“My Piles Make Sense”
In order to be an adult, bring home bread and butter, I need to battle my mind everyday.
The room that I am subleasing from the 26 year old grinch of a girl, a fifth floor walk-up, has started to resemble the garbage plate cuisine so famous in Rochester, one big fricken mess.
The walls in the room are bordered by piles of magazines, newspapers, paper, there is the Betta fish pile, the swim pile, the to read pile, to do pile, bills, bank statements, float around like leaves at the peak of autumn, and in the center of it is that feisty cross dressing – Betta fish who I’ve named Marilyn because its tail is so beautiful it reminded me of Marilyn Monroe.
The roommate has a cleaning woman who comes twice a month to polish the little apartment. The first few times this happened the piles disappeared, the floor was an empty palette. The roomie looks puzzled when I tell her to ask the cleaner to put back the piles, to keep the room as it looks. “I just thought you wanted more floor space, don’t you feel claustrophobic?” the roomie asks. No not really, I think, to me the piles make sense, it is the way that I think.
The roommate is starting to understand the quirks, the half drunken cans of diet coke, the forgotten candy bar or bag of lettuce that has turned dark brown. Maybe she is a fellow ADDer, after all she’s forgotten things like watering her orchid that has gone from leafy green promise to the ugly brown stump, blech. She’s forgotten to create the sublease between us, we are both loosey goosey so we fit, I pay her rent once a month and that’s it.
Beyond the fifth floor pad and the streets though I live in a straight jacketed non add world. In cubicle land the boss, the colleagues, must think that I am strange, oddly quiet. In the past few months I’ve rolled in my own misery, I come in and sit there and look absolutely miserable because it’s tiring trying to rein in the thousand thoughts, that spring forth like weeds and run like wild mustangs. In order to be an adult, bring home bread and butter, I need to battle my mind everyday, focus, write, organize, multitask, I am thrown into a world of blackberries, instant messaging, text messaging, and it drives me batty, I want to tear out my hair, and in the mess I need to somehow pretend that things are okay, that I can control it, but on the darkest of days I ask who am I kidding.
