Clorox bleach on a third degree burn
Hey friends,
Some big changes in the last week, including escaping the favela, having kittens, and being ok with baking failures, doing nothing, and learning how to co-habitate more intentionally with family (Fabian’s brother :). I’m sure no one can relate. This was a journal entry this week that churned out a lil more than I had anticipated. But I guess that is a bi-product of getting quiet. Much love, from our farm now,
Em.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
I never knew that pouring pure Clorox bleach over a third-degree burn somehow alleviated the pain. I also never knew that smearing pure rubbing alcohol on any sort of allergic reaction, burn, mysterious insect bite or irritation would also supposedly grant temporary relief. I learned that it actually did after Fabian poured a bottle of “Agua Sanitario” onto my naked back covered in red welts last summer when we discovered that I was allergic to the parasite medication I took to get rid of my head-lice. The relief was brief but soothing like a cold shower on a sunburn. Now I watched Fabian refuse my suggestion to put ice on the burn so deep in his fingertips, they were now sweltering a deep black, to instead, opt for Clorox. Pure Clorox that he liberally squirted out of the green bottle, and onto his hand like a toddler unable to control his wee wee and spraying the toilet with both animation and urgency.
We had wanted to make cornbread in our new home today, and this was day two of trying to jerry-rig some way of getting the oven fire to stay lit. I hadn’t paid much attention to Fabian’s previous efforts in how to get an oven fire to stay lit, because I had generally never pondered such a thing. An oven to me was a series of buttons and knobs you pressed on, and things got hot. Not here, not this oven. Here the oven was attached to an external gas tank you had to self-haul down a flight of stairs, after waiting for two hours for the gas truck to arrive, hopefully, and then connect it yourself after hauling it back up those stairs, then hope that it will last you the whole month before you do the entire parade of gas getting again. So, Fabian sat there with an old toothbrush and a rag jabbing and scrubbing until he delighted in a fire that stayed lit for a good 15 seconds, the right amount of time for him to walk away, then curse its existence when it turned off again. When he went back a third time and reached for the cover of the extinguished fire, his hand made total, naked contact with the metal sheet once covering pure fire. It singed dip into his now shaking limb, sizzling each one of his fingers, as a melody of words that described a variation of asses and vaginas in Spanish and Portuguese came flowing out of his mouth, pushing him backward in pain and effort to release such a stream. Not ice, Clorox, he said. That was the answer.
I was equally impressed when he somehow knew that burning an egg carton was equal to Dorme Bem, a coiled mosquito repellent that burned slow and easy with a subtle scent of citronella. When we had run out of Dorme Bem that morning he assured me it was nothing to fear. The clouds of mosquitos that began entering through every unforeseen crevice in our home to cover walls and crawl inside our piles of clothes, were apparently no match for burning egg carton smoke. So, we sat that day, eating our cornbread, in smoke.
Special cornbread like the immaculate conception, it somehow rose and grew in size magnificently by an unforeseen power, as that pilot light stayed lit for the entirety of 19.24 minutes while Fabian hovered with a hand reeking like a public pool. (Since that moment, we have not been able to keep the fire lit again.) The cornbread was extra moist today thanks to a stick of butter I had left out in all previous attempts because of the lack of supplies. Thank you quarantine. Making cornbread was now a new hobby of mine because it required a quarter of the effort as making any other bread, but drew the same “Oooohs and awwwwws” at your ability to make such a food from scratch. In the past month, I had made cornbread with no salt or sugar, replacing them with curry powder, which oddly tasted like a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. I had made cornbread with no baking soda or powder, substituting in eggs for a lift. Yes, this had made the bread plump but after being left outside for a day we questioned whether it was the culprit in my 6 days of deadly food poisoning.
But today, we had butter in the fridge and cornbread in the God-lit oven. It was perfect; butter yellow, and hints of honey. We dipped it into a lentil stew and devoured it, and Ozark, a show neither of us would ever watch if it weren’t for already consuming half of the series on Netflix already. Thank you, COVID.
