For dinner tonight I had a ham and onion omelette. It was mediocre because the onions weren’t quite cooked enough, which was my fault, and the eggs were spread too thinly to fold it properly, which was the fault of the overly large pan. The pan also has a raised centre, so the middle was especially flimsy. Small things which many wouldn’t give too much thought, perhaps. But I have always invested rather too much emotion into food. There are times I have gone into deep mourning when, having poured my cereal expectantly into the bowl, I discover that the fridge is utterly milkless. I’ve cursed over burnt toast, cried over cakes left too long in the oven. Errant eggshells floating in the albumen are wholly traumatising.
Happily tonight there were no eggshells in my omelette. I cracked the eggs with relative ease, without having to think about it, to worry about applying too much force or too little. It led me to wonder, at what point did cracking eggs become a prowess of mine, that I no longer had to fear or fret when breaking into them. How many eggs had I cracked in my lifetime? And with that one simple question, my eyes glazed over as my mind drifted off into the infinity of abstract thought.
Just imagine, I thought. Imagine if I could see, in a pile, every egg I’d ever cracked. Every egg I’d ever eaten. Or oranges. Apples. Bananas. Lychees, even, in a pile no higher than my shin. What if I could see, in some vast warehouse, some big white room, pile after pile, in vary sizes, of all the foodstuffs I’d ingested since birth. The pile of pasta, or of bread, or rice, or potatoes, for example, would be huge. I could jump into them, climb to the top and slide down again. Piles of fish and meat, carcasses divided into species, would sicken me. Perhaps they could be presented as living animals, in pens or in tanks. 89 salmon, 78 tuna, 240 sardines, 403 mussels, 3 lobsters. How many cows? How many chickens? Triple figures, at least. Closer to 1000 than to 100. Perhaps that would be more sickening altogether. And what of the piles of salt and sugar, the mountains of butter and cheese. Like some messed up TV show where some scrawny Scottish woman grabs you by the hair and rubs your face in your own gluttony. The dark bodies of starving children, stomachs distended, flies crawling on their yellowed eyes would rise up from the depths of my mind, where advertisements and fliers and news reports had so firmly buried them, making me sick with guilt for all my piles of excess.
What if, in another room, were buckets full of how much shampoo or conditioner I’d ever used. Toothpaste, shower gel, soap and moisturiser, in big glass cylinders, all the different brands mixing to form cosmetic swirls in clinical pastel colours. The smell of a bathroom cabinet. And in another corner, all the pills I’ve ever taken would be lined up in neat rows.
Perhaps in another room there would be, horror of horrors, vast golden tanks of urine. Dark fishbowls of all the blood I’d ever shed, and vases full of tears. A tiny pile of all the teeth the fairies took, and every scab I ever took the pleasure in lazily picking off with one fingernail. A golden pile of hair, simultaneously beautiful and utterly, retchingly repulsive.
And in another room still, darkened this time, would be big white screens, onto which would be projected films of my daily life in all its mundanity. Grainy, like the films on repeat in those awkward quasi-cinemas in modern art galleries. One film would just show every time I tied my shoelaces, another would be all 120,000 minutes of brushing my teeth. Different clothes, different hair, every now and then a different bathroom and every few months a different coloured toothbrush.
Imagine if that was how we lived our lives. Not in the normal order, but if it was all properly collated, ordered by category, by activity, so that we would do everything all at once. You’d spend a good six months struggling to get out of bed in the morning. Then another 8 months in the shower and 9 more in the bath, hands wizened and prunish, feet warm but knees and shoulders getting cold. A year eating breakfast, another just sitting in a car, a train, a bus, a boat, a plane. Imagine the hours and hours you’d sit in class, writing exams, doing homework. Then the 6 weeks of blissful playtime. All your holidays at once. Every visit to the dentist conglomerated into a week or so of agony. How many months on the toilet? And how many just staring at the mirror, watching your face slowly age as you put on mascara over and over, squeezed a thousand spots, then plucked your eyebrows for a day or two before switching to lipstick. How your muscles would ache from pouting. How your muscles would ache, too, when it came the time for your 3 weeks solid of running followed by a week of swimming and 4 more at the gym. How dreary it would be to stand in a queue for 5 months of agonising patience. How relaxing, then to collapse onto a sofa for a year watching TV. Every film you’ve ever seen in your life, all in one sitting. No going to the bathroom, you’ve done that already. And you’ve already eaten all your food at once, all your mountains of popcorn and gallons of name-brand sucrose saturated soft drinks.Picture the bitter hours wasted on Facebook. Picture the days and days of holding hands, followed by months of kissing, weeks of having sex. And picture the days on end you’d spend crying, alone.
And after your long, long day was over you’d lay down, wearied from the ennui of your reconfigured life. You’d lay down, close your eyes, and, after 237 hours of tossing and turning, days of counting several million sheep, you’d finally drift off into 40 years of sleep.
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