I have bathed the dog. I bought him a new collar, a new leash, flea spray, and a wire brush I use to comb his hair. I washed him with my botanical shampoo, dried him with one of my mother’s pink towels. He was covered with red mud from his romp in the woods and now he is fluffy and white once again. He sleeps under my bed, not out in the yard. When he dreams he whines and kicks at the slats that hold up my new mattress. His eyes are blue, like mine, and sometimes he looks at me in a sad way, like he wants to romp in the woods all the time but he could never leave me for more than a day. His bark reminds me of an old man, fussing at his wife.
I have bought new jeans, two new shirts, a toothbrush and two new pairs of underwear: one blue, covered with red cherries and trimmed in red; one blue, trimmed in yellow and covered with the words: Quack Quack Quack Quack Quack Quack… They are hipster underwear, something new for me. They are low-rise, to go with my new low-rise jeans. My new shirts are small and tight, like something a teenager would buy. I wore one to the grocery store last night and imagined someone handsome and bold would stare at me in the frozen food aisle as I reached for a pizza or a gallon of ice cream.
I have lain in bed and stared at the ceiling. I own new curtains but have not put them up. They sit in a wrinkled pile in a recliner my mother gave me to sit in and think and watch TV but I have no TV and I’d rather think while staring at the ceiling. On top of the wrinkled curtains is a dirty clothes hamper, filled with unmatched socks, running shorts that don’t fit me anymore, and an ice bag.
Across the street from my house there is a school lit brightly with street lamps surrounding the parking lot. One streetlight in particular shines into my window at night and casts a shadow through the eight perfect panes of my new bare window. The light reaches in at a funny angle and it is no more a rectangle but several triangles intersecting one another at odd angles. It is something new. Sometimes I think about tracing the pattern onto my ceiling, so I can look at it during the daytime. But that seems a very serious thing to do.
I have sneaked into my old house and looked around for things that are mine in places where things that belong to me would not be kept. I have taken my grandmother’s chest of drawers and my books and a bottle of wine I once bought but never drank. I have opened the door to my old room and taken a nap in my old bed, on my old sheets. There are still pictures of me on the wall.
I have looked through a plastic box filled with old black and white photos of my mother and my aunt and my grandmother and grandfather. In one picture they are in New Orleans, taking a carriage ride through the French Quarter, all four of them. They look very happy. My grandfather is smoking a cigarette; he does not look like an alcoholic, he looks young and handsome. His body is not wrinkled or broken, his legs are not frozen into a bent position from burns; his hands are not shaking. He is smiling.
I have walked around my new house, wondering what you might be doing, who you might be talking to, and if you were behind on your work. I have wondered: if you saw me at a bar, would you turn to look? Would you buy me a drink? Would we talk about all the things we’ve fucked up in our lives? All the people we’ve left behind. Would you take me out for pizza and a movie? Would I come back to your house, look through your books and your record collection and your t-shirts while you poured me a beer into a plastic cup?
I have read over all your old letters and stories and the poem you sent me. I have noticed that you often set things on fire: a cigarette, a couch, an electric kettle, a woman. And then I wondered if we all do this from time to time when we get bored; set our lives on fire in one way or another. Maybe we burn ourselves up slowly, one day at a time, waiting for the right person to come along, and in the process turn ourselves to ash and cinder.
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Photo credit: Send me adrift. / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND