tuckova

This one sits in the living room and coughs politely to get my
attention. Five a.m. and the polite cough is quite Jeeves so I decide
he's probably wearing a bowler hat or something. "You've been
cleaning," he observes. My people call this understatement. Fall
cleaning is thorough and involves windows. I tell him that I've got a
whole system now: start at the lamps. I wrote it out. The enthusiasm is
leaking out of my balloon already and it's not even daybreak. "You
didn't rearrange the furniture, though," and this tone is gentle
reprimand. I want it to be gentle humor but I'm not there yet. Listen:
I moved through three countries, more apartments. If I can't get away
from you then what's moving the couch going to do really. I moved the
dust because that's what bothers me, and in return I get a butler in
the finest rebuttal style. Yay. I want to go back to bed and get a
little sleep before the day really starts and that's so not going to
happen now. I bet he has a cane somewhere. Gloves. "It's no good," he
says, "No matter how much you move. No matter how much you clean.
Getting away from me is not the same as making what I observe go away."
Like I don't know, like I don't hear the echoes all the time of every
outwit I've pulled, like it's not louder in my head than anywhere in
the first place, and I was never in first place. I do wish he would go
but I feel like mainly what I have to work on is acknowledging and even
accepting that he's going to stay, that this is of more value than
spending the rest of my days putting chairs in the middle of the room
for him to trip over. Hoping he's as annoyed by me as I am by him;
until the next one. "I'm going back to bed now. The bed is a nest of clean blankets and that's where I want to be." He nods in the darkness.
"You won't sleep any more tonight, though. And you were never any
good," raising his voice so that it carries through the door I'm
closing on him.