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Grocery Bag, Pot and Plant
I have had this general idea for a long time. It's still a draft, there are aspects I still would like to add and things I would like to re-word and remove. I have a habit of thinking of ideas and never seeing them through so I just forced myself to finish it.
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Grocery Bag, Pot and Plant
It’s not really familiar to me. Well, not from personal experience anyway. If I were to compare it to something I suppose I’d say murder. You watch it in movies or see it on television but you don’t know what it feels like, if it does feel.
“Why can’t I taste my tongue?” Nick has been starring out his window pressing on his tongue, curling it into hot dog buns and leaving it out to dry. Leaving me out to dry. As long as were both going through the same thing, it’s a lot easier to cope with.
Nick was recently laid off from his job. I don’t know too much about our current economy, I just hear the television complaining every once in awhile about it. I never did know what job he had, but never finding out helped the days pass with thoughts at least.
I always wondered if all living things had thoughts but no way to communicate them or if I was just a special case. I once heard you cannot not communicate and that everything you do is part of communication. While it breaks the rules of grammar, hopefully it doesn’t break the rules of life. Things aren’t as funny if you can never communicate laughter. Much like yawns, laughter is contagious. It’s unsettling though how it’s possible to be in the same room with someone and still feel alone. You hear them, see them, but always the number one reason is that we are afraid of is each other. We remain alone. It’s not that we have nothing to say to each other, we just can’t. Physically. I suppose everything physical is linked back to the brain controlling motor functions so maybe I’m not thinking hard enough.
“You left the door open!” Lately Nick has been talking to himself, but he doesn’t know it. Maybe he forgets he is alone or that he refuses that he is alone. This morning he was wearing a paper grocery bag over his head. I couldn’t understand why and all the reasons he could come up with were muffled by the bag. Maybe he didn’t know why and was supposed to figure it out too. Subconscious works in mysterious ways, especially when you are dreaming. I have heard people can go through their entire life asleep.
While he sat there going through his life, sorted in boxes, I hear him crumble onto the creeky wood floor in the attic. He always stated the obvious. He must be looking for where it all went wrong, an answer or a clue. “I’ve done too many things in my life that I regret.” I can imagine him gazing at the dust particles drifting through the spaces between. Videotapes playing behind every particle, reflecting a different memory of his childhood. It never matters what they sounded like, what they said, just the visual memento. He starts tapping on the attic floor without realizing until he becomes aware and severely annoyed. The sound associated with pressing his bone into the old wood floor sandwhiching the small skin below over and over again. “ There is nothing worse than not being comfortable with yourself.
Morning again. It’s really the same everyday. Filled with regret and how his dreams were never fulfilled before collapsing his face into the palm of his hand. Nothing turned out as he planned. Never accomplishing anything he was proud of. As soon as he finished his coffee he won’t think about any of it.
He begins to read the paper and is entertained by things that would normally occupy a person for a few seconds. Reading very slowly. Very. Very. Slowly. Using his new oven mits while cooking in the oven. Trying out new shampoos and freezing ice cubes. He looks forward to these things and if it wasn’t for them I fail to imagine what he would do.
He just figured out it was laundry day. He still has clothes but he doesn’t wear them all before washing them all. Every week, once a week, he counts the shirts that he leaves on the floor and calculates the day. Reminds him its Saturday. He’s been looking for a job now for at least a month. His income from being laid off is probably diminishing and while I remain thirsty, so is he. Even the bugs don’t have anything to live on. The picture you paint in your head is wrong. There is no messes, not a pig-sty, just nothing to live off of.
He moved me back upstairs today, where I first started out. The sun is better here but I fell more alone without the lemon tree to at least pretend she is listening. I guess he must have seen something outside the window because as soon as he set me down onto the table I heard the front door close. “We have the best maintained coffee grinder in the neighborhood.” He sat down on his bed and started writing down something furiously before falling asleep.
The next morning I woke to the creeking of the wood and the shuffling of cardboard. The cap popping off of what could only be a sharpie and the squeeling of dying ink. Up and down Nick fled from the attic onto the front lawn. Each time I watched his shadow walk down the stairs and the reflections of the neighbors windows showed him dropping boxes onto the front lawn. One read “25 cents.” Something must have caught his eye as he staggered wildy into the room. He grabbed headphones, a pair of shoes and a few picture frames and threw them into a box. As he began to leave the room, “What?”
Stopping in his path he must have heard me thinking and turned his head. Is it possible? Trying to remember what triggered his attention it was too late. With every bounce and shift in weight as he walked down the stairs I began to loose soil and faint. There must have been something on the stairs to make him slip. The clay that’s been holding over my environment cracked over his head and we began to tumble as gracefully as an elephant might down the side of a mountain. I’m so thirsty, but so was he. It’s easier to handle together.
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