there are mice in my walls.
i hear their tiny feet and their tiny hands scuffling around, scratching at the floorboards and chewing up the drywall like popcorn. its all around the place, all night long and every single morning. whenever i wake up, i stumble into the kitchen and look for tiny little mouse droppings just so i KNOW those little fiends are still around, still slowly decimating the structure, still surviving on the food scraps we drop underneath the countertop. it ain’t that nice of a place, don’t get me wrong, but i’d really prefer less antisocial uninvited houseguests. yknow, ones that you could actually order a pizza with and talk about bergman’s obssesion with balls or lacanian structuralism and smoke a few turks with out the fire escape.
we tried to get rid of them!!
so many exterminators have come in and out and in and out and told us time after time that “welllll sirrrrr, it looks like it should be taken care of now.” and “looks like they were getting in through the radiator - i’ll go ahead and plug that for you :)"
and every time, without fail, after a few nights of mice-free solitude and quiet, i’d hear those scampering degenerates come back clawing even more violently at the back of the fridge and shitting behind the tv and waltzing around the kitchen.
its a war we’ve lost at this point, and i guess just gotta come to terms with it. maybe eventually they’ll realize that we don’t even really have that much food, and that our fridge is only just michelob ultras and diet coke and yogurt.
but maybe, just maybe, they’re not here for the food. after all, we’re the ones who go on living like this, in this grimy little six-floor-walkup and this greaseball part of town, with that sickly air of cancer patients around us and those elderly new yorkers dodging ambulances and baby strollers down 1st avenue. maybe they just like our hanging plants or rj’s paintings or the dusty books i keep piled around the kitchen table. maybe they like to look out from the fire escape to the tiny piece of the skyline we have, and let the glistening city lights swallow them up in the sprawling tides of sound and amber, the moaning of the river colliding against the color of ash and white blistering the streets and swaying trees. maybe they just like to watch movies with us and walk down to EJ’s for french toast and vodka shots and stuffy old cigarettes.
in my dreams recently i’ve been seeing swarms of locusts and cicadas, around the creaky missouri farmhouse that i visited one summer as a kid. it was my grandparents farm, chickens and cows and a great big green grove of trees at the edge of the barbed wire fence at the other side of the yard. i stepped on poison ivy that summer and had to stay inside and watch aladdin on vhs behind a big bowl of steamy grits and eggs, and all the while i could only hear buzzing from the bugs and birds singing and old leaves crackling on the roof. every time the back screen door would open, i’d smell the soppy river air come wafting through, with sweet summer dew and the freshness of the thicket. i think about that air so much.
when we were driving across the midwest in July, a full truck of unwashed young people and beer and food and all of my earthly, prized junk in a little trailer, we would stop by all the little towns we could just so i could see that farmhouse i remember, again and again. they were all such different places but i could see in them all equally those soft warbled memories and every bit of warmth i could recall from being so young and sick and new to every bit of pain that came my way. old pain is just a memory. a memory you can only really remember when you have to feel it again, like an old friend calling you out of the blue and bringing back all those sickly sensations you felt when you saw them last. all the while we drove and we laughed about it and my lungs felt full for the first time in a while. even if we sold the farmhouse five years ago and even if my grandpa died 700 miles away and even if the pain isn’t new anymore i still love every dream where the locusts and cicadas buzz like hell and the steaming grits smell like old, tired floorboards and open screen doors.
the other night rj and i took the train to brooklyn and the stations were filled with young people like me, passing joints and scuttling like bugs into the brooklyn monarch where we saw some really, really egregious ass techno. not even techno, to be honest. but there i bought a $13 vodka soda and we sat in the garden feeling the wind swirl the smoke around and somehow i learned about the indonesian mafia from this girl we went with. some crrrrrazy shit, there! as we were walking back to the subway i looked up and thought i could see stars. tiny, speckles of light sprinkled across the misty night sky. its been so long since i’ve seen that dark, sparkling void, but it was all just as familiar as its always been. when we got home we realized that neither of us had brought our keys. i sat there, staring at the closed, unmoving door. no keys, no bed, 2 am. we angrily choked down a smoke on the way to the leasing office, but it was no use. no one back ‘till 5.
so, with nowhere else to go, we walked down sutton, across the FDR walkway, and sat on a bench on the bank of the east river, the sounds of cars swelling between each ocean wave. we sat in silence, too tired, too frustrated to speak. the warm summer air and the gentle sea of city lights across the water, in queens, carrying us into the earliest hours of daylight. i thought of nothing but fuzzy hands, as the sun inched over the horizon, spilling golden across each cement building face, until all was covered and dappled in light, and we decided, with sleepy eyes, to walk home.
my depression, maybe, comes only when i stop seeing the world for what it is,
i could spend a million more nights staying up despicably late scouring through internet archives and old flickr profiles until i start hearing sounds in my apartment, and as long as i get to wake up the next day to a bright, cleansing sun, i would feel happy, and i would know that there is so much i don’t know and probably never will. its tuff, being a quiet ass kid with so much alienation packed between his bones that even the easiest of conversations seem like tightrope walks. i can’t help but love them all, though. the slimy, greasy degenerates i talk to online, the old bodega ocks selling x from the deli counter, the old women who want to talk to me when i’m just getting the damn mail. leave me alone!!
but i love them all too much. so much that i will sit on the apartment stoop and glance at the passerbys and feel my eyes well up with fear that one day i won’t be happy to see a human being. i get so afraid that one day, somehow, all the hope and care i have for those people i meet will slip, and i’ll become bitter, resentful or worst, alienating.
but either way i go back inside, and i climb the six floor walk up, and i wash the smell of cigarettes away, and i sit at my desk and watch the pigeons land on the fire escapes, building little nests in the shade of the window ac units, and i wonder if the mice that i live with enjoy this view as much as i do.