Try cleaning house. Cleaning house not in the 1950’s housewife manner now planned in between events and meetings and extracurricular but in a real way. Cleaning house of yourself is easy to avoid. You become a prisoner to others wants and desires and live in other things and somehow you have been forgotten. You might wake up one day singing a bad country song out that window and realize I got to clean this house. Not in my bestowed womanly duties but in the reality of the clutter of life, of family, of loves-lost, shared, or desired-are starting to make you look like a serious pack rat. Cleaning house as an adult is hard to do because you have programmed your patterns so perfectly that you think they are yours for life. But what if you did it different? What if developmental gains were not only lost to the younger counterparts? What if you asked what if I was different?
Cleaning house not many people do it. It is easier to keep going on the hamster wheel fast line with or without passengers on the freeway than stop and ask what am I doing. What are you doing? In the cleaning you find the forgotten sandwich, in the brown bag, in the cotton bag, in the plastic bag, in the growing mold of lack of light into the stench of there is not forgetting this sandwich. You held onto to it. Because a lover made it. Because he made it for you. You held on hard and then tossed it to the side. You will throw it away later. You say to yourself. Not now. Now I am not ready. But then you find it months later. Years later. And think I should have cleaned this, cleansed this of myself earlier.
The other day straight out of yoga, I was soppy with sweat and release and contentment and I ran into someone that once upon meant something to me. He sat on one side of the crosswalk and me the other. I said his name and waved. He walked towards me in between the white lines faded and nothing happened. No butterflies grew into a colony in my stomach. My heart didn’t pick up the pace to match my mind. I reached out to hug him. Warning him of the moisture upon my cotton clad body. And he was like you are sweaty. Most men don’t mind touching me sweaty or not. Laughter and then the walk by side. I had forgotten he was so tall. I had forgotten he walked so propelling himself forward. I had forgotten he was selfish. So selfish not to ask how I was. One and half years or so had passed since I had seen his face near mine. Not a how are you or how have you been. Nothing.
As we walked that one and half blocks- I listened and nodded and realized the gift of a short walk with someone who you thought you knew, someone who you thought you could have loved. I realized I was thankful for the eco-cleaning supplies of therapy and the prick of the needles of acupuncture and realizing what I could agree to before could not now. I turned that corner. Thankful for cleaning my house. I didn’t care about cleaning his. My house was the only thing that mattered. I had changed. In a way I could see. What I wanted. Wanted in a way I hadn’t before. Before. A walk so brief. A love affair so brief. A cleaning of the house. Sometimes you find more than a forgotten sandwich. This time I did.
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