Abigail Swoboda

My pipes freeze overnight. There are simple things I can do to prevent this, but I didn’t do any of those things, and so my pipes are frozen.

I discover this at 4:30 a.m., because this is when the cat wakes me to feed him for the first time. Later, I will thank him for this, for his persistence and his consistency. For now, I experience panic raw and uncontrollable. 

This happened before, once, three years ago. Pete and I sat on the floor and pointed a hair dryer blowing hot at the cold space beneath the sink until the faucet ran again. We panicked together and briefly and then solved the problem. 

Now, I am alone, and the hair dryer is gone. I pass out on the kitchen floor.

It’s brief, though, and not a big deal, because I have a medical thing. When I regain consciousness, I call everyone I can think of who lives near me to ask them if they have a hair dryer. I make the phone calls with my right hand and hold one of my breasts with the left. I call: Camilla, Austin, Molly, Kathy, Sophie, Lindsay, and Sam. Two people actually pick up, but one is out of town and the other does not own a hair dryer. I call Pete and then finally my mom. But they don’t pick up. I pass out one more time on the kitchen floor.

Then I call the 24 hour CVS at 43 and Locust. They confirm that they have a hair dryer in stock.

It is 12 degrees outside. I prepare myself by stacking clothing on top of the long underwear I had been sleeping in: quilted jacket liner, babaa jumper no17 in dark mist, 70s Lee utility jeans, two pairs of socks: one pair burgundy alpaca one pair gray wool, my mom’s old winter coat, a balaclava I knit for myself a few years ago, plaid wool scarf I’ve worn since 2017 but haven’t washed once, brown Teva tennis shoes, and mittens.

By the time I leave, it is close to 5 a.m. 

On my way to CVS a mile away, I see a couple middle aged women out walking their little dogs. The thought crosses my mind to stop them and beg to borrow their hairdryers. I even plan out what I would say. I’d be like, “You’re not my mom, but you’re someone’s mom, and my mom is far away, so can you help me?” But I’m already on my path, so of course I don’t do any of that.

The CVS parking lot is slick with ice. There is a single black glove at its center.

The only person working in the CVS knows who I am as soon as I enter. We have a kind conversation as I buy a hairdryer and a bottle of water from her. It’s the sort of conversation where we throw our hands up together and laugh wryly about things that aren’t funny but are inevitable and ridiculous, things like getting bedbugs back in February and having to throw away a lot of things that live in your house.

On the walk home, I am watched by the thick silver crescent moon. My brain repeats, as it has been, “If you panic, you’ll make mistakes.” So I talk to God a little and realize that I’ve been talking to Him for a while now this morning.

At home, I strip down to only my two pairs of socks and thermal leggings. I connect a power strip to the outlet above my stove and then connect the hairdryer to the power strip. The cord is suspended in the air as I point the hairdryer on Hot and High into the air below the kitchen sink. I hold the hairdryer in my right hand and my bare breast in my left and say some Hail Marys. Patterns like this emerge to me from within the whine of the hairdryer.

The faucet drips faster and faster until it runs. I wrap the hairdryer up exactly like it came and put it back in the box and then put the box in the bathroom closet.

My mom calls me back, and we talk on the phone for an hour. I make coffee and a bowl of granola while we talk. She tells me about my dad’s friend’s wife’s mom whose house was recently broken into by men with guns; she tells me about going to a murder mystery themed comedy show in Baltimore; she tells me about the crystals in her ears that make her feel like a spinning football.

After our call, I shower the adrenaline away then turn on all the lights in the apartment. The sun is up now, too. The apartment is soaked in thick, yellow light that is neither cold nor warm.

I light sandalwood incense and an unscented candle and sit crosslegged on the living room floor to pray the Rosary. I announce the five joyful mysteries with my eyes closed and feel along the Rosary for the space where one bead has broken in half and dropped away. There are easy ways I could fix this, but I won’t. 

When I am finished praying the Rosary, I follow Amtrak on Instagram. In part, I do this in hopes that it might counteract my algorithm which, at present, is trying to convince me that I either have lipedema or fiber glass toxicity. 

Then, I decide that it’s time to rotate all the cushions of the furniture in the living room. To do this, I move every cushion of the chairs and couches to a new cushion space, but the new space is not predetermined by direction. I just put each one where it feels right. No one knows that I do this, because when I am done the room looks exactly the same. This is one of my many secret systems. Ultimately, I do believe these systems keep the engine of the world chugging along, even though I know that nothing would really change if I stopped doing them. 

Somewhere along the way, I realize it is important that I spend today alone, with myself.

So I search out Simone Weil’s Attente de Dieu on the bookshelf. Atop a freshly rotated cushion, I reread her essay on the Lord’s Prayer. This essay always makes me glow from the inside out. I, desiring human creature, do want to want everything to be happening in just the way that it is, I really do. By the end of the essay, I am glowing but I am not done, and so I search out L’Enracinement on the bookshelf and read Les Besoins de l’ame. Then I am done. 

