You’re nine Jo’s Chobani yogurts tall. When you draw your lips back in a toothy exhale, you can taste yogurt tang as hot air leaves your throat. There is milk film covering your teeth, and when you run your tongue over the back of your molars, it comes away chalky. You know what pairs well with yogurt? V-Dub chocolate chip pancakes. You step out of your dorm en pointe and your toes dip through soft, creamy curd. You wade through the fatty sea to get across campus. Some parts of the sidewalk are chunkier than others.
It’s warm out. Places stay, but people change. Is it the other way around? You haven’t seen the sun since December. There are people sitting on the stairs to the campus center, just like the spring before this one, like nothing happened. The sunshine makes you purr. Your throat is unused to it—weary from disuse. The purr catches at the ridges of your larynx, but another spoonful of yogurt soothes the battered flesh.
The sunshine is curdling your yogurt. You’ve been told to think about grief as a ball in a box. There’s a grief button on one of the four walls. At first, the ball rattles around in the box, hitting the grief button again and again. Each press fills you with sharp pain or dull sadness, or a mix of both. Over time, as the box grows, presses become few and far between, but just as intense.
Open the box. Take the ball out. Slip in a few Jo’s Chobani yogurts. Close the box. The box jostles with each step, jostles like the yogurts stuck in your backpack. Each jostle is a new collision—laptop case digging into yogurt tops, yogurts rubbing against your water bottle. You imagine dampness at the small of your back and open your backpack. Your Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus splatter all over your backpack walls.
Your heart is not as hard as a box. The walls to your heart are as soft as the aluminium lid of the yogurt cup. Sealed with thin glue, your metal heart walls crumple easily. Lick the yogurt off the lid before you dig in.
Does anyone see you here, standing on the green? You lick a yogurt-covered eraser. The rubber is gummy against your tongue. Stick your yogurt-soaked fingers in your mouth. Nibbling at your fingers with your thousands of needle-sharp kitten teeth, when you bite through, your bone crunches like a pretzel stick.
You slip yogurts into your jacket pocket at Jo’s. You like the blue ones. They’re plain, unflavored. They become whatever you want them to be. They weigh your puffer down.
Your gait home is lopsided. The yogurts shift your center of gravity: you, alone at night, and the swing of your heavy pockets. When you get home, you can take the yogurts out and put them in your fridge. You can’t shed other things as easily.
The house is quiet for once. You remember a story your mom told you: a neighbor wanted to make their own yogurt, so they set whole milk out in the sun, and it spoiled. They ate their yogurt anyway and got food poisoning. You carefully stack your Jo’s Chobani yogurts in your black mini fridge so they don’t sour. Under fluorescent bathroom lighting, you squirt watery curd and wash your face in whey. Fall asleep to the smell of your milk breath under the glowing milk moon.
