The reorg
15 August 2011 06:00 AM Categories: Writing prompts
The things I’ve uncovered. The things I had forgotten about, had jammed in the back corners of my mind and my underwear drawer. Ancient, redundant, and obsolete forms of birth control. Orphan plugs to long-gone electronics. A disposable camera two-thirds finished with photos from my December in San Francisco, the days of my brief internship at Greens, shots of my little rental in the Inner Richmond, where I slept poorly with thoughts of the surprise baby to come and worries about the ghost I knew was floating somewhere above me, somewhere in the house or in the air. My fear and my newly pregnant state meant that I took midnight bathroom breaks with my eyes closed, my hands feeling in front of me for the wall and the light switches.
I’ve gone through files, too, the piles of stuff that I’ve meant to deal with for a long time now. We have reams of house-buying papers, many redundant since the short sale took nine months (oh, like a gestation, the closing practically a stillbirth) and we got duplicates of things, the same mailings only slightly different, for months. There’s the baby stuff, with the baby almost a first grader now. Yesterday afternoon, the depressing Mad Men on in the background, my new addiction, I went through the boy’s file to divvy it up. There were doctor’s reports from his various “well baby” appointments, vaccination records, the hospital bill. And there, tucked in with his stuff was an ultrasound picture, his first photograph. I picked it up, then saw the due date printed on it: January 23, 1986. Different baby. Different life and death, not so painful now, but still, part of my history.
So I comfort myself with thick red wine. I allow myself tears and then move on to the next box, the next pile of papers. I shop for new underwear, thinking of the smooth fabric of microfiber bras, the enhancement of cleavage, the way I can present what little I have to the world. As if the world cares. But I do. I’m going to move on and look good and I’m fine, or I will be fine, and at 5:00 p.m. today or maybe earlier, I will open the next bottle of wine.
From the prompt "Comfort food." Here is an earlier take on the same prompt.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by anandham.
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