I skim through my anatomy book, and my apartment feels alive. Whenever I pause for a moment to listen, the appliances are humming with different octaves and different rhymes—like a set of organs holding up a body.
The washer and dryer are working like a spleen, filtering and cleaning. The oven, like a liver, is detoxifying and metabolizing. Leftovers go in the fridge, upset like a stomach. The television, unrelenting and blaring with all the different programs, spits out ideas and thoughts like a motormouth. The computer whirls and clicks, processing one and then another to-do like a mechanical brain, fed by neurons of wires and electricity. The shower, washing over me, cool and breezy like perspiration on my skin. The mirrors watch me dance, critiques my hips, and finds fault like my own eyes.
And the clocks—the alarm clocks, kitchen clocks, and the electronics clocks—ticks at its own pace like my heart. It blares rudely in the morning, hurrying me to be awake and alive. It coos soft and slowly in the afternoon, aching as it barely inches by the moments until Steve comes home again.
