post-it notes

The argument unfolded in my head with childlike curiosity.
Don’t leave me out.
The caveat of the house residing at the end of the hall; “pretty much the perfect roommate.”
Stay out of my room.
Cluttered.
A junkyard dog; pitbull’s womb.
Are you a woman yet, Brad?

Don’t leave me out.

Sometimes I would stay in a different house that had two dogs instead of one
and white carpet instead of sanity.
Sanitary rules replacing sanguine freedoms.
I am accustomed to filth.

I always hated getting dressed.
I hated showers but not baths.
I hated the smell of freshly cleansed skin; clothes.
Hands.

I love the smell of the ground after a hard rain.

I stayed in a different house sometimes
with a man and a woman who didn’t have children.
I stayed in a small room at the end of the hall.

I stay in a small room at the end of the hall.

I did puzzles and played with the cat outside.
I stayed in this house with a man and a woman
that rarely spent time together in their house
their home
their marriage.

They communicated through post-it notes.

They expressed their love this way for years.
Years amounting to more than most of my life
but not quite.

Post-it notes.
Dinner is in the fridge.
This is what it will be tonight.
I love you.

I love you?

Love in post-it note form?

I would spend most of my time with my parents.
I lived in my parents’ home.
I lived in a room adjacent to theirs
in a house where all the doors were left open.
I could stay awake at night and listen to them worry about me.
I listened to their Saturday morning foreplay.

I grew up submerged in a much more pervasive sense of love
that I couldn’t always touch.

It was not set forth in post-it note form.

How can that relationship work, I’d wonder.
I’d struggle with this foreign expression in this white carpeted house
in a small room at the end of the hall
where everyone slept with their doors shut.

How?
I asked my parents unconvinced.
How?
How can post-it notes live?
How can a relationship breath for years on little more than post-its?

I read the note left on the counter
where one housemate leaves my mail.
The note was scrawled on a full sheet torn from an unseen notebook
and I came into the “confrontation”
two exchanges in.

It ate away my lunch hour.

I held my breath.

I know that the newest housemate is not working out
according to the overheard conversations of the others.

“You’re the first person I’ve met outside my family that knows that song.”

I’m quiet
not deaf.

I don’t write to avoid, dim, or sidestep.
Writing has been my primary voice for a long time.

Primary.

Now, I find it important to learn how to speak.
More important than I ever have before.
Sammy, the bird, is teaching me how to use my voice.
I have been so quiet.
We do not speak to each other as human beings anymore.
I’m not sure if we ever did.
The post-it note love ended in divorce when the economy fell
and the man and woman
had quality time to spend

with one another.

My housemates do not get along.
I retire to the cluttered chaos of the small room at the end of the hall
and shut the door behind me.