Brushing my teeth today and I see a perfect hole cut from the middle of a leaf in our bathroom. The leaf is part of a vining plant a friend gave us four years ago. I brush my teeth too hard, and the spit comes out pink. I look at the hole in the leaf again. I thought I was seeing the white floor through it, but what's really there instead of a hole is a dot of paint from when the landlord fixed the moldy ceiling a couple weeks ago. The dot is clean. Beneath the leaf, the tile is not.
Shawn moved in last month, but not all the way. He's here. His cat and dog are here. His clothes are here. The antique tea cart he insists we'll grow to love is still and unused in his small, dark apartment a few blocks away. So are the two haunted portraits of a married man and woman that will go in his new bedroom, our spare room, the place that's changed more than any other since we moved in almost a decade ago. It's been a studio where I knitted dinosaurs, made skull candles, cast spells to stave off seizures, emptied out completely and turned into a summer bedroom for my oldest friend, home to a snake, and then turned back into a quiet studio for Josh to draw people with impossible hair. Now, we keep the door closed so the cat and dog can't get in and the plans we have for it can't get out.
I didn't think it would actually happen. Even when I agreed to it, it seemed like the kind of promise you make to hang out with a friend you ran into at the grocery. You want to believe it means something that you ran into each other. That it means you should see each other again and soon. But then you never do. It was enough to see them on accident but not enough to see them on purpose. Shawn would move in someday, when everything else was perfect, when it made sense, when we were all so comfortable it seemed inevitable. I should have known better.
Ask an astrologer about Taureans and change.
At the beginning of May, I went to Seattle to visit my brother and mother. We did edibles and drove two hours to the coast. "This may be the only time I get to see the Pacific Ocean," my mother said. My brother and I had seen that water before. I never doubted I'd see it again. When I think of luxuries, I count those certainties among the richest.
I'm still drawing and writing, though sometimes the dog sits on my lap while I do it. His breath smells like an open can of sardines. The cat screams at the other cat in the upstairs unit through the vents. They will never meet. Shawn runs hot, so the snake sees him as an opportunity for expansion, tapping the glass with her nose whenever he's near. Josh adapted quickly and peacefully. He isn't bothered by the people he loves, his changed home, the floors that never stay clean, the elusive quiet, the strange scents and their animal sources. He loved them immediately, and I loved them eventually, the doubts that moved in and have become luxurious certainties.
