Thin Film Interference Kinda Day

A long weekend with no plans, is a thing of beauty. Do you agree?

I spent today doing nothing with my teen. Best day in months.

We talked in half-finished thoughts, picking up from the night before or three years ago. Sexuality, matter-of-fact, no performance of being cool. Morality and then Nihilism made its appearance; he’s trying it on like a jacket, seeing if it fits. Then somehow India, the US, China: the stories nations tell themselves that no one outside believes, same as people. Wasn’t a discourse, just circling, curious. Of course quantum physics had to have a say. He hyperboles, I rationalise. He pushes his boundaries, I am elastic. We’re perfectly matched.

He told me about what he wants, in fragments — a scene to direct, a place to live, a self still in pencil. I mostly just listen, sometimes stratgize, sometimes mother, most times just a sounding board. Then he roasts me: my height, a phrase I overuse, my “pauses and British phrases.” Being trolled by someone I made is one of the great pleasures.

We went to the theatre for The Sheep Detectives — the Hugh Jackman one, with the flock that turns Poirot after their shepherd is found dead. It shouldn’t work. A murder mystery solved by sheep, voiced by Patrick Stewart and Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Bryan Cranston, adapted by the Chernobyl writer from a German novel called Three Bags Full. The writing, somehow tender. The sheep grieve. The shepherd is mourned. The whodunit creaks along on hoofs and there is, against my better judgement, a lump in my throat by the third act. We laughed at the wrong places. We couldn’t rewind, which felt right — some things you only get once, even the ridiculous ones. That, too, is a love language. Reminded me of the years when all I watched was all the animation and was all updates on the lore of my little pony

Evening, down to the waterfront. The sky showed off — rainbow of non primary colours, where it had no business being, lavender, a painted teal. The water doubled it. We shared earbuds: Pink Floyd, his music taste is eclectic and I couldn’t be prouder, the notes hit as the clouds broke and I came a little undone. He notices, sometimes says nothing.

Home before dark. Low jazz. Opposite ends of the couch, feet tangled like when he was small. I made a good chilli margarita — salt, smoke, slow burn. Wrote a scene I’d been avoiding, got it in one take. Crediting the day, not the tequila. Or maybe the tequila too.

Nothing happened. No milestones, only a few photos. Just a long conversation with the person I most like talking to, broken up by a ridiculous show, a gorgeous sky, a drink that bites back. Nobody tells you that one day your kid becomes the company you’d choose. Doing nothing with the right person is its own devotion. I’ll take all of it, especially the trolling.

Copyright©Neer

Whilst I Wait

I rinse the rice
until the water runs clear, three times, four,
the way my mother taught me

The kettle starts. A message
from a managing director somewhere needs me
to look at a deck before the New York open.
I look. I send it back with two small changes
and a kindness, because kindness costs nothing
and is sometimes the whole work.

the neurologist in London picks up on the third ring and tells me
the scan is clean enough, for now, for someone
like me, in a body like this, and I write clean enough
on a Post-it and stick it to the fridge beside
the grocery list, where it belongs.

One day I’ll lie down and not get up.

One day the inbox will go quiet on its own.

Until then, there is the laundry, folded warm, and the novel on the desk that wants another chapter and is not getting one tonight. 

There is the boy who loves me, asleep in the next room with one foot out of the sheet the way he always sleeps, as if half of him is already walking toward morning.

There is the harbour, which is a kind of a clock
if you look at it long enough. 

There is the email I am not going to answer until Tuesday, in defiance of my own better nature.

So often I have mistaken the urgent for the important.
So often I have stood in front of the so-called big
things — the promotion, the diagnosis, the publication,
the small bright fact of someone choosing me back —
and only realised, much later, that the actual life
was happening underneath, in the rinsing of the rice,
in the picking up of the phone on the third ring,
in the folding of a fitted sheet, which nobody on earth
has ever quite mastered and which I am not going
to master either, and that is fine.

Galileo found the moons of Jupiter. I find a hair tie
behind the bed. Both of us are doing the same work,
in our way. Both of us are saying: *look, the world
is more furnished than I knew yesterday.*

For the moment, I will listen to the kettle.
I will text on the family group-chat
I will finish the line I am writing, or I will not.
I will keep what I can keep, which is not much
and is everything: this hour, this breath,
the soft administrative-ness of being alive,
the dust we are, the dust we are tending,
the small joint and fragile keeping of it all.

Copyright©Neer