Day’s Writings

You arrive early but you have already been seen. The receptionist hands you a clipboard with your answers already filled in. Your handwriting, yes. But more careful than you have ever been.

In the waiting room, a woman reads a magazine from next year. She is crying softly, not from sadness but from recognition. You understand this completely. You have never understood anything less.

The doctor will see you now.

The hallway is longer than the building. The lights are the kind of warm that means something is wrong with the wiring or with the sun. You pass doors labeled with your childhood nicknames. Behind one of them, someone is practicing your laugh. They're getting better.

The doctor's office smells like your mother's hands after gardening. The doctor is facing the window. The window faces a field you remember from a dream you haven't had yet. Poppies. No — teeth. No. Poppies.

"We have your results," the doctor says, still facing the window.

You notice the diplomas on the wall are all issued to you. Degrees in fields that don't exist: Applied Forgetting, Structural Grief, the Thermodynamics of Familiar Rooms.

"You are the results," the doctor says, turning.

The doctor has your face but rested. Your face but believing something you stopped believing. Your face but the version that stayed.

"I'm going to refer you to yourself," the doctor says, writing on a prescription pad. The pen is out of ink but the paper darkens anyway.

You take the paper. It says an address. It is your address.

You leave through a different door than you entered. Outside, it is the same day but the light has shifted one degree toward apology. You walk home. You have always been walking home.

On the third night the hallway began to remember.

Not the wallpaper, not the nails—those are honest things. The remembering came from the air, which had been idle too long and started practicing shapes. It practiced your outline first, then your voice, then the way you hesitate before turning a knob.

In the morning the mirror wore your face badly. Too much cheekbone, not enough refusal. It blinked a second late, like it was reading from a script. When you leaned close, it fogged in the pattern of a fingerprint you do not own.

There is a cabinet in the kitchen that sighs when opened. Inside: a stack of plates with your childhood haircut painted on them in blue glaze. Underneath: one plate with no picture, only a dent as if an eye had rested there for years.

The house calls you by your name, but pronounces it with the wrong mouth.

You leave a glass of water on the table. Overnight, the water becomes heavier. In the morning you can hear it thinking, small and mineral. When you drink it, your throat fills with rooms.

On day six, the light switches reverse their function. The dark comes on. The bright turns you off. In the dim, you find yourself standing in places you did not walk to: behind the shower curtain, under the bed, inside the coat closet among jackets that smell of strangers and sunlight.

A list appears on the refrigerator, written in handwriting that imitates you:

1. Don’t forget to lock the door.
2. Don’t forget the door can lock you.
3. Don’t forget you agreed to this.

You read it twice.

The second time, you remember signing your name.

When the hallway begins to sweat thin, blue milk, it is time to bury the calendars. You must not look directly at the corners of the room; they are no longer ninety degrees. They are acute. They are listening.

First, gather the shed hair. Not yours. The thick, transparent threads you’ve been sweeping from the stovetop. Weave them into a knot that resembles a small lung. Leave it by the baseboard to distract the floorboards.

Do you hear the chewing? It is only the upholstery remembering the cow. Do not sit. If you sit, you will become part of the memory, and you will have to be chewed as well.

If the kitchen faucet drips upwards, open your mouth. Catch the anti-water. It will taste like static and the concept of Thursday. Swallow it, but do not let it reach your stomach. Hold it in the dark hollow of your throat until it hatches.

They will arrive soon. The geometry inspectors with their blank, velvet faces. When they knock from the inside of the closet, do not offer them tea. When they ask for the time, tell them the clocks have gone soft. Tell them your teeth have already flown south for the winter.

Whatever you do, do not close both eyes simultaneously. The left eye must watch the door. The right eye must watch the ceiling.

The blue milk is turning to chalk. The ceiling is lowering its jaw. Breathe shallowly. The house is trying to forget you. Help it.

In the kitchen where spoons grew feathers,
Mother stirred the soup of yesterday's echoes.
It bubbled with faces—tiny, mouthing silent complaints.

Father's watch ticked backward, unwinding his veins
into blue rivers that pooled under the table.
"Time to eat," he said, but his voice was a swarm of gnats.

I reached for the salt, but it was my hand—severed,
sprinkling itself from a height no one remembered.
The clock grinned, its teeth chattering secrets:
You are the ladle, you are the broth, you are already gone.

Outside, the moon licked the windows clean,
leaving smears of forgotten names.
We chewed the air, swallowed shadows,
and waited for the bones to knit themselves anew.

But the feathers wilted, the faces drowned,
and the watch—oh, the watch—whispered:
Tomorrow is the fork you cannot see.