By Turi Sioson

Last week, I was a chef. Good Italian cooking on the stove. Pesto and green beans and not a single burnt end or garlic clove.

I think I know what I’m doing.

This week, I leave the pasta boiling for too long. I like it that way — the same state of mess that took me forever to perfect: washed hair but wind-swept; charred stovetops and tables unkept.

I am a French girl on the windowsill with her favorite songs spiraling serenades into the square below; no chores, no job — just free money to blow.

They tell me this is not knowing what I’m doing.

I think, for too long, we have pretended we are intellectuals. We are not intellectuals. We are monkeys in suits and ball gowns, eating fruit. I am not the philosopher, nor the muse, but the knee that pavement made bruised. I am wandering and wholly uncared for.

I live in the dystopia that calls for whispering, back-behind glances and troubled little romances. I am the author in the modern world making them up. I am the gardener in her backyard who knows all her secrets; I give her daughter a flower on Sundays and a vase so she can keep it.

They tell me this is knowing what I’m doing.

Today, I will be a linguist. Work with ancient Greek or Japanese but will be totally and completely at ease. No sharp breaths or head in hands. No trying on turtlenecks then cancelling my plans. No indecisiveness. No go-in-this-shop-but-come-out-the-back-door; no practice autographs or a begging for more. For once,

I will be the brain of the operation. The way I feel at home in my bed, where I can make things up and not fall upon its dread.

Tell me I know what I’m doing.

But tomorrow, I will be the first thing that comes to mind. Hyperfixation or the darling of mankind. I have to be. Who else will I be?

(cashier, movie star, girlfriend, memoir)

(screenplay writer, olympian fighter, educator, backbiter)

Tell me I don’t know what I’m doing.

No time — usher along. Move the words; don’t say it wrong. Look pretty. Look wanted. Sound no alarms but tell them that you’re haunted. Be the editor and the publicist and the elusive writer with mad ideas. Be the the friend and the mentor and the smothering mother whose trustee is

life. Just as it is. No sudden movements or unattainable dreams. Not the messages misinterpreted, or a failed product and its schemes.

I think I’m failing at what I’m doing.

But tomorrow, I will make a deal with the devil. Everything at once, I will say. Everyone in a lifetime, I will pray. Enough to keep me shaking myself awake with another task left undone: call the hairdresser and read the internet and, in between, make sure you’re having fun. Enough to keep my shoulders tight and my eyes good friends with all not said and all not done, and

I know the reality of black magic. Table manners lost to checklists and sex appeal. Oh handsome devil, will you accept the deal? Keep me up at night with my fifty-fifth passion project only to wake the world up and have them tell me I’ve lost it. Will you let me speak to everyone I love at once? Spend nights with every ex I thought I adored — make me a terribly popular word?

The curtains are closing now. The crew wants their checks. Am I the employer or the employed? Tell me,

who

will I

be next?

I don’t think I know what I’m doing.

Everything Under the Sun

By Turi Sioson