Do you know where I can get some boxes?

When we found the new apartment, that little corner came into focus again.

Just a tiny jagged corner to get around. The one where you have to tiptoe around broken glass and rusty lockjaw-promising nails, while people are sling-shooting massive turds at you from every direction.

This little corner involved seeing the apartment and feeling my weak hope swell up from a buried place in my stomach and come up into my face and take over my mouth and my eyes, turning me into an infidel to my own good reason and experience. It involved sleepless nights of pretending it was from all the coffee I had drunk and not from the worrying that we wouldn't get it, that it wasn't all going to turn around for us, that the person that had it on hold would end up taking it.

Once it became ours for the taking, it involved hours of worrying that we would get our drawers yanked down -- once again -- by greedy mother fuckers, like the time we made a full price offer we couldn't afford on that flat in the old Jewish quarters and they said they now wanted more. (Side note of vengeance: three years later that flat sits unsold. And I try very very hard to push away fantasies of that fucker's skin rotting off and being unable to afford a dermatologist cause he can't sell his stupid flat). Or when we found the perfect penthouse on the Alameda to rent and they called us and said the flat was ours for just 300 more bucks a month. (And I try very hard to dismiss the images in my mind of the person's face getting the shit rocked out of it by my imaginary fist).

On tippy-toes we cut through the mine field armed with not caring too much if we lost another limb. Yup, just me and Stumpy. We can get by feeding each other with the toes we still have left between the two of us, we don't need anything more than this. Besides, I'm actually starting to think that the cockroaches the size of dump trucks that hang out everyday in our bathroom are kinda cute.

And so, pretending we were indifferent, shoving the feeling that bad luck was somehow following us into the back of our mind, pretending we weren't expecting lightning to strike our goddamn pen, we signed the lease.

I've been unable to sweep my thoughts up into the dustpan and find, amongst all the dirt and cat hair, the tiny missing screw holding my fucking life together.

But I think I can get to sweeping now. As soon as I get all this shit packed.

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