Be Thankful

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself. –Charles Dickens


She lay in bed, sunlight creeping over the horizon like a cat hunting. The weekend, a blessed break from the mind-numbing uniformity of the Monday through Friday shift, and there was nothing to pull her from the embers of her dreams, nothing to drag her from the bright lights and cacophony into the haunted and drawn shadows of the day other than the drive to do something with the perpetually waning hours where the shadows couldn’t exist. Usually nothing, except for a doctor’s appointment this day, but that was rare.
Outside her door existed a caring boyfriend that doted and sent flowers just because it was a day ending in –y, friends that bought drinks and chattered like monkeys and nitpicked like vultures, family that stayed blissfully away just far enough to keep her out of the insane asylum and just close enough for her to question what it would take to get into there. Outside held a job that paid good enough to make the ends meet with a little leftover to repair what the work had broken, where she was in charge of making sure things flowed in and out a revolving door of numbers. Outside sat endless, twisting, shifting, moving social circles that never stopped moving and flitting about enough for her to find her feet, and where she started and others began.
Inside her house, shadows clung to corners as they draped and settles like a layer of dust so fine you can just barely feel the grit running your finger over the wood and wallpaper. A memento here, a picture there…in just her journey from the bed to the icy bathroom, she stumbled over shadows of ideas barely spoken to. The cup that sloshed with stale water, glazed and finished back when her just-for-the-art-credit college pottery class had fertilized her unfurling creativity between classes on the invisible hand and the difference between right and wrong. The t-shirt crawling out of the tipped hamper onto the floor, the faded cracked logo of an ex’s rock band, an ex to whom she had given her heart for six weeks before her friends had deemed him unsuitable for their lifestyle and hustled him back to the street corner where she had found him.
She pressed the answering machine button as she passed, her father’s voice crackling on the air. “Hey monkey butt…just seeing if you’re up yet…” “Hey lazy bones, get out of bed…” “Alright, so you’re apparently being a bum today, since this is the fifth time I’ve called and you haven’t picked up. So I’m going out to buy that stuff for the Halloween baskets that we talked about last time. Do you really think Rebecca and Jenny’s kids will both like it? I know Jenny is okay with me sending stuff for the kids, but do you think Rebecca will be? I don’t know…anyway, haven’t heard from either today so it’s not like they really give a crap about me so… call me when you get this. Love you…” Like hell she’ll call, she thought. Not to get caught up in a three plus hour conversation about him.
She found a half-used jar of body scrub tucked behind her 50% off body wash and the same shampoo/conditioner she had used since she was 14, a scrub the saleswoman had promised would make her skin glow like the Virgin Mary in an icon. One sniff told her it was probably as old as the song blaring over her radio, and she let it sink back into its hiding spot.
The shadows trailed after her down the stairs, twining around her feet, her arms, her neck, in a haphazard attempt to trip her up, to send her tumbling after them.
They waited and pounced by the little table in her hallway, from a book of poems, little yellow scrap of paper waving to end its jail sentence next to Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and Langston Hughes’ “Theme from English B”, relegated to marking that spot after a book circle spent too much time actually talking about the selected books and their literary and social impact.
They poked in her fridge, hiding anything they didn’t know the name of like soy milk and mole sauce behind comforting favorites like Cherry Coke Zero and celery.
She leaned against the counter, ankles crossed as the coffee pot patiently waited for the water to meander down through the hodge-podge of leftover grounds, and sniffed at the eastern breeze. Notes of cinnamon, apples, cheddar…glancing over the backyards proved her assumption that her neighbor was pulling a pie out of the oven with his windows flung open showing the mess of her kitchen. Cans…jars…shadows lurking in corners. The neighbor himself, laughing too loud and hard, the one whose girlfriend dutifully toted a piece of the pie over to her and under the rote praise admitted that he had done nothing more really than slap some extra spice in a prepared mix and dumped it all in a frozen Pillsbury crust and topped it all with Cabot sharp cheddar while chewing on chipped nails, the one who left his clothes outside to dry overnight and made faces when his mother admonished him over the blaring radio about spending less time with his bowling league and too much overtime in the office.
At least, she hears the shadows purr, at least we are not his shadows. Heaven only knows what he regrets. Be thankful you are ours, and you do not belong to his. The pot beeps twice, sending the shadows scampering back to their holes and nests in fear of the brief moment of awareness before slinking back out to wind around her and trail up her side. Be thankful, the Greek chorus chanted in a low breath as its leader wrapped its arms and hands around her. Be thankful it is only us that follow you in the daylight and before dreams can chase us to our own rest. Be thankful you are ours and we are yours for you should have no one better than us. Be thankful that you are not him or her or god forbid your mother. Be thankful you cannot speak to us because you know that we just won’t listen, because you know how lonely it would be without our company, because you know how to speak to us buried inside what we try to cloak. Just…be thankful.
She pours the coffee in a black travel mug, and lidded it. The hours are ticking by, the shadows coaxed, don’t let them go without being productive. She grabbed a Pop-tart from the pantry and slid out the front door, red coat draped over her arm just in case. The daylight’s fading…be thankful we shadows can follow…