ennui.institute

Nine: House

I'm staring at the backs of my hands, but not really, I'm staring into the space just before my hands begin, and having one of those moments. I could be doing something with this time, but my mind is an hourglass tipping back and forth, marking pointless time. I break from inaction to start the kettle. I sit down and I'm on Mastodon instead, and then I hear the water fully boiling, shit, so I turn it off and let it settle down a bit. When I remember it, it'll be too cold to use. We are buying a house again. I don't remember how to really make coffee, the smell is off from how it used to be. Yesterday, I wrote a check and took it to our realtor who lives in some sort of colonial remembrance, big, too big, and she said she's excited that we're excited. The bank emails me to say, great, thanks, congrats, and good luck. The coffee is done, so I take the grounds to the trash out in the hall. I wish I could compost it, but I'm at the office and I've never had the kind of garden output that would utilize any amount of active composting. I'm thinking about growing vegetables again, but I get a notification from Discord, and I've lost ten minutes and the coffee is colder, not brewed properly, then a Mastodon notification, and the native wildflower garden we inherited with our current house overgrows and intrudes on anything that can be climbed. Magnificent grasses threaten to outgrow the street lamp, which stopped growing a while ago, and we let them go to see if they can do it. It's a parenting style I don't recommend. My child is four, and I fall asleep screaming that the detached defeat of the world is inching, footing, yarding toward him. Then it gets me and the new house has a great sunny spot for tomatoes, I tell him, and we're going to plant some as soon as we move in, and I'll put up a new swing set, and there will be new friends who might claw him across the face again, but it's a shit-poor canvas that never gets a little scarred. I don't remember how to really plant tomatoes, but we have that compost bin we bought the last time we moved, and we will fill it back up, and the tomatoes will die on the vine if we're lucky.

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