FERMENTATION OF MY NEGATIVE TRAITS

I leave the pot unattended on the stove to watch how quietly water learns the language of violence. It begins with a tremor too small to notice, with a handful of bubbles clinging politely to the bottom as though they are afraid of their own existence. I know that feeling. I feel it each time I read another headline that begins with a woman and ends with a warning. I feel it each time I calculate the route home before the evening has even begun, or when the keys subconsciously thread between my fingers after sunset. They tell me composure is a virtue, so I keep the lid firmly shut and wait for the whistle to finally arrive. My anger is like that steam. It has forgotten the shape of mercy. It burns the hand that lit the fire and the hand that came to extinguish it with equal devotion.

I like to keep my front door bolted and play a game where I recognise love by the sound of its footsteps long before it reaches the porch. I draw the curtains and hold my breath until the one knocking mistakes my silence for absence. I will call it avoidance if someone insists on naming it, although I prefer words like timing, caution, or self-preservation. I leave the kettle warm, the lights on, the chair across from me neatly tucked beneath the table, as though I have been expecting company all along. I practice my almosts. Almost vulnerable. Almost known. Almost loved. Years later, when the paint will begin to peel from walls that have never echoed with another person’s laughter, I will swear loneliness arrived uninvited.

I fold myself into the smallest shape that my body allows and press my forehead against my knees until my spine resembles a question mark. I count my breaths aloud. Then I lose the count. I begin again. I lie motionless as my heart strikes the walls of my chest like a bird trying to leave its cage. I like to catalogue every possible disaster before breakfast and leave glasses of water untouched beside the bed because standing up suddenly feels too ambitious. I convince myself that preparing for every ending is the same thing as surviving it. And so, I survive my anxiety patiently.

I started keeping a hatbox because I wanted proof that I had lived. I imagined growing old, lifting its lid, and being greeted by a birthday candle wrapped in tissue paper and a note in a handwriting that has since learned to tremble. Instead, I fashioned my own Pandora’s box. Every time I open it, spills the afternoon I should have said yes, the apology that arrived too late, the person who loved me before I knew how to be loved. They scatter through the room until the present has nowhere left to stand. Every night I return to that hatbox like a pilgrim, kneeling before a shrine of my own making. I keep lifting the lid in search of the hope that was said to remain at the bottom. Instead, I find myself waiting there, alongside everything I refused to leave behind.