A Gray Layer on the Fan Blades

Dear Delyara, I climbed onto a kitchen chair this afternoon to clean the blades of the ceiling fan, and my fingers came away coated in a thick, greasy layer of gray dust that felt like wet velvet. It was a mixture of old flour, charcoal smoke, and tiny particles of skin that had accumulated over two years of cooking alone. It’s deeply unsettling to see your own survival quantified as a layer of grime on a plastic machine. I wiped it clean with a wet cloth, watching the white plastic emerge from the gray, wondering how many hours of my life had quietly settled up there while I was busy worrying about the future.