After lunch in our new home that is a block away from an isolated beach, we could take with ease a quarantine stroll and not come in contact with anyone. Not a soul. Only rocks that jetted out of the earth and were made smooth by the rising and decent of the ocean blanket. I fell twice while trying to descend onto the hidden beach with my straw sunhat choking me and Filas sandals with soles the likes of linoleum floor tiling. The tide had risen high so there was no sand left to place our things and extend our bodies, but we did find a patch of grassy rock. The beach blanket of choice that was strewn over the weeds and twisted twigs was a dress from Wish that looked like Gucci in the photos, but as my boss in Vidigal quoted “a birthday clown suit” in person. Yes, it was rainbow, but that wasn’t the clown effect as much as the puffy shoulders that resembled a dress Anne of Green Gables might long for if going to a rave.
I had tried getting rid of this dress after the first time I wore it in Vidigal. I didn’t have a full-length mirror at the time so I could not quite tell what it had looked like until the snarky comments came. I remember that afternoon in the long rainbow dress, interrupting my English class with Gabriel for us to take advantage of the sunset, and walk to the beach. He had just admitted to being suicidal. I had just told all my closest friends back home that suicide wasn’t as much a risk factor down here even though the conditions were far worse than suburban life in Eugene, Oregon. But Gabriel put a stick in that presumption. He wanted to starve himself. Our English classes became an opportunity for me to casually drop that I had extra lunch that day and I’d watch him pick at it. We walked the 78 steps down to the tiny beach hugging the base of the favela. We followed Deborah the owner of the Breco but she didn’t see us. I knew she was going to buy weed so why interrupt the process. Once our toes were naked and in the churning water turning pink, we forgot about our previous conversation. Suicide was nonexistent in-front of such beauty. The reality that your parents beat you because you're gay, or you feel entirely powerless to men over 40 with money, vanishes. Gabriel and I both became subjects to queen sea, and before her, were gave reverence in delight. The prancing of high kicked knees, and squeals when the water rushed up unexpectedly. This was life choosing us.
Gabriel began picking up the seeds that washed up with each wave. Fist sized seeds from a nut tree overhead.
He looked at me and held one up in his right hand. It looked like a small, hard, dog shit.
“Throw the seed into the ocean and shout what you want!” he belted over the watery murmurs as he chucked the seed pellet far away.
“WORK!” and it went flying.
“LOVE" I shouted and gave my hardest throw.
“MONEY” he screamed with every last ounce of air.
“HONESTY” I shrieked.
“LOVE”, he wailed as the seed went far flying into the now dark sea.
“Ok ok…” he waved his outstretched arms back and forth signaling a stop to me and my tremoring satisfaction. We were both soaking at this point and panting, and hungry, and soothed.
Now, he picked up a good-sized seed and pronounced a new rule, “Now, every time you throw the seed, you have to yell into the ocean what you DON’T want!”
Then his seed went flying with a loud “Boys!”
“OBSESSION!” I screamed.
“PAIN!” his word vaulted.
“DISHONESTY!” now everything inside of me was coming out, the rainbow dress wet, and sticking to my legs. I was walking a line on the shore where power turns to sea foam. A line as delicate and transparent as joy and sorrow itself.
Gabriel looked at me and we were made whole for that second.
I look now down at the same rainbow dress with puffy sleeves and all its colors splayed out on the rocky the beach patch. I raise my eyes against the sun to see Fabian in his swim trunks, still wet after diving in. He was the one who had shoved the dress into a bag to donate when I had stuck it in the trash. He had then been the one, to pull it out of the donate bag and used it to line the plastic box where we were coaxing Filomena our cat to have her babies. We later used the dress as colorful curtains to block their not yet open eyes from the sun.
We walked back tonight, and Fabian described a book he had finished in our time on the rocky patch of grass, at the isolated beach, in our quarantine stroll.
“In the end, all the philosophers described that the biggest lesson was love. Both the most difficult and easy of all the lessons to grasp.”
I had spent that afternoon and the dispersant minutes in newly quarantined solitude re-thinking my delayed timing of going back to grad school. Why had I not enrolled in an online program last fall? I felt entirely uncomfortable with this constant phantom of unproductivity every day stuck inside. Then I thought of the dress, that I had tried to throw away so many times.. I looked into Fabian’s eyes and felt what the poets and the philosophers allude to, what the painters capture in strokes, and great musicians move you into… love expressed without the word itself. But in your past lives meeting. And you remembering who you are. And why you are here in this moment.
Perhaps this year, out of school, I had actually learned so much more than I originally thought. The thought made me smile so much he questioned why I was grinning.
“I learned a lot today,” I said.
“You are learning a lot more than you think.” He replied.
“Yes…” I thought. Like how to cure a third-degree burn with Clorox.
