The Drawer

There’s a little drawer in my heart I don’t like to open.

Everything I don’t know how to organize is stuffed inside. A green Uniqlo t-shirt that smells like my ex’s sandalwood cologne, the one who did the bad things to me I don’t want to name by name.

Old polaroids of mom with her dyed pixie cut when she was young, but never free. Her heavy leather time capsule of a purse with her cancelled credit cards, broken red lipstick, and floppy notebook filled with unfulfilled dreams and phone numbers of men form her past she hoped would rescue her from her present (they never did).

There’s a sun faded postcard from my sister signed with a wonky palm tree and a little heart written in a time when words rolled away from us like marbles, and my dad‘s reading glasses he told me to hold onto when the ambulance took him away and never returned him. Holding onto can become owning in the bat of an eyelash.

I don’t like to open said drawer because it makes a big horrible creaking noise that shakes the whole house to the core, making my skin crawl, and because everything that crawls out after the squeeeeeeeeak is more painful than the noise. To remind myself not to ever even try, I stuck a big fuchsia sticky note to the drawer that reads DANGER! KEEP OUT! like it’s a teenage dirtbag’s bedroom. It also helps that I keep a big metal lock on it with metal janitor keys, the kind that look like bones. Oh, I also swallowed the bone keys. The cold metal scratched the inner lining of my throat like a horned woman wreaking havoc on her ex’s car. I gulped and gulped and gulped it down like a giant pill they say to take with water, but I just raw dogged that shit to burry it fast. Deep down the rabbit hole of my esophagus straight into the basement in the darkest corner of my heart.

Every now and then someone says: how can you live like this, with that mess, doesn’t tabula rasa sound liberating? And then I can say, no, thank you, it doesn’t. And I don’t have the keys. I lost them in myself. Although I guess it’s not losing if it’s done on purpose.

When I’m in bed at night, sometimes I do find myself thinking about the under-the-skin-crawling squeaaaaaak the drawer makes, and the dinosaur keys weighing me down. But then I just start counting dinosaurs to fall asleep. They start floating, jumping, hop-hop-hopping over strawberry fields weightless like little happy sheep clouds just that they’re not sheep, and then my brain crash zooms in on the little T-rex-hands, and I find myself thinking, do the little hands make tyrannosauruses gifted plastic surgeons?