Tonight I stayed up cleaning my place, as its been a long time since. Even Scout has been protesting, in her small silent way. The dishes have been raising hell. My refrigerator looks like the Salvation Army of the produce department. So I stayed up late and read Henry Miller and ran loads of laundry galloping in the dryer and drank some wine and consolidated the recycling. Crushed all my cans. I read the Wall Street Journal, the copy my mom gave me before she left for Argentina with my dad this morning.
It’s very late/early, probably 1:00 in the morning, and the rain has just started. What I wondered was wind kept steady and didn’t rise, so I pushed up the window and molten moist blankets of air began folding themselves inside my room. Rain. Slow, quiet, deep rain. Just enough to coat the earth. Just enough to forget it happened.
But in the morning I will stir and slam my hand somewhere near Steve Chiatacus' voice as it exits my radio, in snooze, listening again to his steady gentle enunciations of the news, my temples playing a slight cacophany on the inside membrane of my skull. It will occur to me how Steve, with his clear, modest Midwest hyper-murmur could make the most horrific genocide sound like a peaceful soundbyte of culture. I wish my alarm clock were a piece of thin, round glass I could shatter every morning on my wall.
But I will stir and I will remember how the earth around me outside has been washed. And that my place is clean, too.
It will be Valentine's day. And I will smile to Debbie's emergence somewhere across town, her birth into this day. She'll wake and sleepily look around the room for a moment, her hair a study in microcosms, chaos. Her eyes pooled in the dark comprehension of waking.
Ten bucks says I had the best dreams of all.