White Rice

 

You are sitting at your white desk - the used one you bought from Facebook Marketplace at a steal price. The one you used for everything except eating, unless you were eating those spicy sweet potato chips you liked- they were allowed. You are scrolling on your old HP laptop- its what, 5 years old now? Older than your sister’s son. 

You stand up to check the rice cooking. It’s the second time in five minutes- you have an irrational fear of burning food. You take slow steps on the hardwood floor, your thick soft grey socks sliding noiselessly along. You begin to sway your hips- you liked to practice catwalking at random moments, but you walked briskly and purposefully if you were actually headed somewhere. The rice is simmering, still submerged in water and steam. You put the lid back on to silence the pops and plops of boiling bubbles. You reach for your sleek iPhone on the kitchen counter- it is slightly wet. You wipe it on the napkin hanging on the oven handle, then unlock it. No messages. You scroll through your regular apps- Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram- no notifications. You start to put it down, then you decide to open Twitter on a whim. You have barely any followers there, but you liked to use it to keep track of trends back home. But every trending topic was saturated with tweeted photos of half naked, busty women. You scroll for a few minutes, hoping to find at least some interesting information or thread. You give up after twenty tweets.

You check the rice again- there is still water in it. You walk back to your desk. Maybe it was time to finish the online data management course you’d been running for three months already. You cannot remember why you even started it.

You sit through another video and manage to scribble some notes. Suddenly you shoot up from your seat because you smelled something strange. The rice is burning. You dash for the cooker, and slightly burn the side of your right pinky in the steam from the saucepan as you open it. Not too bad, you think. You slide over the saucepan to the cold cooktop on the right, and turn off the cooker. You stand by the sink, leaning on the counter, and you stare at the rice in the pot. You’ve lost your appetite. You reach for your phone again, then catch yourself just in time. You look at your computer lying open, the slider on the video you were watching shows that you are half finished, and there are 15 minutes left of that lesson. 

You walk towards the window and open the blinds- it is snowing. The ground is covered in layers and layers of thick snow, and the cars parked on both sides of the street were not spared. There is not a single person walking briskly down the street in their parka, holding on to a tightly-leashed over-eager dog as they shivered. You don’t need to check the weather forecast to know that it’s one of those days again. The ones on which it was so cold outside that it felt like there was no one else on earth, and the fact that people were shut up inside the warm safety of their homes somehow meant they did not really exist as tangible beings. These were hypothetical people. Hypothetically, there could be 200 people living in your apartment, all inside the building right now. But there could be 100, or 50- you couldn’t know for sure. Unless you really saw someone, you couldn’t know that you weren’t the only one in this apartment building, or on this street right now.

You step away from the window and sigh. There is a book on the centre table that you have not finished reading. Its title reads, ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’.