Bathing in Spoiled Milk
Open Thoughts
It’s a Thursday, I think the day after Christmas. I am in my kitchen spinning in circles around my rollable island. Singing myself songs because I don’t have the capacity to make anything tangible. I thought about scratching paper with a ballpoint pen or mushing clay between my fingers. I am trying to tickle a specific spot and only this guttural, fictive song seems to be keeping me here, spinning.
I found myself reaching for my phone like someone pressed the “reach now” button every 5 seconds in my brain. I am flailing, I can’t figure out how to compose myself with this boredom. But I started to notice in every moment I put the phone down, the song took on a life of its own. Growing into a story and then turning into its own belief system and eventually dunking me in a bath of spoiled milk. But this bath of spoiled milk soothed all those weird cuts and scars I had accrued in the week.
I looked down as I was watching the small, frothed bubbles accumulate around a scab I had gotten on my knee from plunging into the pavement the day before. The milk started fizzing in this area and permeated deep enough to where the scab started peeling upwards piercing through the white clouds of milk. Peering closer, the edge of the scab started to turn pale and smooth. Becoming oily and supple, it was like a timelapse film of lichen being quenched with water. I poked it with my finger and it was firm but still felt like flesh. I couldn’t tell if it was part of my body anymore. I tried to concentrate really hard to see if it had nerves or if I could pinpoint where they ended but it was useless.
As it was turning pale it started curling in on itself like a little polish blintze. Inside this coil, was a white, almost translucent worm-like thing reaching for something - maybe air, sunlight, or the bathroom tile? It poked out and was spindling upwards climbing towards the vented bath light. Sprouting out from my knee it probably reached 3 feet tall until it sent this small ball rushing through its body and making it all the way to the tip of it. The ball burst open and with it came a gentle lip-popping sound. Out came something that looked like dandruff, but it was shimmering and slowly floating down into my frothy bath in the billions…..
🥛
I had tea with my friend Sairsha the other day and she told me how she lost her phone on Saturday and started noticing how creative and open her day felt. It reminded me of this day. It’s kinda weird to describe the feeling of spinning in my kitchen. It’s like time is suspended but you start to see the nodes where constructed reality and energetic reality converge. And you realize that this thing you grew is bigger than you and it just envelops you…… and it’s all strange…..
I really wonder if spoiled milk is the antidote (or part of it) for becoming conscious enough to rewire the bio-capitalist machine we have found ourselves in? (Octavia Butler probably bathed in so much spoiled milk!) This is only the beginning of a thought but I really wonder if anyone else has sat with this hypothesis or experienced it before, too?
🫧
sending warmth & love,
Christina