Choosing the Flowers
Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. Image via Wellcome Collection. There is an old lady who hangs around my apartment. I don’t know where she comes from, or where she actually lives. She just shows up whenever she wants.
“It’s really not appropriate,” I have told her many times. “This is America. We have boundaries.”
“Oh you think you’re so special,” she says, as she fills her plate with food from my kitchen. Not the nutritious food I buy to show that I am a healthy person — yams and cucumbers, kimchee and kale — but the things I really eat. Chocolate chips and potato chips and croissants with butter and jam.
“What do you want?” I ask, as she follows me around the apartment and into my kitchen, watching how I make coffee, noting that I don’t clean up, that I leave the soggy filter to drip on the counter.
“If you don’t know by now,” she says.
I wait, but that’s the end of her statement.
I tell her I’m going to read my book and to please shut up so I can focus.
The book I’m reading is about delight and the author’s compulsion to share it. Paging through all his delight makes me tired and I fall into a deep sleep. In my sleep, I feel someone settle on the couch next to me and stroke my hair. I sense it is my father, and I don’t want him to leave. , I mumble. With effort I swim through layers of sleep, as if I’m at the bottom of a lake grasping tree-roots to pull myself up. I know that my father cannot actually be here, but I also
