snags

ORIGINALLY POSTED January 01, 2023

my brother's sweater for christmas came ripped so my dad asked me to mend it. i'm not good at mending, but i do it anyway. 

before my brother was born i had two bedrooms. one for my toys and one for my bed. when he was born i apparently threw a fit about giving up the room, so my parents opened up the storage room and made his nursery there. i still have two bedrooms, but now one is for my bed and the other is my "office". i feel funny calling it that, but it's a room full of old furniture and decorated with my tchotchkes and souvenir posters. my house was passed down from my dad's dad to my dad, and was built for him and his three siblings and great aunt, so now we just have too many bedrooms to deal with. so one is my "office".

i have a huge wooden desk that was my grandpa's graduation gift when he got his phd. now it's full of my crafting supplies. i sit in my old aunt's chair that we got when she died. my brother's sweater looks like shit but at least it doesn't have a hole in it anymore. i put away the spool of thread and for a second i'm fascinated by the colorful pool of loose threads that weave and tangle in the bottom of my desk drawer. they have their own little world. i had a similar awe to arrangements of yarn skeins and full laundry hampers. and champagne towers. and ant hills. and weaved cloth. and petri dishes and rorschach tests and koi ponds and birthday cakes and those 5g towers that look like trees. you could give me a dictionary and i could annotate it into a new religion.

i showed my mom the sweater and she agreed it looked like shit. i went downstairs to find my brother and my dad said he wasn't home, my old neighbors who moved away like five years ago were in town and he went to go visit them. when we were kids i never thought twice about how he spent everyday for years at their house. i guess i never thought about how he has life that i never saw. that's obvious but i never applied it to him. now when i see him i just wonder where he's been.

when i think about old lovers it feels dreamlike, it's a world with only two witnesses. and then you never speak to the other witness so you have to rely entirely on your own memory for it to even have existed. and then with the gentle lull of time it just goes away. 

that was just on my mind, that's all.

last night i found myself drunk and under the arm of another drunkard, who was blond and skies in the colorado winters and takes summer trips to kanazawa and has a personal library on museum history and the other unofficial twenty-first-century-right-of-passage-liberal-arts, tucked away in the corner of a dark room. i thought his tie was cute and he said i had the voice of a good singer so i said fuck it and sat with him. i remember somewhere in conversation trying to compensate for the little i had to talk about by telling him i spread myself thin. i referred to myself as a "jack of all trades, master of none". i played tennis for a year because i liked the uniforms but i wasn't good. i've been bird watching twice but i can't identify any other calls than a chickadee. i can mend a hole in a sweater if you don't mind it looking wrinkled.

this is something i've always been a bit embarrassed by but this time after saying it, it felt good.