Bedroom Furniture

I can’t get the breath to pull the curtains back, let in the January 10am sunlight, glistening snow tracks and shivering trees, bare and waiting for fruit and flower days, play days and rain days. Instead, I sit, back against a stiff bed, ass on the carpet, wedged between furniture I don’t much like. It’s alright, but man, thinking about what we paid for it and what else I’d get if I had another go.

My bedroom furniture is really the last of my regrettable lapses, I’ve got whole fields of woes to trample, squawking backward with a gigantic dumbbell balancing on my head, fishing line tied in front, dangling a blinking neon sign with no words, just weirdish animated faces and stuck out tongues that tell my whole story:

“What the hell is she trying to do?”

Exactly. My point.

Symbolism in odd, slow, cumbersome motion. No one’s around to stop and stare, but for the rare passer-by, gluestick eyes and quizzical pane, they watch for a highway second, a grown girl in a field of regret trying to accomplish a spectacular nothing with no words, a dumbbell [I don’t even have the shapely thighs to prove it], and a sign pointing nowhere. Wonder why she's going backwards? Then reaffix themselves properly forward, moving fast in fast moving car through a still shot world.

“Eureka! I’ve got it!"

Epiphany bubbles, a pot of boiling tea in my brain, and I realize that proper use of my upper extremities and clenching my gut, like waiting for a big ‘ole sock in the padded doozer, keeps me upright, steady as a pistol, dumbbell in place like an unshakeable pendulum.

“Life can’t get much better than this, to be doing what I do and doing it very well.”

I smile at the sign, faces mocking me like a sock puppet with a hand shoved up its ass, waiting for its next line.