Make Believe

It’s funny working in a thrift shop.

Sometimes I pretend I’m Anna Karina or Jean Seberg in a French New Wave movie when I move about in my smock, putting together outfits on their velvet hangers, or else wandering to the musty end of the warehouse where Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band is playing over the stereo while I try on straw hats and shades and all manners of disguises.

Today I found a Christmas album from my childhood, along with vintage Pyrex dishes and French Onion Soup crock pots like my mother used to have, before both handles of the glazed brown and white ceramic fell off in our broiler.

I didn’t cry like I usually would, reduced to tears by the derecho of grief as it touches down over the fathomless oceans of my memories of her. A scurry of an undertow in the gulley of my throat. Rather, I was contemplative, turning the red CD over and over again in the small palms of my hand beneath the hot fluorescent lights. It felt like a thousand lifetimes ago, but it was only this one.

It felt almost sacrilegious finding it there instead of where I’d find it before, in my mother’s basement, in the space that was converted into our home’s storage facility where it once was our modest cement garage. A place I believed for the longest time was haunted because one of our English Bulldogs, Winnie, used to stare at his reflection in the small window.

Today flew by. I was able to pause for a bit and make progress on the book I’m currently reading, a Mass Market paperback reissue of an Anne Rice novel. A pretend origin of the species of vampires, a fascinating little tome. A dark confection of fantasy, like a chocolate covered cherry with an enigmatic center to behold. I read it, enraptured on my break, while eating some gummy bears.

I came home and found my roommate in the courtyard, beneath the glaze of her melancholia and emotional malaise. We find it hard to decipher each other right now, so I just left her at her Adirondack chair beneath the shady leaves of a palm tree while I wandered in and took a shower—cold to shock the heat and sweat from my system after a day of working, and then hot to relax my muscles.

I’m enjoying a late lunch of chicken tenders before I take myself out to the cigarette shop on a quick errand.

Inevitably, I did a load of laundry for my soiled work clothes.

I like that my feet ache after a long day of working.