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pickling defies time/defines time/denies time

 

Here is the closet where my miso is darkening for more than a year. Here is my continuous brewing jar half full of kombucha. Here is the fermentation nation group I found on facebook, the black garlic in the slow cooker, the kosher dills in the crock. Here is the torshi seer I have made for the new year (come try it in twenty) and here is the tempeh that has grown its white furry coat of mold around each bean. Here is the oil and spice of lime and mango aachar, the salty pink gravlax freckled with juniper berries, the bubble of sourdough, the piquant crimson kimchi. Here is proof I have existed through this time and that it was not wasted in waiting. These things have survived. They are not rotten, just changing. They are being cured. We are in the process of becoming.

I’m a pickle myself, putting my faith in salt and time to cure me. I wake up before the sun; get sick. Draw a bath. Hours pass warming the tub. Sweat and skin and limbs and tears making up a slow broth. Today will be different. Tomorrow will be better. Maybe this is what will change things, maybe a different feeling will propel me forward if I wait for long enough. Maybe the water will dilute this sorrow. You are what you eat; my fingers and toes are pruny and my face is puffy and saturated with brine. And I am not patient but I am waiting. And which came first, the salt on my lips or the lumps of it in my heart—

—and so I’m seeking out communities, colonies of yeast and townships of bacteria. Come live with me in symbiosis, I am aching I am so lonely—

—and I am turning to the rhizomatic the nonlinear the lateral the interlocked in hopes I will become this too, connect me to the network let me carry the spores too let me be a part of it I need to join in—