Picking Up After Him

Dearest Rachel –

Another morning of waking up to a dark room. Even as I realize that it’s now September, I’m still pretty sure that it shouldn’t be this dark when I’m waking up. Sure enough, it’s not even five o’clock yet. My subconscious superego chirps that it’s an opportune moment to prepare to go to the gym, which I put down fast. After all, I’d just done that yesterday morning, thank you very much, so I could claim that I’d done my two-a-week duty already. At the same time, I reminded it that, as the place didn’t open until five-thirty, I’d be sitting around outside the place waiting to get it; if I’m going to hand around somewhere doing nothing, I’d just as soon be here at home – and better yet, in bed, since I’d only gone off to sleep at around ten-thirty, after updating the screensaver on the television to pick up all of the photos and pictures I’d uploaded to the cloud (you know, I was wondering why I never saw certain random events when it switched to the screensaver after ten minutes or so of inactivity. Guess it just didn’t realize what all was out there).

Besides, for the first time this week (although, admittedly, not the first time ever in this weight loss journey), I was actually waking up with a weight under two-forty (albeit only just), despite having dined at the folks’ place last night. So I didn’t even see myself in a position to need to go as some weird and twisted form of penance. I realize that, before the end of this month, that two-forty benchmark is going to be evidence of backsliding and I will treat it as such, but for now, where I am is quite good enough. It’s certainly a good place to be to start off another month in which I hope to drop another ten before it’s over.

But to mollify my internal personal trainer, I offer the half-hearted suggestion that I might – just might, mind you – stop by there today on my way back from the ‘office.’ It’s not as if I have much real work to get done today – yes, the new month has started, but it’s too soon to try to close out August – and I haven’t been able to find any more videotapes of us (or you – I personally don’t recall Bill having his camera out all that often when I was around) to convert to digital format. Then again, I still have what I already have, and I could certainly spend plenty of time trying to extract what you said on camera; I’ve got a long way to go before I amass fifty minutes of you talking. So, while I may be there all day, it’s possible that I’ll get tired of the process and head home with time to spare at the fitness center.

After all, it’s not like I’m going to be going on a date or anything tonight…

***

Somehow, this promise proves to be sufficient for my conscience, and it allows me to drift back off to sleep without even forcing me to get up (that weigh-in happened an hour or so later; the promise and the reminder of what I’d already done was all that it needed in order to relent), but it proceeds to send me off to a place both familiar and yet not. Because that’s how dreams work, whether my superego has anything to do with them or not.

As with the beginning of this week, I found myself considering Kevin; after all, the Labor Day weekend is just about upon us, when we would otherwise be expecting to welcome him here. Only this time around, my subconscious had apparently come to terms with the fact that he, like you, is gone; but now, for whatever reason, the responsibility fell upon us to pick things up after him. So Daniel and I were sifting through his place, attempting to clean it up and out, and take care of various paperwork regarding to his demise ~ all of which, in real life, I suspect his mom and stepdad have already long since taken care of. And by way of comparison, by this time in my process with you, I’d already gotten the house cleaned up down to the crawl space. Of course, I had professional help in the form of Jan to direct me – and I was living in the middle of that clutter – so maybe I’m an outlier in comparison to them.

But either way, I was trying to clean up his house like I’d learned from her. And I should mention that I did learn from her; by the time we visited him last year, I’d gotten so used to the relative neatness of the house that his place seemed distressingly askew to me in comparison. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to not say anything, as I knew that I had no real grounds to complain about the place; just because I had gotten accustomed to a orderly home was no reason to impose my newfound standards on anyone else. After all, he and the girls were friends of ours because they were (and are), among other things, willing to tolerate the mess we lived in. For me to disparage them for their messes would be uncivil and hypocritical, to say the very least.

But with him now gone – and the house needing to be cleaned up in any event, as I expect that his sister (who owns the place, and was renting it to him on what I presume to have been peppercorn terms, because family) would want it presentable for potential buyers, I found myself picking up after him, trying to sort through what could be salvaged and get rid of that which had no use to anyone other than himself.

For whatever reason, I was about to take a load of his old clothes, and send them down a chute to the laundry room – only to remember that, like us, his ‘laundry room’ is on the ground floor, in an alcove right by the garage. Unlike either of our childhood homes, neither of us have a laundry chute. Heck, Kevin didn’t even have a basement in his house. So what was this hole in his closet I was sending his old clothes down?

And it was this questions that snapped my suspension of disbelief, and proceeded to wake me up. By realizing this wasn’t Kevin’s place at all, I ultimately shunted myself back to reality, but at least I had an extra ninety minutes of shut-eye that I’d benefited from. At the same time, I was wondering if my subconscious wasn’t letting me know that I needed to do some laundry over the weekend; it doesn’t seem like there’s much that absolutely needs to be done, but if I work up another sweat, maybe…?

Anyway, that’s my morning thus far, honey. Keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m probably still going to need it.