life and cleaning.

Does this kind of thing ever happen to you?

You’re cleaning your room. Or, honest to goodness, really trying to. But then you find a dress your friend gave you that you’d completely forgotten about and it’s yellow (yellow!), so you decide to pair it with a purple belt and your rain boots and then you take a picture so you can really see what it looks like and pretty soon you’ve forgotten all about how you were trying to clean your room in the first place.

Because now there’s a fashion show in the basement and Tim Gunn would be so very proud cause there you are, making it work.

And there’s the mess, too, still persisting. Or just altogether ignored now, actually. Because now you’ve found one of your umpteenth journals from The Great Past and you’re reading right in the middle of the book and it hurts a little to read about what you thought then and compare it with what you know now, but maybe it heals a little, too. But, anyway, you’re a lost cause in terms of organization because what you’re trying to do is process your life. And for some reason, your room is mightily dwarfed by your life.

Priorities, I know.

“You’re one of those people who are unbelievably present, aren’t you? Like, you can’t get out of the moment if you try, huh?” observed a friend today as we were stretching each other.

Yes, stretching each other. This is what we do. I stretch out his hamstrings or he sits on my back as I do a straddle and we tell each other stories about our lives that make each of us groan and laugh, respectively.

“Yeah, I think I get pretty stuck in the moment, actually; like, it’s hard for me to remember that anything else even exists sometimes,” I agreed.

But it does. Time moves forward, graciously revealing those things other than NOW. Sometimes like a battering ram and sometimes like a knight in shining armor, but no matter what, time comes for you. I wrote an essay in school called, Ready or Not, Here Time Comes! and thank God it does. I don’t always feel this way, but now–well, now, I definitely have cause to call Time kind.

But still, it can be so strange. Like when I went to a friend’s party tonight. That sounds normal enough for a Friday night, but the thing that was strange was that it was at an apartment where my ex used to live. So it was weird to know exactly how to turn on the unconventional light in the bathroom; unsettling to see the old wood paneling that I used to see a lot. There were reminders everywhere. Ghosts around the corner who acted like enchanted mirrors, only too happy to reveal reflections of who I was.

And all this was going on while I was making small talk and listening to stories and eating cucumbers.

Finally, we climbed out a window onto the roof and I don’t think the ghosts knew how to get there. Probably because I had never been there before. I felt free and light and like I blended in with the universe up there; I knew the stars could see me, but their gaze is generally kind and they have this wink that seems to say, “Head up, kiddo; great things are in front of you, you know, but even greater things are within you.” And then they laugh a sparkling kind of laugh that makes you scratch your head in wonder at the thought of trouble and what it could possibly have to do with you.

So yes, thank God for windows that lead to roofs that are too high for the ghosts to climb. Thank God for Time and how it comes again and again, making life bearable and then even good and then so lovely that you’re starry eyed just thinking about it.

And tonight my room is messy, but I am processing life, see; because life just feels so much more imminent than a room, I guess.