Why I open the fridge when I'm not hungry
It's almost midnight. You get up off the sofa, cross the kitchen, open the fridge. You're not hungry and you know it.
The light comes on, the cold air hits your face, and you read the shelves like a page: the end of the cheese, the half-eaten yoghurt, the milk that's half there. Sometimes you take a piece of something, just so your hand has a gesture to make. Most nights you close the door with nothing. Two minutes later you still don't know what you went looking for. I find that little walk between the sofa and the kitchen quite moving.
Before you got up, you were on the sofa, phone lit, scrolling through things you'll have forgotten in ten minutes. Walking to the fridge is changing rooms without changing anything else. Three seconds where nothing is being asked of you: just milk, cheese, a jar of mustard. And meanwhile the evening stretches out, and the thing you don't want to decide is still waiting for you on the sofa.
In front of the open shelves, for three seconds, nobody wants anything from you.
I was wondering…
What have you been putting off telling yourself, on all those evenings you get up and leave the room instead?