Friday, November 1, 2013

(on vacuuming)

There is a glass bowl filled with tiny pumpkins. There is a plant growing from three fat bulbs next to a rock. There is a circle of marble milky with indistinct memories.

I do not know if I am saying goodbye to me, or if I am leaving me, or if one of us is merely going into hiding for a while. I do not know if either of us plans, at some point, to return. I do not know if I am supposed to feel sad or uncomfortable or cling to my ankles until I have dragged myself to my forehead and swallowed me. I do not know if I am supposed to allow change to happen or to fish my boxing gloves out of the closet and get to work. Hiya. Hiya.

For now I will choose to accept the fact that this evening I dogeared a magazine article comparing the merits of various vacuum cleaners. Do I go bagless? Handheld? Roomba? These are questions which somehow interest me, despite having never purchased a vacuum cleaner in my life, and despite knowing that it is a privilege to vacuum and, in many ways, an act of utter non-necessity.

For now I will choose to relish the fact that there is meaning to be found even in vacuuming, that perhaps it is not vacuuming that is silly but I who has been silly all these years to catalog certain actions as somehow more meritorious than others. As if meaning needed to be rationed. As if it were not infinite.