It's Not My Fault. It Can't Be My Fault

There was a wardrobe explosion in my apartment this week. I mean that quite literally. I opened my wardrobe and all three drawers came cascading down, causing my clothing to explode forth onto the floor. Now, I'm a pretty neat guy. I'm no clean freak, but I keep things pretty tidy around here, and I try to do a decent cleaning once a week. It's a small place, so it needs this to keep things from getting out of hand. Unfortunately, because of the size, there's very little space for my stuff-- even what little stuff I own-- so when you take one piece of storage out of the equation, it all falls apart. It's like Jenga. The clean clothes go on the floor, taking up the spot where my wetsuit goes, so that hangs in the bathroom shower. The dresser comes apart for repair, meaning the stuff on top goes on the bed, and the hanging clothes go on the couch, leaving nowhere to sleep. My bike needs to come down from it's hook on the wall to make room to take the dresser down, so that's in the living room. The night-table has the remainder of the dresser items, leaving nowhere to put books and papers and odds and ends except for the kitchen table and the end-table in the living room, which are now overflowing.

With all this going on, I finally gave up the battle, didn't do the dishes for a day (and I had made spaghetti), stopped sorting mail, kicked my athletic shoes on the floor. All and all it got pretty ugly. I was starting to have nightmares-- the anxiety kind where you get overwhelmed by your daily life stuff. In last night's I was moving and my place was in typical moving disarray. I'd met a beautiful woman and taken her home, but then lost her in my terrible apartment, which was even more like a flop-house than the real-life one.

So today, after a nice cove swim and two pool parties, I came home to my shitbox explosion of an apartment and started to clean. Repairs proceeded on the wardrobe as it was still not fitting back together correctly. Dishes were washed and sinks were scrubbed. Floors were swept and vacuumed and papers were sorted and stacked and thrown away when appropriate. I even did some extra-curricular work, noticing an out of wack drawer in the living room cabinet. It's payload of 15+ years worth or photography had overstuffed it and it was falling off it's runners. So I pulled it out and emptied it and therein found, naturally, some detritus of love lives past. I found framed photographs and gifts from a girlfriend I never loved, but who was too sweet to me for me to ever bring myself to throw them out. I settled for removing them from the frames and relocating the pictures to anonymous corners of photo albums. The cards, I felt, were sufficiently passé enough for me to recycle. Then I stumbled on a picture and a letter from a woman from about a year and a half ago. One I may have written about here. The picture-- a somewhat vain Christmas gift from a time when we were just trying to start things out after years of bad timing and missed chances-- was also removed from the frame and scurried away. The letter-- her final words to me-- I took out and read. They no longer stung at all, but they reminded me of what it felt like to be stung, and of what it felt like to have hope for someone such that you give them that power over you. I put it back in it's envelope and laid it aside rather than throwing it out (some things you need to keep as reminders) and then decided it was time to walk away from this casual dating crap and find someone who's someone, or find myself alone. And so commences housecleaning of a different sort.