Reticulated.
We are sitting on the roof with our mandarins. It is a cold night, crisp sly wicked cold which teases at the edges of our sweaters. Clear, to be so cold, and we are in the woods, and the lights from town are distant, which leaves the sky totally pure black. Smell is muffled in the cold, although there are a few crushed fir needles in my hair which secrete a sharp scent when I move.
This is night, true night, when the black is so intense that your eyes feel like they are turning inside out.
A single candle burns on the windowsill somewhere below us, but it feels like a world away. My world is a kaleidoscope of inverted and twisted colours and what is far away seems close while what is close seems far away. Between the candle and I, an eternity lies. The trees feel close enough to reach out and touch, but all my fingertips can grab is air. I am Alice, and I have found my Wonderland.
The stars are scattered across the sky with the Milky Way stretching through them. Jewels, carelessly scattered and sinuously twisting their way across the Universe. Everything is so still that it seems like everything is holding its breath, even us, and the night seems almost unreal. There is a facet of me which leads me to question the existence of everything outside this moment.
“Can you start this for me?”
Silence breaks and I wedge a fingernail into the rind. The scent of oils tinges the air and I feel a fine spray on my skin before passing the mandarin back. I leave mine resting in the gutter for the time being, where it will slowly grow cold with the copper and the air. I like my fruit cold.
Sometimes I leave things to ripen at room temperature and then I stick them in the fridge for a day or two so that they can get cold, so that they are refreshing when I eat them. I like cold persimmons, scooping out that soft jelly with a spoon and taking tentative tiny bites until I reach that strange point of satiety one arrives at with persimmons.
Persimmons must be left to soften until they turn into nothing more than small orange bags with fluid inside. You must not be impatient, you must wait for the right time. Everything at its right time, and everything in its place. If you can wait, you will be rewarded with an unearthly texture and layers of flavor which pour over your mouth and then sparkle, like fireworks.
You must wait for the sweetness.
Mandarins peel so easily, so lightly and so gently that once you start the peel they almost seem to peel themselves. They’ve been made for this moment, for sitting together in the darkness, and I know, even though I cannot see it, that the segments are gently opening up like the petals of a flower, because that is what they do.
Opening.
Wordless.
There is something on my lips and I bite down, an explosion of sweetness and juices and a faint hint of a tang and perhaps even an underlayer of salt but I am not certain. It is warm from hands that are not mine and it is strangely perfect. Perfectly ripe. I have chosen well, these mandarins, they are everything that I could have wanted and more, even though my eyes were blurry when I bought them with an assortment of other random items, in a hurry, so that I could come here, to the woods and the cold and the stars.
There is a strange solace to the grocery store in the dark hours of the night, in which every object I select seems weighted with meaning. I have pondered carefully the things I selected which are scattered across the kitchen table downstairs. Even as I hurried with darting hands and impatient feet I chose with meticulousness and exactitude; precision and speed intersected in a way they do not usually do, for me.
My breath is a cold mist and there is a heaviness on us, a silent/silencing blanket. So much has been left unsaid that to speak is impossible because there is no thread to pick up to begin. Everything is too small and far away. I know that we are breathing but I cannot sense it.
I lie back against the roof, which grinds against my back, and cold sneaks in when my sweater rides up. Hands behind my head, I stare up at the vast blackness and try to remember constellations taught to me in the dim days of childhood, my father and I sitting on a blanket while he points into the sky and tells me stories. Dark stories with betrayal and bitterness and contempt and loss because my father never was one to hide the truth. It is a trait we share, that and the storytelling, and so much more.
The wind sighs through the trees for a moment, stirring up the pine needles on the roof and sending a momentary chill through me. Some small creature somewhere rustles and I hear the sleepy chirping of something, a momentary stir of alarm which is hushed again by the stillness which lies over us. It is almost as though we are keeping the world frozen with the force of our will.
I eat another wedge of mandarin while I contemplate quiet and repletion even though I am thrumming with tension and alertness and cold. The goose pimples which dot me may be from cold and may be from something else and I start at the sensation of warmth on my stomach, a hand come to rest before flitting away, a segment of mandarin left behind.
Perhaps it is a joke.
Perhaps it is an invitation.