13: weather

Hi. It's me again. The embarrassing one. I read the last four entries this afternoon on the bus and I could feel the exact moment I'd sound like this to that person, the one with the spreadsheet, and I want to say to them, hey, you did great, you kept the rules, I've got it from here.

Rule one, still kept. I did the walk. I dressed the front tables. I sent the recap, four minutes late, and my manager gave me a look, not the held one, or the ping pong. Just a normal ‘I’m annoyed’ look. I'll take any kind of normal look. I'm collecting them now, the normal ones, like beanie babies or comic books.

Rule two. Corridor, four doors, photo. Fourteen photos. Fourteen flecks of lint.

Okay.

I want to talk about weather. Because that's what it is now, that's what I've figured out on day five with the subtraction gone and the room at full scale... It's not events. I've been logging events. Door, minute, nails, hanger, hall, like they're incidents, like I'm loss prevention filling out a form. They're not incidents. They're weather. They're just what it's like out. And once you see that you stop writing them down one at a time and you start just, standing in it.

So here's the forecast: The monkey. The one from the kids' books, the little brown one with the man in the yellow hat. I was in a doctor's office waiting room today, my own doctor, I'll get to that, and there was a stack of those books on the kids' table, and I picked one up because I was vibrating and needed something in my hands, and the monkey doesn't have a tail. I flipped through the whole thing. No tail. Not one picture. I sat there and I could feel the tail. I could feel it curling around the man's arm, I could feel it hanging off the edge of the page in the one where he's on the bike, I have a physical memory of a drawing of a tail that isn't there. I looked it up on my phone right there in the waiting room and of course, of course, it's a known thing. A famous thing, thousands of people remember the tail, and the explanation is the same explanation as the basket. Brains. We all fill in the same detail. Monkeys have tails, so we give him one.

Except that's the explanation for why we'd remember it wrong. It's not an explanation for why we'd all remember it the same wrong. Ten thousand people don't independently invent the same tail curling the same direction around the same arm. That's not filling in. That's a vote.

The movie line. The one from the space movie, the father one, everybody's father says it in the deep voice at some point in your childhood. It doesn't start with the name. I watched the clip. He doesn't say the name. I have heard my own father say that line with the name at the front of it a hundred times, at dinner, at my graduation, at the DMV once. He was quoting something. What was he quoting?

The song. This one's mine and I can't find anybody else who has it so maybe it's just mine. There's a song, radio song, about a play on words, something about a hairdo. The chorus goes up on "hairdo" and it was on constantly the summer I was fifteen, I can hum you the bridge. It's not anywhere. I've searched the lyrics every way I know how. Nobody's ever heard of a song about “You ain’t got it, but your hair do”, there's no band, there's no summer, and I can HUM IT. I hummed it to Marisol and she said "that's nice, what is it?" and I said I don't know anymore.

And here's what I've noticed about all of them. The basket, the tail, the line, the song. Nobody argues. That's the weather part. When the world changes under people they don't fight it, they don't even really notice, they just... agree to the new one. Marisol said it never had that basket. The stranger said “Saw what?” My own brain, when I look at the monkey, is already starting to go, well, maybe he never did, and I can feel it trying, I can feel it wanting to slide. It's not that the world is being corrected. It's that we are. The world gets voted on and then we get updated to match, and the update feels like remembering, and the only way you'd ever catch it is if you were the kind of person whose eyes stick.

The doctor. I told my doctor I'm off the pill. I didn't tell her why. I said I wanted to see how I did without it and she said the thing they say, that's your choice, let's check in in two weeks, and she typed for a while, and then she looked at me. Not at me. At the screen, at me, at the screen. Ping pong. And she said "your roommate called." Just like that. "Your roommate called last week, she was concerned about your refill." And I said the refill came through, and she said "I know, she was very thorough," and she looked at me one more time, the checking look, the question in it, and then she went back to typing and didn't say anything else.

My doctor did the ping pong. I don't know what to do with that information. I'm putting it here.

And the last one, and then I'm going to eat, rule three, I promise.

I got home and there was mail. Mine and Kate's, the building puts it all in one slot. And I was sorting it on the counter, hers, mine, hers, mine, and I stopped, because the street is spelled differently, on hers. Our street name, on every piece of her mail, has an extra letter in it. A silent one. The kind of extra letter a street gets when it was named after somebody a hundred years ago. Mine doesn't have it. Same building, same apartment number, same slot, two spellings.

I went down to the corner. It's a block, I ran it. The sign has the extra letter. The sign agrees with Kate.

I stood under it for a while. Nobody looked at me, which I noticed, because for a week people have been looking at me, and tonight under the sign with the wrong letter, nobody did. Like I wasn't worth watching for a minute. Like the thing had already been decided.

I don't know what my street is called. I've lived here for four years.

So this is for you, whoever's reading. I keep saying that and I don't know who I mean, and tonight I think I mean it more than I have before... Go look at your mail. Look at the street on your mail and then look at the sign. Go look at the monkey. Go look at the man in the yellow hat's arm and tell me there was never anything wrapped around it.

You won't. You'll look and it'll be fine and you'll feel that little thing, the wanting-to-slide, and you'll let it. Everybody lets it. I would have let it. That's the whole thing, that's the weather, it's raining and everybody's dry.

I'm not. That's all I've got. I'm standing in it and I'm soaked and it's day five and I have a plate to eat.