flashing/lights

Exhaustion.

Last night I took a bus an hour to fall asleep on a bed in a clean motel with cinder block walls and get a late night knock on the dead bolt door. A two dollar chocolate cake, a quarter eaten, on a nightstand beside some Andy Warhol banana ice cream dishes from a store with things like that. Cool white sheets, crumpled around from watching cable news and sweeping away crumbs.

"Long distance relationships," the cashier says, I wonder if she thinks I'm a hooker or I'm having an affair, "oh, I understand, I'm trying to get into one of those," she says and I know she means internet dating not the glamors of cinder block motel room rendezvous.

I got up in the morning and the bus never came and I stood in the summer cold with bare legs and a half wet kind of wrinkled collared shirt. No one was up, 5 am. 6 am. I went back and woke him up, explained the situation, made phone calls. And he said "I'll drive you back" and we got coffee and listened to pumping cheesy hip hop and talked about our work/life/summer. The situation was inconvenient, and we were angry, but never at each other, and by the time we were in the drive through it didn't matter anyways.

I like him as a physical presence, how I curl into his back and sleep with my face near his heart pumping and lungs breathing, but it's the rest of it that starts to sink in as rare. How we do life together. That even though I don't need anyone to take care of me, he will take care of me, and I will take care of him, and we will figure out what to do about this, this life as a project. That both of us will meet somewhere in the middle of nowhere in a cinder block room so I can curl into his back and sleep with my face near his hear pumping and lungs breathing.

*

Work is intense, but not in a bad way, and this is a good time. Instant karma, this stuff, and the search for meaning that caused compulsions like making organic biscotti midafternoon fades a bit. Today we had free food in the last hour, the usual gourmet cookies and cherries and cheeses and crackers and various alcohol to celebrate an esteemed colleague. Perks. Tomorrow I will raid the leftovers from the fridge and not be wearing all pieces of my suit when this happens.

*

My new house is really good. It's tidy, small, and my room has this aesthetic I really like. I won't move any furniture in, the best kind of moving.