The First Years of Semi-Failure – Marianne Filaretou

February 6, 2026

Up until this moment I had never seen a fully white room, and it was not really my taste either. I had a sports tragedy years ago when I was sixteen, so my one leg always limped. I saw a man in a button shirt filled with small anchors and a captain’s hat. He smiled too much in a white room behind a piano with organ dreams, where everyone was doing their best. My presence felt unfortunate but eternal, and that was the whole arrangement. This man looked fat, Bulgarian butcher beard and American smell, assembled that way. I did not care if he was regarded worldwide as a pianist; it did not fit into my afternoon. “Where did you attend primary school?” he asked. I wasn’t answering much. I’m sorry, but I accommodate very little, and fat, weird men are difficult.
        “Will you play the piano?” was the only thing I remember asking. The light came into the room from the left. If you followed it far enough and looked inside, the whole entire world was waiting. It was a world I could only comprehend in the darkness of night, and if I didn’t have this limp, I might as well have been completely drawn to it by now. The pianist played a beautiful song that made each light warm. And even though I did not like him, I could not help but consider him a good artist and a friend.  

A few months after that room I went to the most boring place in America. Boston. Bostonian girls have rarely travelled around the globe. At best they have gone fishing. I like that. I was in the backyard of a big family house with green tall grass and a bucket full of little grey fishes.
        “Battle it out!” I said to my two small Canadian nieces. I had recently bought them two big swords.
        I gave my nieces one gray fish each and they slapped them hard on the wet grass until everything smelled like fish. I am getting them used to the smell in case they ever end up somewhere honest. It was almost Spring in America, and I noticed it before anyone else did, because nothing was insisting on being miserable.
        My hands still smelled like fish but I didn’t wash them right away. I wanted to see how long it would last. I was in a bad mood around my Canadian relatives. I left the room for a moment to see if anything would change, and this seemed reasonable at the time.
        I went into the bathroom and closed the door, standing in front of the mirror and making a few faces to see if I would laugh. Most of them didn’t work. Then I made one that did, and it reminded me of someone I didn’t get to know very well. I held it for a moment, thinking maybe this was as close as we were ever meant to get. I said a few things out loud, just to see how they sounded. It wasn’t very good. When I went back out, everyone was still at the table taking turns talking in the gentle way Massachusetts families do. I sat down and tried to listen. I behaved carefully and ate what was nearest to me. It wasn’t half bad.

I had two doctor friends I went to stay with the following month, and they lived in England, where everything is very small, like the whole country had been put in a washer-dryer one too many times. The pipes there don’t work much. They regurgitate when too much water or gunk is down them, and don’t seem to know what to do. I had never seen anything like it. It made me crazy plunging orphaned bits of leftover soy chicken thighs.
        It was a huge change from the Massachusetts food-waste disposer, with its big iron tap and sharp blades that sucked everything in. In England I thought about it all the time, like an ex-lover.