the drawer
Where once there were stamps and shiny coins, blown-glass beads and lengths of ribbon, there is now only sticky layers of ancient dust. I drag my finger through, leaving streak after streak like the tails of slow moving snails. Gray rolls of fluff spill out around the edges of the tip of my finger like the wake of a boat as my eyes search for my father: the little black pocket book, the knife, the cigarette case.
In some distant time, these sat on the other side of the deep drawer, hidden under mounds of socks and undergarments. But even those, too, have gone.
The lonely wood now reeks of cigarette smoke. I suppose it always did, but my nose was blind to its odor. It used to be I could note the subtle scents underneath, like cornbread and chili, candles or shoe polish. But now it is just a sour musty stench soaked into the wood and carpets, the white-faded-yellow-faded-orange paint on peeling walls, the soft and crumpled cardboard boxes mangled from reuse.
Something inside me must reek like this, I think, steeped so long in the shit of it no matter how much I pretend in years since.
I leave the drawer open, now criss-crossed with finger-painted lines of grime, and crouch low next to a box. Lid bent open and stained along the corner. Things have been stuffed inside haphazardly. THINGS because they are meaningless - just echoes and repetitions on the so-beloved garbage piled high, decorating the bedroom around thin corridors sized only for difficult, strained movement. The items inside the box are faceless. Caked in cockroach droppings and bedbug carcasses and spider egg sacks. But then a hint of black leather at the bottom of some dark corner.
A pocketbook? A sheath? Or a cigarette case?
My throat is tight and aching: with soiled air, with tears, with a wail I cannot - will not - let loose as I extract THINGS that crumble or tear in my hands. Or feel gritty or damp or slimy under thumb.
Claw and dig and dig and claw through sweat and shit and piss all so useless useless until…
until…
the torn black leather scrap of a camcorder bag. Tapes in plastic cases scribbled with family memories, but none are ours. Where must the precious ones reside?
Another lost item added to my list.