Everything is delicately interconnected
broccoli and orange peels
written by: Bus Stop Girl
I left my broccoli boiling on the stove top, stepped out of my body, and into my bedside table. Safe. Warm. I emerged to scents of burning, reminded me of last spring – fires by the sea, tide lapping over our toes. Laughing like we couldn’t be swallowed whole at any minute, sharing as if my secrets could not be spat from any mouth but mine.
I don’t remember yet that we had drowned, perhaps a kinder ending exists between my bookmarks. I can rewrite the passages, but I am merely leaving the words on the page. Perhaps you were right, perhaps I am too much, my muchness has taken my reins, I’m guided by maddening muchness.
My broccoli is ruined, shrivelled up – it looks rather like how I imagine myself, almost foetus-like. I find myself feeling remorse for my waste, crying on the patio, sitting next to a smoking pot of burnt broccoli, I almost apologise, yet I stop and wonder who I am asking for forgiveness, perhaps myself, perhaps the broccoli, or the people that I burnt.
The pot sits outside all night. I think about it in my dreams – does this hold some deeper meaning? I regret feeling so heavily. There is no one to scold me for my mistake. Morning comes, and still no one is the wiser. I don’t decide whether I like this feeling; though I find a certain discomfort in knowing that everything could burn around me, and not a soul would know.
Finally, I muster the courage, and the broccoli joins the scraps in the shopping bag we use as a bin. I hope that maybe it will make friends with the orange peels. I worry that some things get lonely, the places we don’t visit anymore, the people we don’t tend to think about. I clean the burnt pot, it takes me approximately ten minutes, I scrub in silence. Only hearing the running of water, the smell of burnt air. It becomes rather therapeutic to me, and I become lost in the simplicity of life, in the act of ruining something and then putting it back together.
I think maybe I have grown into my loneliness, or maybe it has grown into me.
- Everything Is Delicately Interconnected - April 19, 2026
