Pomodoro

My coffee’s gone cold. It’s my third cup so I should probably just leave it. I take a sip. Tepid. But it’s still coffee so down it goes. I’m hoping it will cure me, wake up words lying dormant in my brain. There’s something good in there, I’m sure of it. All it needs is a nudge. Something comes to me from long ago, someone else’s words:

if you have to sit for hours

staring at your computer screen

or hunched over your

typewriter

searching for words,

don't do it.

Shut your face, Bukowski. 

I have nothing to write about and too much to write about. I could tell you about my resolution to run every day in January. I haven’t, by the way. But I’ve run most days and I’ll take that. Sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes 22. 

I could tell you about my alopecia. I’ve had it for over ten years now. It ebbs and flows like hunger. And now it’s flowing: a beast that was satiated for a while, suddenly ravenous again. And so the patches wax like a fattening moon, bigger each day. It makes me look like a cyborg or an alien — like that one from Guardians of the Galaxy — the less favoured daughter of Thanos, Nebula. I wear a headband and think about getting one of those snake oil treatments that definitely won't work. For a moment, I allow myself to go somewhere that feels like lament. It feels good to feel sorry for myself. Like that first gulp of a martini. My hair was always my best physical feature: thick, curly, long. But that’s enough of that. I had more than my fair share anyway. And at least I’ve still got my eyebrows, I think, as I down more room temperature coffee.

I could tell you about my daughter losing her snood at school — her snood of many colours. I knitted it for her four years ago. She’d left it on her peg and poof, it was gone. The way she sobbed and shook that night, the weight of loss so heavy on her small body. The way, a week later, we saw it on another girl from her school in the park. The way I went up to her and her mother, awkward and embarrassed to explain that the snood is in fact ours, my daughter’s. The way she stood there, unflinching, posture like a swan, elbow crooked for battle, and said her daughter had been offered it from lost property. The way she hesitated to give it back, saying how much her daughter loves it. The way I, like a complete mug, offered to knit another one for her. The way it was the father who eventually told her to take it off and return it. The way I raged afterwards with all the things I should have said. The way it didn’t matter. The way my daughter smiled with the deepest joy. 

I turn to the window: mauve sky. I’ve written the word ‘syncopated’ on my notepad. I whisper it to myself, my fingers tapping out the syllables. My cup is empty now; the patches of coffee scattered like landmass on a map, a globe of coffee stains, of tiny islands and huge continents. My phone dings. Pomodoro telling me it’s break time. Five whole minutes to wander the house, to look out of windows, to make more coffee.