Monday mornings, your room is mine.

When you’re at work, at university, or out shopping. When you’re still asleep or sick in bed, I come back later. Just like you, I enjoy the silence, and being alone.

Your home may be your castle, but I’m the silent mouse no one notices. The one who empties your trash, washes the linoleum floor, vacuums the carpet, scrubs the bathroom. Airs your sanctuary when it’s all smoky. Sometimes I wait a while, and read your smoke. The tales it tells. Of goodbye-parties, of random sex with strangers picked up in a bar or simply on the street, of sorrow. Sorrow so deep and senseless, it can’t really be told. So I look at the lingering shadows of your addictions. The patterns they form on your drapes. You can’t fight fire with fire, didn’t you know? Or you can try, but nothing good will come of it. Estrangement from your family, from friends who don’t know you anymore, who think it’s a joke, or a phase. I know better. I also read your post-its. “Your mind is too beautiful”, “athlete, writer, jurist, anthropologist (…)”, “no food after 6pm”, “quinoa/carbs”. Is that who you are, or who you want to be? Vain attempts to find reasons why not to do it. To hang on to what? You chose the slow way because you can’t decide yet. Get better or leave it? But how do you want to get better when there’s always another setback, another disaster, another accident, another estrangement, another disappointment just waiting for the right time to strike, just after you thought you’d gotten better. So fragile. Where did your substance go? No solid matter left, only wisps of smoke, of thought, of feeling, of unbearable insecurity. Oh how I wish I could help you. But I can’t touch your stuff, only clean around it. I would like to leave you post-its, too. The things I would write. You know that people would miss you, people you care about, people who care about you right now. You know all that, but it doesn’t make any sense. Not right now. 2010 was a pretty bad year, in some ways, for all of us.

I read the titles of the books on your shelves. Did you read all those? What a curious collection.