draft 7

There are 6 drafts gathering dust, 6 tries to write a blog entry from over the last several months. 6 drafts that went nowhere.


But drafts don't have to go anywhere, really, and digital media doesn't gather any dust, really, and maybe it just wasn't interesting enough to keep writing about. I mean, it's all bitching about my brother, sad shit about my mom, or me trying to explain this running thing. Just to let you know you're not missing anything.


I remember befriending writerly folk once upon a time (there was kind of a group of us, back in the Myspace days, remember those? Did everybody have those? Did you?) and practically salivating over getting to see their drafts. It's like getting to see someone in their underwear. Someone hot. It's intimate and sexy and emotionally very intense.


But really, it's all just the same crap I talk about all the time. Not really all that interesting.


There is something I keep thinking about, though, and I'm not sure how to write it. So I'm not going to try. I'm just going to put it here. Fuck it. This isn't writing. This is just me letting something out of my head.


The man who cleans my office at night smells like soap. I can almost place the soap. It's round and pink and floral scented. It's a scent that most men probably wouldn't choose for themselves, and that makes me wonder if he notices the scent at all. It leads me to believe that he has a wife who chooses the household soap.


We've hardly spoken to each other. I only see him when I work late. He says hello. I say hello. I smile. He smiles. I pull my trash can out from under my desk so he doesn't have to ask me for it, then I go back to work. He thanks me. I thank him back. He wishes me good night and I say something reciprocal.


I don't know his name. It's never come up in our limited conversations. I don't imagine it ever will. I'm not the befriending sort. Even with people I like, I usually am not the friendship initiator. I don't know, call it leftover shyness from an awkward childhood. Call it frigid bitchiness. I'm cool with it, either way.


But the guy who cleans my office at night smells like soap that makes me think he has a wife and probably an abuelita. It's an abuelita kind of scent, really. My grandmother's bathroom always smelled of peppermint, but when I went over to hispanic friends' houses, the ones with abuelitas living with them, their bathrooms smelled like pink floral soap.


Every time I stay late at work I get homesick. I have to remind myself that New Mexico isn't home anymore. I've lived outside of New Mexico longer than I lived there now. More than half of my life has been spent elsewhere.


My grandpa, the one who died first, before I realized he was my favorite, his bathroom smelled like Scope and Vitalis. A plastic bust of Abe Lincoln sat on the windowsill. Abe's head unscrewed and his torso concealed a bottle of aftershave. I don't remember the scent of it, but I thought the whole idea was very clever. There was a closet in the bathroom filled with hanging coveralls. The floor was linoleum.


I think I'm not the only one who writes things down sometimes because losing a memory is a terrifying thing. I can't remember how my mom liked her cheeseburgers at Sonic and I report that from a nearly hysterical emotional place. You'd think my narrator were screaming into a microphone on the edge of a cliff as a hurricane whipped up. Cheeseburgers at Sonic. Mustard or mayonnaise. Probably mustard because I like mustard. I'm pretty sure Mom didn't like mayonnaise on her burgers, but then again she liked Whoppers at Burger King. So I don't know.


The lovely thing about writing things like these is that you, the reader, don't have to see the bursting-into-tears part of the above paragraph. Isn't that silly?


Recently I decided that I might not quit being a CASA after this case is over.


The part of me so terrified of losing a memory is the part of me that believes that to forget is to disrespect, to disregard, to drop. So there's a part of me that would like nothing better than to build statues of my mother and spend every day polishing and tweaking and perfecting those statues.


Fuck, I just realized I missed jewelry class.