At six o’clock I start to listen to the day. I hear the whirr of traffic and lawn mowers and asphalt drills and orioles and birch trees rustling in the wind. The sounds existed before, but only in a muffled state, as though I was previously listening underwater. The day ceases to revolve around the automatons, the veiled political subtleties, the senseless cessation to important numbers, the data points that dictate our lives, the successful personas that influence us, the rigor mortis of key performance indicators that exist whether we like them or not, whether we hate them or not. We are told and reminded that the day must revolve around numbers, which are translated into points, into rules, into laws, into social cues. Finally, a break, a turn, a passing.
Life is not just numbers, it’s instinct, and the moment my shoulders unclench and my sternum moves forward, my fingers, so tight and tense they creak, straighten out and move away from the curved position, like I’m loosening my claws. I click the mouse and close the laptop as though I am making a statement and slicing a demon in half. During the day, my muscles atrophy, sticking to my bones like magnets. The stagnation of the simulacra, infecting my body like an internal rot, and the ominous buzzing of the numbers all start to fade. The tension of the day fractures my skull and I open, letting the breadth of possibility ooze inside.
The day ripens into evening and morphs into a welcome creature that leads me to a clearing. The clearing is reserved for feeding my lovers, rearranging my belongings, stretching my mind like clay, lying down in the folded blankets on my couch, and hope climbs in, shy and sputtering, germinating in my chest and shooting its branches through my fingertips, and the world unfurls, even as it gets dark, even as I yawn, even as I mourn the day that passed me by. For a moment, for an hour, for an evening, I let my mind swell and my body becomes a liquid, flowing gently onto the hardwood floor and letting gravity decide where I go.
The city breathes and kicks and screams like a newborn. My mother calls me to gossip about forgotten family members. I snack on my friend’s banana bread. A bunny emerges behind an alleyway dumpster. A young couple on a jet ski skim Lake Michigan. My neighbor squints his eyes in the blistering sun as he waves a Puerto Rican flag. I feel the sugar on my teeth with my tongue. Each moment morphs into momentum, distending my muscles from my bones, keeping my organs suspended in liquid and tissue, and making my heart pulse outside of my mouth.
Tanya Kornilovich has been published in The Weightless Review, Scapi Magazine, The Alliance for Jewish Theatre, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction essay was a runner-up in The Mukoli Contest. She is a storyteller and has read at Tuesday Funk and Do Not Submit. She lives in Chicago after a nomadic childhood in Russia, the UK, Germany, California, Oregon, and Ireland.