3 minute read
Swimming with Cheese
Cheese... fermented and compressed to be bouncy like rubber – tissue sucked out of another living being, secreted not as a result of pure love or governmental subsidies, but out of biological automatism and necessity, blind function of preparation and certainty. Will governs the suckling, though, allegedly free will.
Mould – will fly through the air, close relative of the one eating away grain in giving bread, it sticks to sugar embraced by fat, it procreates in cellars and natural caves alike. It destroys and vomits, too, and preserves by decay.
I eat. I take it slow – and so do you –consuming fuel that is stored in soil, extracted, travelling through furnaces of scaffolding and flesh, both standing up and lying down as they please.
“What to do next?” I asked, wine and cheese on the table, locking eyes with him, curd reflecting pure love, akin to us geographically void of subsidies.
“I’ll cut this one with this small knife” he said, and he did, slowly, on the wooden chopping board placed on the wooden table, a set of flat Matryoshkas of practicality and motherly insanity (“Don’t cut the cheese on the counter!”), breadcrumbs everywhere and leading nowhere – a Cézanne still life, this one akin to motherly instructions.
We were naked, layered on top of each other like the chopping board’s wooden surface and the table, nested in each others’ parental dolls. Accordingly, our faces were painted in gloss and pigments, hardened around our eyes and on our mouths, chewing on our own tongues –bouncy bouncy little rubber.
“Give me the other piece” I said to him, and I put the white lump with a hole of
blue mould in my mouth. The paint cracked open, and the sludge started breaking back into the sugars it once originated from. A similarity, this is, with cheese and wine: stomach breaks them back into the same constituents they began at, at an arbitrary point of the Earth’s energy storing cycle. And so it goes on, in our own hollowness. Rotting, alas, begins as usual.
“Do you know Casu Martzu?” I asked him. Maggots liquidise the cheese; you gotta eat it fast, before toxins appear in the bound structure. You gotta eat the maggots, too: you are what you eat, you shit what you eat, and so the syllogism ends. “Never heard of it” he replied, and so I explained, opening up the outermost doll, the maternal skin, the thickest of all.
With pure love, entwined with itself endlessly in its own repetitive cycles we sat up, looking at the wall. The wallpaper had a pattern I’d never noticed before; it looked like water, waves upon waves, from top to bottom.The apartment was his, nonneutral grounds for both of us.
I bought the cheese. I quarrelled at the market, bargained maniacally for the cause, and according to him – in this we disagreed – I placed wood on wood to facilitate hedonism. We undressed, we were always undressed. In fact we are always undressed, once behind closed doors; we only leave make-up on. So we eat, and so we drink.
So we swim in the water, Present Simple, afloat like the board and the table would be, made of the same material, all halves of the dolls sealed tight. Else we’d drown, and by god, we never, ever manage to drown. So we sat, heads on each others’ shoulders, looking at nothing, really.
