Scarlet Tape

The bubbles have gone still in my glass of ginger ale.

I spent all day cleaning the apartment. It felt good, scrubbing the baseboards, moving the mop along the tile floors, cleaning the mirrors, washing the basins of the sinks and the bathtub.

And when it was all done, after I’d vacuumed the rug and wiped down the surfaces until the dust had vanished onto the tightly woven fabric of my Lysol tissue, I thought it all looked good and pristine.

But then the restlessness visited upon me once it was all done and I sat alone on my dark blue velvet couch while the guinea pigs purred, pushing their pile of Timothy hay around while another squall threatened the horizon, turning the sky a deep and dusky shade of cobalt.

My roommate came home again in one of her sullen moods. We ran into each other in the hallway, her cherubic cheeks turned downward and her hazelnut eyes tinged with a little girl’s sadness. She disappeared into a cloud of steam into the shower, then I heard the door of the bedroom shut while she wrapped herself beneath her hooded sweatshirt and talked to her parents, only her melancholia made her less loquacious than usual before the heaviness of her unspoken burden made her drift into sleep; her iced green tea sits neglected on our kitchen table and the whole restlessness of hurricane season drifts over the palm trees of our shady lane.

I dread her coming home these days, it shifts the whole mood of the place. She’s in a retrospection following her attempts at, “getting in her own way”, as all the life coaches call it here. But isn’t that the folly of humanity? “Getting in your own way”?

I attempted to read for a little bit, but felt a phantom chimpanzee gleefully jumping over my shoulders. I contemplated making a cup of Constant Comment tea but it reminded me too much of that Leonard Cohen song my mother shared a name with and a place back home, from another lifetime ago.

It’s 4:30 in the evening though, and I have a rotisserie chicken and garlicky fingerling potatoes nestled in my fridge, waiting for the dinner hour. A nice change from all my frozen TV dinners. I could make it just as well myself, but my roommate would throw it all up out of self-loathing and I would feel dissatisfied and ambitious as being party to that inner turmoil and scarlet tape she wraps herself into.

Perhaps I can draw a mermaid on some loose leaf printer paper with an old Bic pen of mine and lose myself for some time.