Vacancy

We clean. We sneeze through dust clouds and wade through the years of trinkets piled into this tiny Greenwich village apartment. The big interior design site wants to come by to photograph our home, and it doesn't take long to realize how much grime remains in corners unseen. She frets, I delight in the open windows, the higher ceilings. Daylight savings tricks me into thinking the day is young, and I adore forgetting dinner, weariness, while my hands smell of softsoap and clean.

She erases every trace of me in the bedroom, and I let her. How proud she is of her home. We joke of the madness of the house, squirrels on the fire escape and santa clause salt shakers in March. In the end it's an apartment 25 years in the making; we are who we are, with all our eccentricities. I go into her apartment and I think how much potential it has, if only... she says of the neighbor, and perhaps that's how we all feel. How much easier to find flaws in others, to say why don't they just..?, and how hard to do the same for oneself.

I roll silently in my self-righteousness before I try to shake it off, again. In the end, it's too lovely an opportunity to revel in the clear windows and polished porcelain, to waste time making yours what is not.