Dear (Down) Diary,
Sometimes I miss frozen pizzas. After coming home from long tasks that let our brains feel empty. The pink matter was scooped out like sherbet. I let the plaza mall storefronts lobotomize my worry. I had no career, no desire, no path, no worth. But the bathroom needed new rugs. And the gas tank needed an expensive splash. And by the end of an afternoon, air would press out of my ears like the bottom of a hot computer, whirring out a limp desire that whispered frozen…oven…pizza.
We were picking out a bathroom rug. We were using coupons. We saw a little vase for the living room. We held up the camel tan and sienna brown rugs side by side. Six hours later a camel tan mat made it onto the bathroom floor because the sienna was too reddish for the beige walls.
Sometimes I miss the accomplishment of nothing, where everything lightweight sank heavy in the sweat of July. I would get out of bed and feel accomplished, and by the time pour-over coffee had dripped into my mug, all this morning labor left me gratified. As the day passed through us, our big SUV wheels rolled across cooked pavement down Pulaski in the setting western sun, while the fingers of our stomachs wrinkled in ready hunger. Being so eager to preheat the oven to 425. The sun yawned past the flat dingy tops of the department stores. The deer hadn’t grazed in the cemetery fields opposite these shops since I rested in the gauzy dew of March. No questions asked, I was always here.
Mom, I must admit that sometimes I miss living with my dreams glazed over by errands and soap operas, with my hopes cooking hot and golden over the dull oven rack. Sometimes I miss our days full of nothing that could paint my resume. Sometimes I miss the days when I couldn’t stand you because it made me feel small to live a life that we built out of air. Sometimes I miss our aimlessness, our mutual diminishing, and how we’d bandage it with a frozen pizza.
—Anonymous
