Her Interior

I only required a brightness, clean lines and a modest assembly of places to sit and relax. Over the course of weeks, I would set materials about - things that either defied categorization, meaning I had no place readily defined for them - or things that demanded attention, but not immediate attention. Days would come and go, and these abandoned objects, by rod and cone, would become real, demanding entities in my brain. My mind would become as cluttered as my comfort space, my thinking less linear as thoughts navigated through an obstacle course. Inspiration would get derailed by an unsustainable attention. Eventually, I would grow frustrated and stand in a doorway. Survey what truly needs to be saved. More often than not, the promise once held by an object lost all value in my need to achieve clarity. They were widows. Hanging threads. Having committed to the cleansing, they would either find their way to the trash or get a second chance somewhere where they could exist out of sight. My momentum would take me into every corner of the house, even the places that did not affect my thinking so. Clean and purge. I would attend to every detail as though my home were a car and I wanted it waxed and buffed by sundown for a beach cruise...only the person I wanted to impress was myself. And it would work - I might question why I didn't do all of this sooner, but it would work and I would have a pleasant, focused evening. It would be only me and my inspiration - which could be any number of things - but importantly, my mind would be free of the distracting notion that it needed to be somewhere other. Settled.

Then, her interior. I could make no sense of it. It was all ambiguity and expiration and dischord. There were signs of affect. Of neglect. Of suspended activity. I would sit on her floor among bread crumbs and tracked cat litter, strewn sheets of paper and children's toys. Purveying the cerebral vomit of so many interests, so many appetites, too many personalities. Tired plants would beg for spare change. Mounds of dishes resigned to rust; a kitchen counter resembling a salt-battered shipyard. Everywhere were whispers of immediate gratification and ignored consequence; a pleasuring that limps instinctively forward in defiance of cognitive maintenance. It was a squalor of petulance and indulgence. The apartment was an overpacked suitcase fit to burst, its air a heavy thick drowning. I could never be at ease here, and I wondered how she could either. I fought a meddlesome urge to grab anything, start cleaning: but where could it go? Where would I begin? How long it would last.

Her interior was no soft place to land. It was a menagerie of attention deficet and derailed inspiration. A rat's nest of tiny abandoned hopes and wishes and caprice. A junkyard or a collapsed attic. It was no place to quietly exhale; no place to let a mind float adrift.

Her interior was no place to be; we would quit it for the streets. Perhaps this was her comfort, to spend as much time away from herself as possible...existing as a derivative from the self we cannot escape. To become one's own shadow. Having walked among the detritus, I can appreciate this. To recall it all, my breaths become low and my hopes become wrung tight. Her interior was her nervous breakdown. Her coffin.