I look at the slurry of mashed up moments, blended together. A blue soup. Wet to touch.
I stick my hand in and swirl it around, pretending I need to stir the soup, to break up more pieces of paper until they are no longer paper. I want to feel my hand swirl through the lumpy liquid. The water will break down the paper over time, most likely without the help of my mixing. It’s cold. In the soup I ball my hand into a fist so that its contents squeeze through each finger. I continue this action, gliding and squeezing, gliding and squeezing.
I lift my hand, still balled, out of the water. Holding impossibly what remains of the dripping mass, I begin to squeeze, differently to the playful squeezing that the hand has been doing while inside the soup. Shifting my hands I create river beds for water to slide back down into the bucket to join the rest of the soup. Like blue blood, rushing through veins, it pours through channels, finding any path it can to make its way back into the bucket. Except this blue is more real than the blue blood inside veins, who’s blue-ness is a trick told by our eyes and our skin. Then more squeezing. Draining the blue mass’s resources bit by bit until the lifeless lump, so tricky to handle moments ago, is dry, and solid.
The memory of my hands remain pressed into the surface of the dry blue lump, the tightness of the squeeze dictating its shape forever. As is the persistent nature of the colour blue, it too leaves its own mark on me. Staining every piece of skin that made contact with its blueness. Something about the fingernails means they catch the blue most, it remains here for a week, subtly making its home in the bits of skin most receptive to it.