kitchen.

It’s midday and I am cleaning the kitchen because I am convinced that in the two years I have had this particular kitchen, I have never really cleaned it. Not really.

Moths fly from the bins that hold little plastic baggies of cumin and allspice and curry. A family or two of spiders dance in webs that may have been in the family for generations. I feel like all kinds of bugs are biting me.

I find the charger to the old purple dirt devil while I am using the red one to clear out the webs. I suck up a pregnant spider and it gets stuck in the sucker hole so I have to pound the vacuum against the granite floor and wonder if the lady is going to birth a thousand spiders inside of the damn thing. I think that now that I have two of them, I can throw one away. I then chide myself for even thinking about being so wasteful. Maybe I’ll just leave it in the alley for parts.

I find three or four re-buys of plastic wrap, aluminum foil, some kind of herbal cleanse and tums. I am having a hard time executing all of the moths and as I swat each one I watch as it turns into a sort of dust in the sunlight streaming through the backdoor windows.

I get to my cookbooks and they stare at me, defeated. Forgotten. Each one reminds me of a mini-series of stories. The notes I made because a friend loved my shepherd’s pie. A thoughtful dedication written by someone I used to know inside of another. Later, the same person deceived me with nearly the same level of eloquence.

And I am sitting amongst all these cans of tomatoes and boxes of spaghetti in a green terry cloth bathrobe covered in dust and cobwebs and exploding into tears. Head in my hands. Holding the purple cookbook that I was so proud of owning. Holding those old memories and feelings of joy that I felt when creating something with love. Feeling disappointed in my lack of care for these precious things. My lack of care in general.

I remember things I love and somehow forgot. In that, there is something real.