I’m crying, and cutting onions, and 25. The year I thought everything would happen. The outer layer is white and dry, crinkles and flakes like paper in oddly square sections that I almost can’t believe have folded themselves out from the square bulb. They curl, but connected like those endless chains of hand-holding paper cut-out figures by torn sideways sections of flesh, into a white porcelain bowl.
I’m thinking of other white walls. The white expanse above my partner’s bed, pockmarked with polaroids, and the glue from fallen polaroids, as I tell him, laughing wryly, that people have layers, like onions. The lamp was focused too close to the wall, so that there were concentric circles of painful brightness, and then one faded skirt of light that flailed wildly, crookedly, across the wall. Did not quite make it to the farthest corner of the bed, where there was dark dark.
(And where that statement came from – a stupid movie – and the stupid movie of my memory here where the first college boyfriend, who fucked me up, and who I fucked up, laughed about it in the white cinderblock cage of his dorm room. After all, it came from a meme. I wonder if he’s still the kind of person who would devour the metaphor of those layers, printed in a book, but still not trust himself to discuss it.)
And then there is the other fluorescent-lit, but glossy-tiled kitchen of the bakery in Berlin, where the French pastry chef tells me to peel the green out of the center of the garlic. It’s not poisonous, but you can’t digest it. In the same conversation, as I use a spoon to skin kilos of ginger and set them into a pot of water, she describes how the flayed tubers will be boiled seven times, so their bitter souls leave their pale, sweet bodies behind.
I don’t want to boil out my bitterness. But as I slice the onions open, directly through the middle, I see the beautiful cross section, speared by green. The heart has betrayed the body. The shoot has used the old flesh as food. I peel out the undigestible core, the try-hardy shoot. The spine that holds the chin of the flower up, the vasovagal nerve that reaches to the root of the torso, that can turn everything off.
The layer, maybe three or four deep, that tingles sometimes with social anxiety chides myself for being too deep. Deep. Playing at something. Something serious, or something silly, or embarrassing so that the only rational reaction is to be silly. I’ll peel things apart here, and put myself in a series of boxes. WordPress is cinderblock in another dimension.
I’ve opened the window, and put a box on the sliced onions. I’m not crying anymore. Hello.
persimmoness 