to scrape me empty like a vanilla bean
I am dating again – well, the one date, with a man who didn’t ask me any questions about myself. It ruined the pace of things. I had to maintain a constant brainstorm of conversation topics, mostly replicating material from his profile – falsified – he’d lied about his height. “What do you do for a living?”, “Where are you from originally?”, “Do you drink much coffee?” I asked, and he said optometrist, Baltimore, no, though we were in a coffee shop and he was drinking coffee, which, iced and milk-pale, had touched his breath already, that dad-smell. “I might do that at home,” I said, pointing at the glossy violet quotes stenciled on the walls of the café, letters in a dissonant overlap. I began tearing my napkin into tiny pieces. I didn’t know how to end a date properly – was thirty minutes enough? The napkin was indigo blue with “Indigo,” the name of the café, patterned over it. I tore it to separate the letters – i, n, d, i, g, … – and formed a lush pile in front of me, until he answered one of my questions with unanticipated enthusiasm, and his dad-smelling breath blew the pieces over me in a sudden napkin rain.
Afterward, I found bits of it caught in my hair. I combed them out with a slow flourish. The cat watched for a little while and then fell asleep, curled by the window like a seashell. At the sound of cars, her ears flickered in sleep, affected by the world in only this small way. At what degree of loneliness does owning a cat become a cliché? I don’t want to leave our apartment again. I’d rather stay here and do domestic things – bleach down surfaces, iron your clothing, clean the tarnished silver with a chemical reaction, boil a chicken carcass into stock. I want to research the history of the clawfoot bathtub, to discover where it got its cruel, curled feet. I want to paint the rooms, roll a creaking roller over the gray wall. That’s the part I was most looking forward to – I would have painted the back of your shirt when you weren’t looking. There wouldn’t have been any brainstorming, or any new dates with uncurious strangers, to scrape me empty like a vanilla bean. We would shut the shutters, and if an ambulance sirened violently outside, it wouldn’t be headed here.
