Rice milk
I woke up at night because I heard rattling noises in the kitchen. As soon as I heard them, I realized how pointlessly scared I had been the other times some random noise had woken me up. This wasn’t a poster falling off the wall, or the neighbour’s dog going for a midnight snack. There was someone in the kitchen and that was it. As terrified as I was, I was also very aware of the need to act. For lack of a better weapon in my bedroom, I picked the sharpest stiletto boot I had and grabbed it really, really hard. I tip-toed breathing very shallowly to the door that separated the kitchen from the bedroom in my apartment (yes, i do live in one of these small big-city flats) and peeped through the gap left by the ajar door.
I don’t know what was I expecting to find, but I’ll tell you what I did find: Devendra Banhart drinking my rice milk.At first I only saw a man standing by the fridge, holding its door open. He then raised from its illuminated cold insights and I could see it was a young skinny man. With curly hair. And a really nice powder green cardigan. He was unashamedly swallowing all of my rice milk, straight from the tetra-brick, avidly. It was organic, vanilla flavoured and really, really nice. And not the cheapest type in the store. And he was drinking it all. I was now more pissed than scared. And this must have dropped my guard. I took a better look at him and matched my suspicion of having seen him somewhere and the concert i had just been to. He noticed me and turned my way. His face produced the simplest, friendliest smile and said: “This is really nice rice milk”. And continued drinking.
Tired, and feeling surprisingly safe, I just turned around and went to bed. I couldn’t imagine that the guy who sings “I just want to be a little sea horse” would break into my room and cut me into pieces. He stole my rice milk, for god’s sake. He was probably a vegan anyways.
The next morning I was telling myself I’d find a full brick of rice milk in my fridge and I’d laugh at my dream. But when i stepped into the kitchen, I found a wrinkled tetra-brick on my kitchen top, a little trail of vanilla-scented drops from the fridge to the sink and an inexplicable trace of silver glitter on the floor, leading to the window rather than the door. The funniest bit was that, somehow, it made sense in my head. I still buy the same rice milk. At the end of the day, it was really nice rice milk.
