A Collection of Me
Forgive me for not bathing today and allowing my
deterioration to shed itself cell by cell around me
in front of this desk. I string words in business
casual rhetoric because I’m trying to tell you, with
some odd pride, that I am falling apart.
I’ve been falling apart since the
day I was born since the day I began growing. And I
haven’t yet grown or fallen apart. I really do
remain the balance of everything I am and everybody
else. This is not the collective spirit talking; I
am a collection of dead and living cells.
There’s a trail of me that follows and floats a path
from my rumpled bedroom to this computer desk to the
kitchenette to the bathroom where other microscopics
have married my own and now share my space in their
own everything. They’ve given birth to
stains of interesting shapes on the linoleum.
I want to be forgiven for falling
apart because, I believe, it’s kind of my job -- not
to fall apart. Ah, the real conflict is that I have
not bathed today and chosen not to. How I get
myself to the shower is to tell you that I have not
bathed today. I will tell you, too, that it’s hard
to keep memories clean all the time. That I like to
be too comfortable in public. That I care so much
that it embarrasses people. What shower, what bath
should I take then? Or, can we find some glory,
maybe purpose, in sitting in this collection of me a
little longer, while I stare into the screen, the
morning light greets me, and a cowboy hat is the
only shelter for this naked body. The shower would
make me less of what I don’t need. The latter would
bring me more company. More reinforcement for a
behavior that confirms I’m not the only one socially
strange. I cannot say, at this time, what is the
better solution.
©
lyw
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