It’s nearing 11 now. I put a pot of congee on the stove and call Soph. We talk a little but mostly do not talk for the next hour and a half. I am happy just to hear the sounds of her world in New Orleans: I hear her drop off her dog and cat at our grandparents’ house; I hear her and our grandfather shuffle around Miracle Mets memorabilia in his home office as they work together to mobile print a Depop shipping label; I hear her work voice when she gets to the bouldering gym she manages and discusses bathroom cleaning protocols with one of her employees. As I eat a bowl of congee and listen to Soph’s life through her AirPods, I think about how lots of people probably just want to listen to each other live.

During our call, it has lapsed into the afternoon. It is now 17 degrees outside. I bundle back up and prepare myself for an apple walk.

Apple walks are another one of my rituals. To do an apple walk, you go somewhere and buy the largest apple you can find and then eat it as slowly as possible while you walk around. At Fu-Wah, I buy three Gala apples and a bottle of water. This costs $4.96. I put the four pennies change in my pocket where they do not jingle around.

On my way to the Woodlands, I come across Huckle, the giant, gnarly old tuxedo street cat that lives on Springfield between 46 and 47. Huckle’s ears are shaking and he’s crying, so I call the number on his collar and leave a message on an old man’s message machine. I’m like, your cat’s cold and I love him. Huckle follows me crying for two blocks before giving up. I take a picture of him and send it to Pete right before my phone shuts down from the cold.

At the Woodlands, I head to the bioterrorized plane of the capacious old Black Walnut to start my apple walk. Here, across from the Black Walnut, there are four concentric circles of pathways that surround a large White Oak at their center. I start walking counterclockwise around the White Oak on the outermost pathway. I use the Black Walnut as my starting point. When I finish one lap, I move to the next pathway one step closer to the White Oak. I take bites of apple when it feels right.

On my journey inward, I listen to the crows chatter. One crow chases a songbird around the gray sky for a while until I scare them both away just by being here. 

There is a shallow puddle of ice on one path. I walk back and forth over the brittle ice like I’m the fiber darning a sock. I crack the ice under my weight as many times as I can before I keep walking. Small ice fossilized leaves stare up at me from deep inside the puddle, untouched by my force.

Along the way in, a woman walks nearby with her dog. She’s like, “Fido! Fido! For fuck’s sake!” when he tries to eat something on the ground that he shouldn’t. I like when dogs are named something like Fido in the same way I like when people do stuff like wear the faces of their watches on the inside of their wrists. 

I spiral my way all the way in to the White Oak. The graves that ring around the tree are more contemporary. Some have flowers on them that have only recently died, so that the brightest part of them is a plastic tag that says something like “Special Memories” in pink script.

Then, I spiral my way back out away from the White Oak, walking clockwise back along each of the concentric pathways until I get all the way back to the Black Walnut. I turn the screw and then I unturn it. I take thoughtful bites of my apple until only the core remains. A bird perched atop a bush with bright berries stares at me, and so I stare back at it, stopping only when I think we’ve agreed. I want each part of this to be happening for just as long as it happens. 

When it’s time to go, I go.

I retrace the streets back in the same way I came. Huckle is still outside crying and shivering. Seeing him again does not unbreak my heart, it just breaks it again. I realize I can only restep not unstep along my path. On the sidewalk, someone has drawn a spiral with their finger in the soft cement before it hardened. At the last minute, I decide to walk down Windsor instead of Warrington like I did before.

Back at home, I feed the cat and pull three brown bananas out of the freezer.

While waiting for the bananas to thaw on the counter, I frog the scarf I started knitting yesterday. I pull out all the stitches until they are a pile of red noodles next to me on the couch. Then, I reknit the yarn, this time with fewer stitches across and a cleaner edge. I am careful to stop once I’ve reused all the yarn I used before. 

The sun sets. Huckle’s owner texts me to let me know he is back inside. I text back something like “Yayyy.”

Back in the kitchen, I bake gluten free banana muffins with the thawed brown bananas. At the same time, I make myself dinner, which tonight is nutritional yeast acorn squash, crisp greens, and balsamic glaze. While I cook, I drink a glass of kombucha and jump along to La Roux’s La Roux. Pete and I talk on the phone a little. We miss each other in a good way. 

The night gets smaller; the path narrows. 

I clean up small messes I made in the apartment throughout the day. I put away the clothes I threw around this morning while looking for my flannel-lined Carhartt jeans; I vacuum up the incense ashes that have fallen onto the rug; I do the dishes I have made today, including the French press. 

After I feed the cat one last time today, I do a protracted version of my skincare routine. This includes washing my face with soap instead of just rinsing it with water. I leave all the faucets dripping when I am done.

In bed, I do a crossword puzzle on my phone and wait for the cat to join me. When he does, we lay butt to butt, and I read Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony until I fall asleep with all the lights still on. 

Sometime during the night, I begin bleeding into the sheets.

Abigail Swoboda is from Pennsylvania. Visit their website abigailswoboda.com or find them on Instagram @beetrootstock.