the fridge is a chapel of neglect

on leftovers, loss and the dailiness of rot.

this morning, i found an apricot that reminded me of a bruise on my thigh from two summers ago. i bit into it anyway. it smelled of nectar curdled on the bone. it tasted like mildew in a velvet theatre seat. like rusted sugar. like the breath of a house that hasn’t been opened in years. it tasted of collapse: soft, fragrant, rotting from the pit outward. like flesh that remembers being fruit. like girlhood left too long on the windowsill. it stood in the kitchen like a mother on the verge of collapse, humming low and grieving. and maybe decay is a woman too; sequestered, obliging, with waxed arms and chipped teeth, who lives under the tongue, sleeps beneath quilts that still smell of grandmother, and sighs when the house forgets her name.

https://www.colrat.fr/peintures

most days, you open the fridge out of boredom. or loneliness. or both. you’re not reaching for food. you open the door not out of hunger, but compulsion, or habit. you pretend you’re looking for something, you stand there barefoot, letting the cold lick at your bare shins. less sure of what you’re expecting, but expecting anyway. you don’t throw things out when they start to rot. you let them sit there, quietly collapsing. you’ve always loved theatre. the slow, histrionic drama of wilted herbs, the sagging bags, the slumped fruit pulp no one dared to taste. you tell yourself you’ll get to it. that you’ll use the herbs tomorrow. that the pulp might still be good. but you won’t. and it isn’t. you already know that. you’ve known that for days. the refrigerator becomes a reliquary for every good intention you let rot. a forgotten bag of salad, liquefied beyond recognition. a jar of mustard with crusted edges. soup that no one wanted twice. no one tells you that rot is a part of domestic life. that you will live among decay, and call it normal. you pay $5.99 for berries that mold in two days. you’ll keep half a lemon in a ziploc bag for no reason at all. a container of leftovers, contents unidentifiable; some meal from last week pushed further and further back, as if neglect might erase the need to throw it away. a bag of spinach, murky and liquified at the bottom of the drawer. half-sucked lemon, desiccated at the edges; hollowed and hardened to a pale incandescent bulb, shrivelled and sunless. wilted lettuce collapsed into itself like a deflated lung, yellowing at the spine. a jar of marinara sauce, its rim crusted yellow, used once for a sandwich in july and never touched again. the lid sealed so tight it might as well be welded shut by memory. and in the crisper drawer, a bag of herbs you forgot entirely. basil, you think. or maybe cilantro. whatever it was, it’s now a wet fistful of dust. the scent still clings faintly. a limp bag of carrots with white root hairs, buried under the spring onions. its skin has softened to something like suede, bendable, no longer capable of resistance. a half-eaten lasagna in a glass container—its sides streaked with hardened béchamel—isn’t just leftovers. it’s a domestic relic. no one touched it after the argument. there’s a jar of mustard on the top shelf. dijon. rim encrusted, half-used, tucked behind the baking soda. you bought it for a sandwich someone once liked. he doesn’t come over anymore. still, you kept the jar. women keep things. even when the appetite leaves. even when the man does too. there’s a bottle of wine, opened, cork forced back in at an angle. the label peeling slightly from condensation. it’s been there since the beginning of january. it’s soured now. acidic. astringent. you sip it anyway. half a bottle left, like love that only ever showed up halfway. you keep it because you loved the night you opened it. you keep it because throwing it out would mean admitting the night meant more to you than it did to him. some nights you notice it, sweating quietly under the fridge light. and for a moment you almost reach for it. but you don’t. not because you’ve let go; only because you know how it ends. you think about pouring it down the sink. but you never do. a slab of butter, its surface marred by errant crumbs—remnants of toast or perhaps a biscuit; clings to the butter like mould to a fallen birch, the residue of a breakfast long concluded but never forgotten. a ziploc bag leaking something green and viscous, shoved into the back behind a jar of capers no one remembers buying. a tub of ice cream; half-eaten at midnight, then shut in shame. no one dares eat it, as if to finish it would be an admission of greed. a forgotten bag of peas, frostbitten and rattling like loose teeth. a jar of something old, label gone, sticky with years. maybe gooseberry preserves. maybe something your grandmother taught your mother to make one summer when the air was thick and the bees were loud and she still believed in sweetness. a container of rice you pushed back last week, then again yesterday. it’s gone grey around the edges. you keep it because you don’t want to admit you never meant to eat it again. a mason jar; crystallised at the edges and nearly empty, pickles curling at the bottom, spoon left inside, metal tarnished with time. a bottle of cranberry juice. bought for a body that bleeds monthly. a jar of something unlabelled, dark and sticky, forgotten in the back like an old wound. maybe fig jam. maybe sorrow. nobody knows anymore, and no one dares taste it.

