Meditations on the Mess

I want to be a different kind of person than the one I turned out to be. I want the things I do and the way I live to make sense, to be congruent with my values, preferences, and ideal aesthetic.

I want to be neat, not too neat, just functionally, reasonably situated. My things as tools, items at hand for me to manipulate, not as an artificial environment that I live in, fabricated to distract and entertain me like a hamster in its cage.

I want to feel pretty, and I think deep down, I won’t ever feel pretty in a stable and mature way until my home does as well.

But cleaning up won’t do it anymore. I don’t live in mess, I live in squalor; the walls need to be scrubbed, scoured. The floors are overgrown with roots, the vines creeping up kitchen counters and bedside tables.

I seem to infect, inhabit, and corrupt my spaces, a symbiote, a mass with vasculature, a cancer too insidious to ever get good margins on. I’m in its bones.

This place has been animated while my body becomes superfluous, reduced to a mere go-bag of blood and body fat, my own veins acting as an IV; to leave my house feels dissociative, like I’m astral projecting into the CVS drive thru.

During the winter, when the snow is fresh and the roads not yet plowed, the host succumbs, the possessor asleep inside as muscles atrophy and open sores fester and rot and gangrene. The filth does not hibernate, only its witness. As the frost turns to dew, mummified bodies and detritus show themselves.

Extended metaphor is the tool of cowards and revisionists: my home looks like shit.