The money saved on rent, on rolling her own cigarettes, on plastic-bottled liquor all went to clothes. To stylish, outlandish, belle-of-the-ball clothes. Dresses with petticoats. Jackets of varying lengths. And shoes. Dear god, those stacks of shoes. Some weeks it would all hang pristine in the hallway closet, between the galley kitchen and the sliding-glass-door-ed living room. Other times, strewn in piles of tulle and silk and wool, like some giant textile-digesting animal had been left alone in the place for a week and never walked. All of the clothes that never saw the air beyond her dry-walled world. Out there, black slacks and a green apron did the job. Sometimes that hoody from an old boyfriend that smelled like any brand of cigarettes but hers and which I fucking hated.
She never dressed up for me. Or anyone, as best I could tell.
She didn’t even own a TV and I’d never seen her cook. Grinning plastic bags declaring their thanks would leer up from the trash. Stacked forts defended the refrigerator’s interior with Styrofoam walls. I was never not surprised to discover it was day or night at the front door. If you asked me how we passed the time, I couldn’t answer. Only that we did and in whirling, haphazard stretches.
One assumes someone else has wondered that if there’s a difference between boredom and love, its not one easily pegged.
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