I like to shower early. I guess I like to wake up early, have one of those full, productive days, but I also really like to sleep. So, when I can, I sort of launch myself out of bed at seven thirty and feel my way to the bathroom. Showering itself is almost my favourite thing to do because skin is so nice up close – when you’re washing it and staring at it. It’s only from far away that it becomes ridiculous at every angle. Fascinating like a car crash. If I wanted a day that was just right it would start that early – not dawn chorus early but seven thirty when the sky is dull and nothing is happening to anyone except perhaps somewhere hot water is hitting a pale back.
A good day starts with a shower and it goes on to a breakfast with eggs. It ends with a memory.
When I was little my parents used to pick flowers for a living. Grow them, pick them, box them up, ship them out. We had a couple of fields down this long track and two days after a bit of rain there were cracked beds of dirt where puddles used to be. So, we would drive this track in a big green monster of a car and they would pick flowers until their backs burnt and I would sit cross legged on the ground in a dress, of all things, and pick at it, pulling up great slabs of crispy mud like it was dead skin and there could be something new underneath – new world, new body… The sort of body that has no dead skin, on which nothing might ever die, because I wanted that, even then. I heard once that by the time you’re about twenty your entire body is new because every cell has been replaced at least once and I wanted that over and over again. I was little then, I was so young but I was thinking that a good day is a day where nothing can be picked off, picked apart
