Before and slightly less before
This is the after. I sit here at the dining room table holding my cheesie-dusted fingers in the air like a surgeon about to scrub in on a soon to be botched surgery. I am blank. I remain frozen long enough that the pantry moths feel safe to investigate this unusual offering of orange gold on my finger tips. They have not seen a pantry in human form before. I look out the window and notice passively that the squirrels are trying to eat my bistro lights again. My brain is squirrels. Anxious little creatures run around in there in a panic, making absurd decisions to eat plastic and electricity in a mistaken, fear-based gesture of survival. Only, my body is slow, like an Easter Island monolith. All slab on the outside and nervous squirrels on the inside.
Around me is the decaying evidence of who I once was. That lady who obsessed about which shade of black to paint the anaglypta wallpaper. The whimsical psycho who based a weekend getaway around the purchase of a vintage kijiji rug in another province. Now, packs of wild cheerios and legos speckle the floor like tiny landmines for unsuspecting feet. Above my head is the silhouette of an insect graveyard, backlit by the dusty mid-century pendant lamp that holds it. A patch of drywall winks at me brazenly from behind a conspicuous tear in the once magnificent wallpaper. I wouldn’t want to see what a black light would reveal in this room. The spiders wouldn’t care for it so much either.
6 months ago, full of the hypomania of apocalypse, I started to write a little ditty about the before and after transformation of our house in between frenzied third wave shifts at the emergency department. Back then, I still had the will to battle the decor-destroying entropic force of my Tasmanian devil children. But then, entropy took over my household, the couch cushions were permanently transformed into building blocks for children’s forts, the squirrels came to invade my mind, and the ditty was forgotten. I think the caring so much about so many things started to turn into a loud, cicada-esque buzzing in my mind. The sound of the delta variant now just as loud as inconsequential decisions about which pattern of bandaid I should buy for my children’s mostly imagined wounds. (The answer is Star Wars). It was all white noise and it all seemed to make the squirrels equally frantic.
Perhaps it was the weight of all that cheese dust on my fingers today that encouraged them to fall upon the keyboard and finally type out a belated, orange ditty about the transformation of my not so new home. But I consider it to be a ray of hope for the squirrels. I just need to find one who can get it together enough to pick the cheerios off the floor.
Ok, here are some nuts the squirrels picked out for you:
The before and after (or slightly less before)
