Monday Morning
One of the most difficult parts of every week of my life these days is this one I’m experiencing right now. I’ve spent the weekend looking after the children, and now they’re back in school. It’s Monday morning, and I have work I have to do and work I want to do. I’ll get done what I have to get done and I’ll do some of what I want to. But I also feel like the best thing for me would be to hire someone to tie my hands and feet together, take me back to bed, and feed me sedatives until I fall asleep again and stay there for forty-eight hours.
But then, if I didn’t sit at my desk like this, what would our basement cat do with herself? She has to spend her mornings in my lap, getting up on occasion to walk across my keyboard and breaking the skin on my legs through my pants.
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I’m thinking of hiring a publicist, someone who can communicate to the world on my behalf that I’m tired, that I’m having a hard time and would like to go back to bed.
I want someone who can post photographs of coffee that looks just delicious, and potato chips, so that people will like me and remember that I’m not such a bad guy after all.
I want to hire a publicist so they can put a blanket on me. Sometimes I’m cold, and there is nothing at all that I can do.
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I have these cards that ask you questions. I got them at Target nine years ago. There’s one on the bookshelf, and it’s asking me, from over there, “What do you hoard?”
It’s a terrible question. The only answer it’s likely to elicit is a facetious one. No one thinks of themselves as hoarding anything, not unironically, and so you’ll never find out that way what they really hoard.
Like, okay, sure: I “hoard” books. I buy them when I can and I like to read them.
But I don’t really hoard books, because over the years it’s only gotten easier to let go of the ones I’ve read already or will never read.
What I really hoard are regrets. I spend about 70 percent of my waking life deep in the recesses of my mind. I spend that time sorting my regrets and categorizing them, putting them in alphabetical order, then switching to chronological. I pick them up and savor them. I put them in my mouth and talk to myself in the shower.
Sometimes I feel regret like fluid that collects in my lungs and makes it hard for me to breathe.
It makes it hard to work, like the cat who comes out of her hiding place when I go to my writing desk in the morning, and has to sit in my lap for at least an hour, or else she takes it out on the rocking chair that shares this space with me.
She has torn the upholstery on that rocking chair to shreds.
And I had a dream last night that I was buying furniture and planning to take it on a plane with me, to a big house I’d just bought, which had so many rooms in it I couldn’t remember which ones needed more furniture.
