Morning Studio
Published in issue 5 of The Toe Rag.
Soon it will be morning in her studio. The sky is empty, though Andromeda’s constellation has been out all night, still and glowing, each star meticulously rendered on that 24-inch 4.5K Retina display. I shiver slightly under the hardness and blueness of the light, the far-reaching singleness of that vast screen. This is what Larkin must have felt when looking up at the moon after his midnight piss. The expanse of the galaxy makes her small flat smaller. Her toilet’s in a closet, the bathtub in the kitchen and Alexa on the windowsill, but she doesn’t mind, she has all she needs. The rent is low and the sparsity means things remain tidy and monastic. She says it gives her a better chance of fitting her whole life into this short life.
She breathes on my forehead through her nose and I feel stray hairs float rhythmically in the warm current of each exhale. I resist the urge to move them, to submit to that sad, primal reflex against discomfort – like a hollow horniness induced by a Hot Single in Your Area scam, like craving a cigarette. The half-light of the early morning makes her bare chest glow. Pale green veins branch visibly like the inside of a deep-sea fish and I hear the blood swell through them, my ear a flesh seashell against the white shore of her sternum. We lie with hair and limbs and fingers tangled, sinking into her crumbling yellow foam mattress. It smells as you’d expect; of plastic and mildew, a trace of last night’s weed and fried egg when we smoked and ate and spoke with long lapses of silence, listening to the low hum of the router almost reverently. I mostly remember these moments in between, while the night’s conversations and the movie we watched all blur in sleepless delirium. It was a sexy eighties drama and James Spader’s huge hair was blown up huger on that screen. One pixel per hair-width, or something like that. He’s the only blond actor she can stand because he looks like a girl she’d once slept with. A frustrated woman is interviewed by a pervert Spader about her most intimate desires on videotape. I said I’d be scared of it getting into the wrong hands, she said it’s a shame there were no deepfakes back then. I don't have the slightest idea who I am, and I'm supposed to be able to explain it to you? That was her favourite line. She repeated it to me in the dark in a cowboy voice, then asked what I’d really thought of her when we first met. It’s been three years since we both moved to the city – I told her I don’t remember but I did. I looked her up on the internet when I got home and spent a while going through every Instagram profile that had tagged her until I fell asleep around 2016. She looked adorable with those overfilled eyebrows.
This time of morning feels colder and longer than the hours of night before. Days aimlessly follow days and Andromeda stands on the grey plastic milk-crate, looking on with an indifferent, wide-screened stare. I know the air outside the window without having ever touched it, I see the view with my eyes closed: hepatitis-hued buildings against a deep plane of sky. The wind bangs on the pane to announce the approaching dawn and I thank heaven we are inside. I’ll put some coffee on soon. We lie languid on the skin-soaked mattress under pixelated stars, serene and brilliant.