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eye_of_a_catThe crack in my bedroom ceiling had spread this morning. Most of the way across the room, then a sharp right turn, then into the outside wall. I'm too high up to be able to see whether it's showing up in the brickwork or not, but I'm not sure I'd look even if I wasn't. So I slept on the sofa last night, and I'll keep sleeping on the sofa, where I was lying awake in the dark, laughing about it. I've held on to my singleness with a talon-like grip, I get jittery weird if I even share a bed on a regular enough basis to have my own side, I'm in my own place all by myself, and... here I am, sleeping on the sofa anyway. Yes, I can indeed start a fight in an empty room! Cower before my, er, skill.
And it's occurred to me since then that if I was nineteen I would be writing a poem about this. Two or three places in ten years? Well, people move. Four or five? That's bad luck, maybe, but these things happen. But eleven, as I've had? Much though I might bitch and whine about moving, and much though I could give you a good reason for every single one of those moves, I can't even try to pretend that hitting eleven doesn't have something to do with me, for better or worse.
So if I was nineteen, I'd be writing a poem about watching the crack in my bedroom ceiling. And about how my landlord, who should be far more worried than he is, never wanted to investigate properly because then he'd have to put all his energies into shoring things up and warning future buyers. And about how the whole thing is going to fall down at some point, in some huge shower of plaster and rafters, and about how it doesn't have to be my crisis, because it isn't my house. I'm just living here; I'll shake off the plaster dust when I go. And yet, the cracks in the ceiling come from the same roots as the warped, uneven floors, the same ones I'd have seen as a warning if I wanted to buy, but saw as a feature I loved because I didn't. So that would have been the poem I wrote, back when I didn't think metaphors needed to be subtle.
And it's occurred to me since then that if I was nineteen I would be writing a poem about this. Two or three places in ten years? Well, people move. Four or five? That's bad luck, maybe, but these things happen. But eleven, as I've had? Much though I might bitch and whine about moving, and much though I could give you a good reason for every single one of those moves, I can't even try to pretend that hitting eleven doesn't have something to do with me, for better or worse.
So if I was nineteen, I'd be writing a poem about watching the crack in my bedroom ceiling. And about how my landlord, who should be far more worried than he is, never wanted to investigate properly because then he'd have to put all his energies into shoring things up and warning future buyers. And about how the whole thing is going to fall down at some point, in some huge shower of plaster and rafters, and about how it doesn't have to be my crisis, because it isn't my house. I'm just living here; I'll shake off the plaster dust when I go. And yet, the cracks in the ceiling come from the same roots as the warped, uneven floors, the same ones I'd have seen as a warning if I wanted to buy, but saw as a feature I loved because I didn't. So that would have been the poem I wrote, back when I didn't think metaphors needed to be subtle.
