Undeserved

You walk down the street towards your apartment, rummaging in your purse for the keys that you know are there, that must be there, before admitting you forgot to grab them this morning. You call your roommate to be let into the house and think of how pathetic you must look on the other side of the door. You find the missing keys under the fleece you wore yesterday and the unfinished book you finally tossed aside for the trash novel you knew would be an easy, empty read. For two hours you sit on your unmade bed ignoring the laundry, crumpled papers and old soda cans around your bedroom. You check the internet for entertainment, for distraction, for procrastination. You do not do your taxes, or pay your bills, or call the bank. You do not chip away at the massive tower of smelly dishes sitting in the kitchen sink, or vacuum the living room or even put away the air mattress (still inflated from two weeks ago) that takes up 3/4 of the living room floor. You move the bottle of Kahlua you poured a drink from last night under the coffee table so that you can move your laptop with you onto the couch.

At 8:30, you finally eat dinner - an egg and cheese bagel and a can of diet soda. You do not call your mother, whom you haven't spoken to in almost three weeks because you keep forgetting to email her at work. You do not email the boy you have gone on two dates with who eagerly admitted his interest in you on Sunday. You do not try to figure out how to tell him you are still in love with someone undeserving.

And then your father calls to check in and you push aside the guilt for not having called him first and you answer his questions about your secure job and your impressive-in-this-economy raise and how well you handled your boss's two week absence and then you listen as he tells you that his sandwich shop went under and how your troubled, pig headed brother has an arrest warrant out for him on this side of the country and how the mother who you miss so much it aches called him a horrible parent for not wanting to put up the $500 for the courts so your brother can get a driver's license on the coast he ran away to last month. And you remember to breathe when your father teases you about wanting to crash your birthday party next month and you don't yell and you tell him you love him too and you thank him when he tells you how proud he is of you for doing so well.

But then you crawl into bed, onto the sheets that need washing, and you think of your father and his praise and you cry for 15, 20, 25 minutes because really, well, the only thing you accomplished today was changing the batteries in your electric toothbrush and buying a train pass and tomorrow probably won't be much different.