Sometimes you need to neglect everything in life so as not to neglect yourself, right?
To begin cleaning my room takes considerable strength of the
mind. I prepare for it throughout the week. I wake up to a messy room full of
complete and utter shit, and repeat the morning mantra: tonight, when I get
back home from work, I will clean my room. But I repeat that mantra as I head
straight to a friend’s place holding a bottle of wine, and repeat that as I get
drunk on aforementioned wine, and then repeat it again as I stumble into bed,
too apathetic about my current condition, of the right treatment of the body,
basic self-respect, matters of cleanliness, because I could really care less,
and besides, I’m going to wash my sheets tomorrow.
But then I get a nagging feeling in my head, from when Kyle
told me not brushing your teeth after drinking is the worst damage you could wreck
on your dental health. I struggle my way to the bathroom— Bright lights! Cold
floors! Moving!-- because I think I’m concerned about my teeth.
But I also know that I would actually just hate to look back
at it all when I’m strapped to the operating chair in a few years. My dentist
has just numbed my teeth with a large metal needle. It pinched. I’m sweating under the
light when he grabs pliers and starts grabbing for a rotted tooth. “You seem
nervous,” he says. “Relax.”
“Doctor, I’m fine,” I want to say, “I just sweat like this
normally, for example, when I wake up.” He should know that abnormally excessive
sweaters exist and that is fine. I flinch when the pliers lock on to my molar.
It’s at this time when I realize that my mouth is not yet
completely numb and that after all these years I still don’t really know what
my dentist looks like behind his mask.
Most of the things I find in my room are unused vitamins, paper clippings, business cards, posters, flyers, leaflets, individually wrapped bags of tea, deodorant I meant to return, two identical books I meant to return, an uneven Frisbee, heart-patterned wrapping paper, a dirty bowl with a stale chunk of rye bread, unreturned letters. I cannot throw them away, but I know the next time I come back to them I can grab them by fistfuls and leave them in the trash bag. Eventually I understand that I’ve grown weary of them, and that my bullshit has got to stop. Sometimes when I call my mom she'll ask for a picture of the current state of my room, which means she wants my bullshit to stop. No matter what, even if I am having a bad day, I have to stop my bullshit. There is no use dwelling on it. It stinks.
I killed a plant once. My other plant has grown buds in my
friend’s apartment, where it was forgotten about after winter break, and the plants that live in my room back home thrive because my mother waters them everyday while
I am in college.
I used to get sharp pains in my foot. I waited three years before telling my doctor.
My favorite Italian ice shop closed down this summer. I have always meant to go there one last time.
I haven’t seen someone important to me in years. I don’t miss them but I love them very much.
But I let things grow old and dirty, because I reason
that they’d end up like that regardless. I think I have done very well for myself despite this, but I notice myself more haggard, irritable, withered, brooding in the darker parts of my room where the light doesn't reach. I was told to lean in it. It's quieter there.
