fortnight

I think I have forgotten what Sundays actually sound like. In my ears, Sundays are still shoulder blades stretching over cotton, eyelids fluttering shut. I can hear small portions of caffeine leaking through the back of my head - drip, drip, drip... A slide show of second-hand thoughts is flickering over my brain. My wardrobe door is banging shut.

Sunday, to me, sounds like perforated edges rustling in my drawers. The piercing, static noise of galaxy and city shining through raindrops and bouncing off my window. Fingertips searching out instability and scratching only the surface. Wanting to find half-set clay. I think I hear with my fingertips mostly, on Sundays. Like a grasshopper hears through its legs. My legs – my knees – curling against my chin as I crouch under alphabet-stained white light. When I can hear pen tips cutting shapes across white wrists, arms, I know it is Sunday.

Hearing Sunday makes my ears hot like melted fat and iron or boiling water on teabags. Like when someone calls you and their voice filters through the phone, cauterizing your nerve endings.

Sunday also occasionally sounds like there is an extra body in the room. For example thinking there are four when there are actually three. Maybe the other body is somewhere nearby and the sound waves are becoming disoriented as they negotiate space. Can I hear three bodies or four? Three is a holy number. But it doesn’t sound like it. Three ante meridiem on a Sunday is not holy.

Flat shoes are chasing metal cylinders across busy roads. Crooked metal circles are chasing shoes across grass. Canvas is swinging between bodies – the quiet friction of four-legged races. Less holy than three legged ones. Everytime a body negotiates the barbed moat around my ankles I think it is Sunday. That sound of carbon dioxide against my forehead, my post-card vision - that is also how I hear Sunday.

And a whispering about colours: Sunday is saying, y e l l o w y e l l o w y e l l o w g r e e n , g r e e n a n d r e d a n d o r a n g e a n d y e l l o w , b l u e . b l u e b l u e b l u e . d e f i n i t e l y y e l l o w . s o m e t i m e s g r e e n a l w a y s g r e e n g r e e n . y o u a r e c l e a r a n d y o u r h e a d i s n o t a n d w e a r e a l l p o i s o n e d b y w h i t e f r u i t s i n a f a c t o r y .



This is what Sunday actually sounds like:

An absence of traffic.
A rolling around empty two-by-three surfaces.
A song on repeat for the sake of nostalgia.
A clinging-on to silver-transparent ideas.
A drawn-out waiting for something to happen (I am not sure what).
A rush to resist sleep.
A realising that the week has only minutes left, like a saggy skin holding together a brittle skeleton .
A staring competition with the wall until my eyes begin to water.



I am scared. Afraid that if I take my earphones out I will hear exactly how Sunday sounds. But I will forget how to end one week and begin the next.