— tapioca world tour

We cleaned out her late grandfather’s late wife’s apartment in the Prudential all day Saturday. The whole place was filled with dust mites and trash and furniture from the 60s. We put on rubber gloves and bug repellent and went to work, dissecting the life of a secretive old woman who left behind salad tongs and silver platters and china teacups and who left no one behind to appreciate it. Some stuff was her husband’s, and now one of his modern art prints hangs in my kitchen, his blown-glass orange vase lives on my table, a French thermostat dice-shaped pen holder made of amber sits on my desk at work. “I don’t want any of this stuff,” my roommate said. “It’s dead peoples’ things. It creeps me out.”

“At least we kind of know who these people were,” I said. “It’s better than buying dead peoples’ things at a thrift shop, not knowing where they came from.” What’s fascinating is how quickly life comes and goes and how fiercely we hold on to the things we acquire, even when they gather dust. By the time I’m 90, if I live that long, I don’t want to own anything. Maybe a bed, some eccentric rings, some colorful boots. Maybe an ice cream scoop, but that’s it.

And now it’s El Dia del Amor, not that every day isn’t full of love. The kids gave me extra Valentines they’d made. I put their paper affection in my back pocket and forgot about it. That’s a metaphor, people.

Now that the moon is boiling
like the blood where it swims

the claw marks of those
who preceded us across this burning floor

- John Yau, from Borrowed Love Poems

Thinking too hard about this, it almost makes me choke; now the bricks are swept clean first with a fine mist, then an unrelenting rain. We’re stuck under an awning again.

And I try various tactics to convince you to love this place as blindly as I do, which is like trying to convince a hungry man to eat. It’s pouring and we’re on North Second Street and my feet feel like sleeping dogs which,

when you eat octopus later, I have nightmares about. What now? I don’t have this city anymore, you don’t have your secrets anymore, we only have a comforting car ride in the dark during which we eat

too many chocolate donuts and sleep sideways with our skin pressed clean against the glass, where you make faces at other drivers and take pictures of their pretty spinning tires, their fast white lights.

Now an unfinished cartharsis is growing on our walls like a strong mold. The floor smells of it, the sink smells too, and in your room this and the stillness become thick as smoke; thinking too hard about it makes me choke.