I-ing and mopping

There are things in this world that can only be accomplished through sadness. Cleaning the entire apartment, for example. Vaccuuming beneath every chair, table, desk, throw rug. Scrubbing the entire bathroom. Dusting every surface, beneath each knick knack, polishing each piece of furniture. Cleaning out and reorganizing the closet that was never so much as "used" as it was ignored--full of the things that could be gotten around to later. Rearranging all the various little trinkets and accessories--moving flower vases, candles, coffee table books, regular books, decorative boxes, photos and yarn and knitting needles, finding a home for all the lip glosses and lipsticks, the 1/2 full bottles of perfumes and scents, the thousands and thousands of Bic pens.

And the list of things to clean gets shorter and shorter until the only thing left is mopping the kitchen floor. And although there are lesson plans to be written, knitting projects to start, to complete, to re-do, books to be read, although there are a hundred other things to do, it is impossible to mop the kitchen floor. Because even though lesson plans need to be written, and books for school need to be read, everything that comes after mopping the kitchen floor is just busywork to avoid the inevitable.

Which is the realization that I cleaned the apartment for a visitor who will never visit, for a knock that will never sound upon my door and startle me, for a phone that will never ring with a familiar voice on the line, saying "You'll never believe where I am--what's the gate code?"

And we defer so many things. We defer our dreams, we defer the deaths of dreams, and half the time we live in the betweens, neither here nor there, neither dead nor death. neither being nor becoming. There is no grammar to describe this action that is non-action, that is moving without movement, that is motion in stillness.

I want so many things. I want the phone call, the voice on the other end of the line, the knock on my door. I want the dreams, and spaces in the betweens, and the moving that is motion, and the stillness that is still. I want the breathing that is saturated with sunlight and the breathing that is soaked with moonlight. I want the either and I want the or and I want the and and I want the never and I want the always. I want the everything and I want the nothing and I want the something in the middle.

And I know I want too much. But desire is like that. Desire desires the absent, Desire desires Desire. Language is desire, and breathing is desire, and living is desire, and dying is desire. Creating is desire and destructing is desire, and creating is destructing, and destructing is creating. I want to be the -ing. The endING, the beginING, but always the -ing. I want to be I-ing.

There are things in this world that can only be accomplished through sadness. I have the mop (or, rather, the Swiffer). I have the cleaner (or, rather, the cleaning pad). And I'm sure that some of the stains, some of the dirt, some of the footprints on this floor are yours.

And I am mopping.