I had this dream
of building a home. Of making something beautiful and peaceful where we could
live with love and harmony. I started in our small duplex. The finish on the
floor was peeling away; I suppose the landlords didn’t want to spend the extra
money on a higher quality brand. That, or the wheeling around on the office
chair and the sliding around of furniture for a year began to wreak its havoc.
When the weather
was warm, the bathroom ceiling would start to rot. Little tiny black bumps
would pimple out of the ceiling. “Black mold?” we joked. A swift wipe down with
bleach and water and the pimples would disappear. I knew they would come back,
but, for the time, I was doing all that I could. I was keeping the surface
clean, but a damp heaviness still lingered in the room. The claw foot tub
wasn’t the glamorous antique I had hoped it would be. Cat hair and dust clung
where the feet met the legs, like a ring of gray paint. I got down on my knees
and wiped it away with the bleach and water towel.
When I was down
there, I inspected the floor. A black, gummy substance was growing out of the
cracks. I scrubbed the floor; the gummy substance stuck to the towel like it
would the pigtails of the odd girl on the playground, stringy and sticky,
holding pieces of hair together at odd angles. I felt this lump in my stomach,
this lump that wanted to come up, and was coming up, like a tiny ball lodged in
the back of my throat. I leaned over to the toilet, lifted the seat, and the
ball spewed out, split into a yellow liquid. I looked away, holding my head
from the dizziness of something coming out the wrong way, and pulled the “wrong
way” handle to the right to flush. After the water surged out and back in, the
toilet kept on with this monotonous trickle of water flowing in or out, I
couldn’t tell. I looked in the toilet bowl; the black pimples were creeping in
there too, down from the edges hidden from the naked eye. I reached for the
toilet bowl cleaner and sprayed with haste. I grabbed for the brush and fought
to remove the black pimples leading from, what I saw now, was a giant brown
ring. I scrubbed while large flecks of brown and black jumped into the still
running toilet.
After about two minutes,
I stopped and looked down at my work. The pimples were gone, at least. The
brown ring had been penetrated, but like everything else brown and black in
that bathroom, I knew it would come back. I could never get ahead of it. I knew
it was always just there, just below the surface, threatening any potential for
sustained happiness. I got up off my knees and jiggled the handle of the
toilet. It stopped running. I grabbed the bottle of bleach water and the
muddied, nearly disintegrating washcloth. I ventured down the stairs, the blue carpeted
stairs, like a cheap doctor’s office waiting room threw out the edges and our
landlords glued them to the stairs. I couldn’t help but wonder what was
underneath that carpet that had been so hastily and steadfastly glued down. My
feet left the last step, the last of the rough edges irritating the silken
bottoms of my feet, and I entered the kitchen. The towel had no other place to
go than the trash. It needed to be destroyed, any ounce of the darkness that
could be removed or destroyed felt like an accomplishment, but maybe I was just
chipping away at an ever-growing monster. The real problem was hanging back;
retreating from my desire to clean it, make it right. I returned the bleach
water to its home under the sink. Just then, I heard the door open, in the
crunching way it always did, the crunching of everything peeling away and
rubbing together with any sort of movement or change, of everything being a
little too small to fit properly in its place, like everything was expanding,
dying to burst free. My body tensed at the sound, but I reminded myself of the
darkness baring down. “Go to the door with a smiling face,” I told myself. It
was my tiny fight against what was eating us.
I ran to the door,
smile on my face and open arms, ready to give you a hug, to not let the weight
of this place and the world out there swallow you. I could swallow you instead,
at least, for a moment. But I saw you were wearing that clay mask that made
your face heavy. It was hanging down. I couldn’t see your eyes, but I knew, if
I looked at them, they would just be these glowing, rounded surfaces, convex
shapes that you had clearly already retreated from. Were you standing in there,
just to the side, but still out of reach? I could see you back in there, over
to the side giggling, a child playing hide and seek. I tried to pull you out. I
put my hand on your shoulder, “What’s wrong?” You pushed me away and walked
through to the kitchen. I guess I should have yelled, “Olly Olly Oxen Free!”
Maybe that child would have come out, playfully wearing the mask, making fun of
the monster in the closet.
“Nothing,” you
said, still not looking at me. You walked right through the kitchen and out the
back door. I just stood there for a moment, taking it all in as I heard you
scramble in that back room where we stored our bikes and a mélange of overflowing
belongings. I heard you yell, “Fuck” and “Shit” and “God damn it!” Tears
started to roll down my face, but then I heard you open the back door again.
“I’m going for a bike ride,” you shouted.
“Okay,” I said,
swallowing the tears trembling in my throat. “Be careful.” The back door
slammed. I walked into the living room and melted into the couch. The cushions
were hanging off at an angle, but I was too exhausted to fix them. I lied down
and stared up at the ceiling as my left arm disappeared into the crevice
created between the pushed out cushions and the slippery leather back of the
couch. I thought about how the Velcro I had applied to the back of the cushions
never helped. I thought about how nothing I did here ever helped. I told myself
that I wasn’t doing enough.
I leaned my head
to the right and stared at that picture of us that was next to the TV. I looked
happy, maybe a little chubby, like I had been eating my feelings and trying to
jog them off but my emotional calories outweighed my exercise pay off. At least
my smile was genuine in your embrace. You had your arm around me, but your body
was pulling away, like there was something you couldn’t quite let me touch. I
figured if I kept smiling, one day you would let me touch it. One day that
glowing light in your eyes would be more than reflection; it would come from within,
and we would be happy. I sat up with that thought, hoping that you would find
something warm and real to bring back to us on your bike ride. I decided to go
for a walk.
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