Unceremonious
My mother was a hoarder. Sorry to my Mom.
I grew up surrounded by old newspapers and magazines, fragments of broken things that would never be fixed. Clothes no one in our family of 6 had worn for years. Towels torn to tatters. Toys. Old shoes. Pets. Dirt. Debris. And so much food. Always food, the family business, processing through the house or getting stuck there, going bad. I lived. But under duress.
You ever engage in a psychotic cleaning bender? I do.
We just had a solar eclipse. This is never planned (the cleaning, not the eclipse) but once it starts, I am at the mercy of completeness, driven to the actual limits of my physical ability to move things around and/or out of my house.
Defragmenting the past (time) in material space.
Not my bath tub. (Shot on film in Palm Desert, California by Eric A. Reid
Now I’m sitting in a house that looks almost like no one lives here. Except I live here. And I know where everything is. There’s nothing I don’t need.
I didn’t get what my mother has, I got whatever compensates for it, feeling almost a perpetual urge towards this periodic purging. Once in a while, though, I find myself in possession of an object that makes no sense without extensive context. A plant placed in a broken glass from a pandemic road trip, the tag from a dress I bought for something exciting, or a torn open envelope that came full of cash, now long spent. For example. Things that individually carry little weight but, accumulated, tip to chaos.
It’s not like I’ve never held onto something too long, though.
My last “serious” relationship, I escaped with my life and not much else. Of all the things that could have made it, though, a glittery, pink and green cupcake-shaped bath bomb that he had given me persisted in my belongings like a cockroach in the nuclear apocalypse.
Without force, entropy is always increasing.
Obviously I am aware that this entire time, being a completely rational person, that it was a $5 bath bomb from Whole Foods. If it had gone missing in my move(s), I wouldn’t have noticed, but since it was still there sitting in the little basket with the other bath thingies, I couldn’t throw it away. It was bad luck. It was also bad luck to use it. I didn’t know when the “Right” time to use an (obviously cursed) item like that would even be. What kind of spell would I have to say to contain the experience? So, it just sat there and traveled from apartment to apartment with me. For the better part of a decade.
Until, on this day of rage cleaning, the devil’s cupcake fell out of a tipped-over basket and into a filling tub that I was about to use to bleach my sheets (not a metaphor for once). The audacity of this inanimate object to start fizzing through its decrepit little plastic shell. The choice of what to do with it was taken from me and coincided with whatever was already going on in my world.
I told my son it was bath time. He screamed “Toxic Waste!” and threw his toys in when he saw the glittery green water. A 7-year spell neutralized by a child’s joy and some magnesium salts. Pure and clean.
Out of my hands.
What I do have is flowers every week now. Sometimes more if I travel.
I learned from a feng shui influencer once that dried plants and dead flowers are bad luck for prosperity. But I’m not worried about running out of fresh ones, they follow me now. When they start to die, I throw them away. And wherever there aren’t flowers? I know I’m not supposed to stay.
Of course, all of this is really to say, I have a would-be update to my last post. But unfortunately, it was so anticlimactic that to note it would be to memorialize something ultimately lacking all distinction.
Some things can just go down the drain. What a relief.
Xx, is.
PS. Thanks to my movie star (ex) boyfriend and all the florists of the world.
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