September 2005

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I’m exhausted just looking at it. My apartment—or rather, the disaster area that once was my apartment. I make a point to at least have some clear floorspace for an unobstructed pathway from room to room. Beyond that, it’s hopeless.

It usually starts with dishes. I’ve developed this bad habit of leaving dishes everywhere. Glasses half-filled with water and melting ice. The plate that had some grapes in them. Potato chips bowl. I’ll wash them tomorrow. By tomorrow, they’ve seemingly multiplied, perhaps by spontaneous generation.

Then it’s laundry. Little piles of clean, questionable, and downright dirty. I’ll come home from the hospital tired, pull off my scrubs, and they’ll end up in a trail that leads to my bed: socks in the living room, pants by the bathroom, and shirt lost in my bedroom. Sometimes, I’ll wash the clean ones again just because they’re wrinkled. Much easier than ironing—if only I can remember to take them out of the dryer on time.

I didn’t use to be this bad. Ask Steve. I used to love my apartment, and it loved me, and…and…and…it’s become this bad marriage where I neglect it, and it plots to move piles of junk during the night so that I’ll trip over it in the morning.

I’m falling apart, and I can see it here. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I’ve convinced myself that if I could only clean, really clean this place up that I’d somehow be fixed, too.

But I’m so tired. I look around, and there’s so much to do, and I tell myself Tomorrow, Dee, you can start tomorrow. It’s been weeks, and tomorrow is nowhere in sight.

Seriously, tomorrow.

Listen. I’ve got a secret.

Everyone keeps telling how cute my new haircut is, and I have a hard time saying thank you. I blush, smiling uncomfortably, and feel like a fraud.

I stole it from J.

I’ve been trying to grow out my hair for ages. Every now and then, I get frustrated and chop a bit off, but last weekend, I took off what appeared to a small mammal. Reeeeally really short.

Of course, J’s been walking around with this cute little short haircut for ages. Well, not ages, maybe weeks or so. She’s this beautiful tall girl with big pouty lips and very high heels. She’s the kind of girl that can pull off a fashionable print silk scarf and red red lipstick.

So she’s got this hair. Sort of falls in her eyes, so she can toss it back oh so gracefully every now and then. And when she does, every male heart in the room skips a beat.

So I sat in the salon, hair just shampooed and dripping on my shoulders when the stylist asks in her Australian accent what I want done.

“Short.” And I pulled out a picture.

I stole her hair. What was I thinking? I’m just a sad little copy of cute hair. It just lays on my head, mocking me, knowing I’d never pull off pinstripes and pink silk.

At least I’m saving money on less shampoo now.

There’s nothing like a gia-normus white 4×4 pickup truck squeezed in next to my little Honda to make me feel insignificant. Even in my frame, I could barely slip through the crack of my driver-side door. However, I do believe my white coat dusted off the side panel of my car quite nicely as I slid by.

When I was finally able to get out in one piece, huffing and puffing, I stepped back to survey the monster. The parking space may be a tad small. There was only about 4 inches of room between the monster and the yellow line on each side. The roof could have brushed the fluorescent-lit cement ceiling of the garage. I would have needed rockclimbing hooks to hitch a ride.

The car on the other side decided that it needed a good two-feet distance from the trunk, lest it be contagious I suppose. Consequently, the entire row was off by two-feet, each cartire happily balancing on the fading yellow line like a tight-rope walker. I pictured a single metermaid, scribbling furiously, writing off page after page of parking violations, easily meeting her quota for the day before 9am.

I imagine in its glory days, the trunk might have hauled mountains of lumber. Christmas trees. Mulch. Ridiculous amounts of furniture for a dorm room half its size. Now, it probably chugs by at $2.79 a gallon, toting little more than a pimply baseball-capped soon-to-be-a-man and his spiral-bound notebook lost in his bookbag among unopened textbooks and an iPod.

I glanced at the barely visible sign in front of the truck.

This space is for compact cars only.

Talk about overkill.

Love will remain a mystery,
But give me your hand and you will see
Your heart is keeping time with me.

— Aqualung, Brighter Than Sunshine

I’ve been impatient. There are so many words, and I haven’t given myself the time to listen to any of them. I’ve settled back upon my familiars, my comfortable tunes. I need a new voice. And now I find myself humming. Oh, what a feeling.

I’d like to think that these songs, these love songs, meant something to someone. That behind the chords and strings and haunting voice, someone was falling in love, sewn together with these words. They put this in a movie, where some strange and beautiful girl finds herself with an equally beautiful boy. Oh, what a feeling. I know they’re actors, but there’s something blasphemous about faking love. There’s hardly enough to go around as it is. We ought to be careful what we pretend.

But nevertheless, there is no music like the soft rhythm of his heart, my head against his chest. There are no words for that.