i think about how many things i have bought with intention but let die in drawers—lettuce, basil, dreams. decay, i’ve learned, is rarely violent. it’s methodical. it’s intentional. a basil plant wilts three days after the recipe is forgotten. a lipstick wears to the bone. an ambition grows mould under the bed. you wipe the drawer. replace the basil. tell yourself next week will be different. this is how women manage rot—with lavender spray and denial.
this is how we keep the house while falling apart.

the house—the house is complicit. it absorbs rot. it takes it in through the walls. the sponge by the sink never truly dries, always a little damp, a little sour. the tiles collect a grey scum that resists language. even the air begins to sag with time, as though every breath exhales a faint vapour of resignation. i notice it in the cabinet hinges, the slow creak of exhaustion. in the way the faucet drips, steadily, like it's trying to forget something.

i once thought homes were for protection. now i think they are containers for beautiful ruin. i’d ask her, ‘‘why do you keep this? it’s gone bad.’’ and she’d answer without looking up, ‘‘it’s not that bad.’’ but you could smell the sorrow, how it crept out when the fridge opened. how it soaked into the sponge beside the sink.

rot has a smell that crawls: fetid and miasmic. it gets into the corners of the kitchen, under the fingernails, into the breath of the house. the way a single clove of garlic, once white and firm, splits and bruises in the drawer; its smell seeps into the drawer’s grain, low and sulphurous. or how a bag of spinach, collapsed into mush, turns the crisper drawer into a green sorrow—wet, defeated, almost vegetal in its grief. the fruit fly opera in the sink, the bloated tomato rolling across the linoleum with the soft resignation of a woman who’s just remembered the thing she was trying to forget. there is theatre in rot.

i often stand at the sink, washing a single spoon, and think about love. how it decays when left unstirred. how even affection goes rancid when it’s not aired out. i remember a man who once kissed me like he was starving. then slowly, stopped. the hunger gone. i once thought love was eternal. now i think it’s a loaf of bread. and maybe bruise is not death, just proof of having been touched. mould is not evil, just a reminder that nothing remains untouched. everything becomes something else, eventually. even me. even this. so i begin again, as all things do. i water the plant. i scrub the mug. i open the windows and find, in a forgotten drawer, a clove of garlic—still firm. still fragrant. still waiting to be peeled open.

sometimes i catch myself smelling like my mother. not her perfume, but the low scent of survival—the blend of soap, exhaustion, worry, and something cooked too long on the stove. it’s strange, the things we inherit. not wisdom. not dexterity. but the particular scent of trying. there is grief in that realisation, but a strange kind of comfort.

i forget birthdays. i forget to water the plants. i forget grocery lists. i forget what i walked into the room for. but i remember the one cruel thing someone said to me eight years ago. that has roots. some thoughts spoil faster than others. hope, for instance. it curdles fast. optimism goes sour when left out in the open. but bitterness? bitterness is shelf-stable. it lasts forever. you can store it in your spine and it will keep. these thoughts do not decay—they metastasize. bitterness roots itself. hope doesn’t. hope begins to smell like something left out on the windowsill for too long. sweet at first. then sickening. joy curdles when left unused. and regret? regret is non-perishable.

on quite nights, i swear i hear the refrigerator whimpering like a mourner. it groans like a heart in exile. a white monolith. cold-lit. sanctified by its own sterile glow. i open the door and the light sputters on; flickering—and there it is: the chapel of small abandonments.

to clean a refrigerator is a sacrament of grief. a hollow exorcism. you do it after death, after a man leaves with a suitcase and forgets the name of the cat. after your name sounds unfamiliar in your own mouth. you unscrew lids with fingers that shake. you pour old hunger down the drain. the cranberry juice he liked. the brined feta. a jar of kimchi—alive, effervescent, now forsaken. the drain gulps it all like a throat that has forgotten how to sing. there is no requiem for the souring. you throw out their sauces. their preferences. their hunger. there is no funeral for what spoils. no eulogy for the week-old stir-fry. but you feel it. you feel it when you open the lid and look inside and find yourself waiting for something that won’t come back.
there is nothing poetic about throwing out food. but there is something painfully human about it. we try to keep things. we think we can. we can’t. not raspberries. not routines. not people.

