Despertar

like a bottle of celtic moonspice

Lavender Fabuloso is a new beginning.

I care less about the tidiness of my environment than pretty much anyone I know, so under even the tiniest bit of stress, I go into complete shutdown mode, cleaning-wise. My room got to be abysmally messy about two weeks ago. I put the old sheets in the laundry hamper but for some reason couldn't bring myself to sleep on new ones, so I crunched myself up onto a tiny corner of the mattress cover, slept like that for days. Did laundry, didn't want to cross-contaminate the neat piles with the helter-skelter messes in my drawers, opted to strew the clean clothes all over the floor, instead. The vacuum cleaner handle knocked over one of my window plants, and dirt got everywhere. It stayed that way for, literally, two weeks.

Justin dropped in on me a few nights ago and was horrified by the way I was living. "How can you even study in here?" he asked, not even trying to conceal his disbelief. His feet are bigger than mine, and didn't fit into the little pathway I had cleared from the door to the bed, so he couldn't even really walk inside. I decided it was time to clean.

It still took me four days to find the initiative. I woke up in a good mood this morning, thanks partly to a steady stream of endorphin surges, and I started by putting sheets on the bed. I tidied and cleaned for four hours. The last step was to wipe everything down with a good coat of fresh-smelling, brain-killing Fabuloso, lavender-scented. It's a smell I love--I never clean unless I'm completely happy, so I associate it with optimism, et cetera.

In total, I found seventeen dollars in scattered change.

*

Popeye's chicken is failure.

There was a Popeye's five minutes up the hill from my college campus, which I'm sure was no accident. We ate there at least once a week, to the point where the homeless people who stationed themselves around it knew us by face, if not name. One crackhead had a gangrenous leg wound; one time, she cornered me in the women's bathroom and asked me to clean it for her.

When I was a junior, they moved the administrative offices to a building just off-campus, a little closer to Popeye's. You could smell the chicken frying in its fattening oil from the front door of the administrative building.

I don't know why I had such a hard time staying focused in college, why I was forever having to call in favor after favor from various administrators. One of my freshman year English professors was also the undergraduate assistant dean, and she bailed me out of at least a dozen messes I made all by myself. I would fuck up, lay low till the shit hit the fan, then trudge over there, to that building, in which her office was on the second floor, and sit hanging my head in shame as she informed me, totally blamelessly, of what we needed to do to fix my latest screw-up. It would last fifteen or twenty minutes, and then I would head back outside, and that smell of chicken would hit me, powerfully, and I would think, I can't wait to get out of Atlanta.

I hated to be outside in college. Anytime I walked out into the open, my risk of running into Marcus increased significantly. He was an outdoor guy; he liked to stride purposefully around the campus and talk to people. I didn't want to be one of those people he ran into incidentally and brushed off with some insincere promise of action.

I was in Atlanta a few weeks ago to see my brother's probate show. Driving uphill with the windows down afterward, I caught a whiff from the Popeye's drivethrough and my heart clenched around a mirage of Marcus marching down that hill in his black jeans with a parcel of flyers tucked under his arm, on his way somewhere as always, too busy to ask why I was wearing my tight registrar face.

*

Versace Blue Jeans is excitement and sex and the tensest contentment.

For a big guy, Justin smells incredible. There's this bizarre sweetness to him, but with a hard edge, like a Justin-flavored liqueur. How I can tell when he's in the mood is he'll lie back on his giant bed and crook his arm into a canoe, and I'll lie back into it, drape one leg over his knee and adjust appropriately so his hand can find the inch or so of space between my top and my pants.

It smells wonderful in that canoe, and it makes me feel all springy and wired.