Central Florida and currently lives and works in Thailand as a primary school teacher. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has previously been featured in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell Journal, and is forthcoming in The Hooghly Review.