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I want to stay home from work today
What that really means is, I want to organize junk draws full of building blocks, dried out ink pens, and half empty pill bottles, the accumulated detritus of twenty years. I will make shrines in our living room – memorials to the place God has met me. I absolutely will not part with birthday cards including your handwriting. Bury me in piles of carefully, crafted lines. I simply cannot toss away a lifetime.
I want to stay home from work today
What that really means is, I want to vacuum carpets littered with popcorn hulls and dirty shoe prints. The hullabaloo of the kids and friends. Frenzied from togetherness and video games forgetting about mom and her strange notion that carpets must be minded like a newborn baby – cared for, tended to, the dust removed tenderly and lovingly, with reverence. Never has a rug been so cherished. The fibers filled with appreciation for home. One day, I will rip it out with my bare hands. I will wrap it around my shoulders sitting on the front porch waiting for your visit, as crows dance upon my cheeks. You will bring your children, they will dance in the yard, you will tell me how they are ruining your floors. I will smile, telling you about the stained precious carpet on my shoulders.
I want to stay home from work today
What that really means is, I don’t want to make myself smaller, but larger. I want to own that place completely, mark it with my scent. Maybe piss on the walls so you know I was there. Leave droplets of my blood on the kitchen floor as I burn dinner waiting out the end of the world while raising kids beneath a roof that doesn’t leak.
I want to stay home from work today
What that really means is, I want to hurriedly scream all my feelings onto any scrap of paper I find. I want to rant, scribble, panic, cry as I breath hot, smoky words into existence. Then I’ll yell at the sentences because they aren’t good enough. I’ll rip the paper up, tiny shards of fickle feelings and shove them down my throat. Tomorrow, sweet tomorrow I will sound like Mary Oliver. I’ll write the perfect sentence with a cracked voice, crooked pen, and steaming skin as I sit on my bedroom floor. Cross legged you’ll find me surrounded by broken sunshine, raw meat and dirty laundry, little altars of our life. I’ll pull on someone else’s skin and give my words away to the first person I meet. They’ll tell me, “these are no good.” I’ll take them back and try, try again.
Does anyone know, how many times did Mary hear no before she heard yes?
- Megan Bell
Meg Bell has served as a reference librarian for 10 years in Fort Wayne, Indiana. When she is not working, she enjoys riding bikes, hiking, and swimming with her husband and two children. She digs all 70s singer-songwriter music, any cat she meets, and saving all extra pennies for travel.