denial Izzy Kalodner

denial

It’s just going to go on like this, says the prophet, hands held skywards in the universal shrug of dismay, and that is when I begin to wish for a flood. Instead of mourning Pompeii I start to romanticize it and study the active volcanos. I contemplate building fires along the icebergs. I refuse plagues but I crave peaceful endings, slipping into continuous sleep. People speak of space and I imagine paralysis, drowning. I drop ice cubes into my cup and think of freezing as they melt. What is worse than dying early? Forever lasting, in quiet, unified disaster.

Izzy Kalodner

I Hope This Email Finds You Well

I woke up this morning and the sky was woollen and I watched the wall of rain roll over the mountains in the distance and I wondered if I had not wiped my glasses off well enough -- after several more attempts to get rid of the cloudiness I realized it was much bigger than my own perception.

My feet felt cold in an adult way when I turned off my 6:30 alarm and went to the kitchen for coffee. My mother had set the pot to brew at 6am but it didn’t listen and when I pressed the button and laid my sleepiness and coldness on the counter it tells me it is too full. The counter looks like the sidewalk beside my mother’s garden after a rainstorm.

I drink a cup anyway as I clean up the mess and dump the grounds that settled into an abstract painting at the bottom of my mug down the sink. I seem to remember my dad telling me as a child to never dump coffee grounds down the sink but now I do not know why he would have said that or if that is something adults think about and I do not want to look it up but I think about it every time I clean out the filter.

I wonder if I am causing mass destruction in every water line I visit.

I take the trash out while the new coffee brews for my mother and when I return it is very easy to slip into the shower and to wash my hair and to shave my legs and to continue these motions without sound or thought until I find myself dressed and clean in front of my computer at 7:15am. The sky is murmuring now. I wonder if it is trying to talk to me in particular. Maybe it heard me thinking about silence and decided to interject itself. Maybe the sky likes to play Devil’s Advocate.

These are not very adult things to think.

My shirt feels wrong and improper and my walls feel too bright and the little patch of yard outside my window feels like it does not really exist as I start work for the day.

Lily Reavis