there’s always a moment in front of the fridge after someone has died. or left. or vanished in that hushed, indecipherable way people do—without ceremony, leaving nothing but air behind. you open it, and they are still there. their oat milk. their jar of olives. that half-eaten thing they swore they'd finish. you stare. you close the door. you open it again the next day. eventually, you throw it out.

but not all at once. never all at once.

you unscrew the jars. you pour their habits down the drain. you rinse the containers they touched. you toss their cravings into the bin. and beneath it all, some quiet, brutal accounting murmurs in the hollows where the air is still—what’s left, what’s missing, who liked oat milk, who wouldn’t touch leftovers. it is almost always a woman who keeps this ledger. not because she wants to. but because someone has to.

some mornings i watch my mother clean with vinegar and vengeance. bleach in her lungs; war-paint of women who are done waiting. other mornings, i cannot look. i open the door. let the chill lick at my skin, and i close it again—ashamed. i close it too quickly. i tell myself i’ll deal with it tomorrow. i always do. something in there is dying, but i can’t name it. maybe a melon. maybe decay.

the decay is not operatic—it is intimate. subterranean. it nests in corners. a clove of garlic, split down its pale belly, bruises like a ruined benediction. celery hearts collapse in the drawer like the spines of tired women. flaxseeds, kefir, apricot jam—purchased in a brief mania of salvation. heal the body, save the soul. they’ve gone limp now. your intentions have turned to compost in the crisper drawer. now they bloat quietly behind fogged glass. penitents turned to pulp.

the domestic is not benign—it is brutal. some mornings, i butter toast and feel holy. other mornings, i press my cheek to the tile and feel as though i’ve already died and been shelved beside the mayonnaise. i watch the nectarine cave in overnight, as if it has lost its will to remain a fruit, to be whole. i stand barefoot on cold tiles, eyes fixated on the condensation crawling along the jar of apricot jam like sweat on a dying woman’s lip. this is not hunger. this is ritual. a vigil. a refusal.

there’s a shelf in my fridge with sauces that outlived relationships. sriracha for the girl who loved fire. mustard rimmed with regret. a jar opened for a woman who didn’t stay for breakfast. condiments are loyal that way. they’re in their own way, a record. of eras. of intentions. of versions of myself i don’t inhabit anymore. preservation is a performance of care. a denial. perhaps, this is what grief looks like, on a shelf chilled to 4°C.

my mother’s grandmother used to roll lemons on the counter before slicing them open, said it brought the juice out. she always cooked khichdi on wednesdays, wore her good house dress, tied a ribbon in her hair. the rice and lentils simmered gently on the stove, warm, inert, waiting. but no one came home. no one ever came home hungry. there’s a cruelty to that kind of waiting. i know it. i’ve lived through it.

nostalgia is not memory—it is inventory. not the photo album, but the perishables. things that decay so discreetly, you can imagine they’re still whole. but you know. you know.

admitting it’s over takes more courage than we have on an ordinary thursday afternoon.

we keep things because they’re linked to some version of us we thought would stay. or to people who didn’t. we say things like i’ll use it later. but what we really mean is i can’t deal with this now.

we don’t clear it out right away. we think we will, but we don’t. we leave it for days, maybe weeks. we pretend we’re busy. but really, we’re merely avoiding the quiet brutality of disposal.

you do it like a slow amputation. you unscrew the lid. you smell. you grimace. you dump.

i’ve stood before enough fridges to know: what’s inside is never just food. it is desire. remembrance. remorse, collapse, love, all lined up in glass and plastic, gleaming under the cruel, iridescent glow of cold yellow light. most people open the door, see only the surface, and shut it again, too frightened to look deeper. but if you let the fog dissipate, and let your sight deepen; you’ll see it all—what they loved, what you clung to, what you couldn’t bear to throw away.
sometimes i wonder if decay is what gathers where touch, care, and intention have drained into absence.

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residual:

i’ve been watching things rot lately—strawberries wilting into mush, mascara hardening in its tube, my hands aging, parched, like bread left out in the sun. the house smells of neglect. the house carries the scent of decay, a stale, forgotten grief that clings to the corners. i wipe surfaces that stain again by morning. i wear perfume to hide the scent of staying too long in one place. i wipe surfaces that will never be clean. i scrub at stains as if they were sins.
and yet, i can never get it clean enough to forget. and some sins, i think, are meant to stay visible.

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