New Divide

The first thing I did when I got home after driving Rex to the airport this afternoon was to hang about a dozen pictures around the house. I hung my mother's mushroom trivet and mushroom clay disks in the kitchen. I hung the lion door knocker I brought back from China in 2002 — though not on the door. I hung the five framed Leo cards I've collected over the years on the wall in my bedroom, beside the bookshelf; a couple of small framed prints in the new powder room in the foyer, and the two little red Ikea mirrors above the toilet.

I pulled out all my framed family photos from their boxes, where they've been since I moved home from California four months ago, and I'll think about where to hang them next.

I'm not sure why the impulse to do all this now was so strong. Maybe because it's the first time I've been alone for any length of time since September; since that day everything in and about my life changed, literally overnight. I lived alone for three years in California. Now I live in my friend Gilbert's big old house in downtown Toronto, with my high school boyfriend, Rex.

It's not what you're thinking. We're roommates. We don't live together live together.

All afternoon I've been watching TV, the shows I like, not just the ones both Rex and I like: NCIS, Power Play, Traders, Gilmore Girls, and, yes, I'm not afraid to admit it, Cougar Town. And I've been making a list of things I want to do this week:

1. Buy some more hooks and hang some more things
2. Shop for new underwear (and a self-smack to the head for forgetting to stock up at Victoria's Secret before leaving America for good)
3. Get some potting soil & sand for the cactuses
4. Organize my shoe closet
5. Hang the curtains I bought three months ago
6. Spend the Christmas money my Daddy gave me

It's not that I can't do these things when Rex is here, it's just that I can't seem to actually do them. It's as if a sort of paralysis comes over me, and I just want to go home after work and turn my brain off and let the world go to pot around me. I haven't been very productive lately.

So I'm going to try to do that thing that I used to do when I was angry, or upset, or embarrassed, or otherwise feeling like kicking myself. That writing thing. It's why I started this blog in the first place.

Give me reason to fill this hole, connect the space between.

In the next story, Sass goes underwear shopping and takes up drinking wine.