If I could have a thousand dimes, I would have one hundred dollars. With one hundred dollars I could buy some books, a pack of cigarettes perhaps, a new hairdo or two, from the local CVS. But maybe I am being frivolous. With one hundred dollars I wcould also be one hundred dollars richer in savings. Perhaps ten years down the line I might own a car. It’s hard, I think, to know what the right thing to do is.
I once broke into an open house, after hours. Well, not really broke in. I opened their garden gate and circumnavigated the house, peering into each of the newly cleaned windows. They probably had a security system, but I doubt they would’ve minded a little harmless sightseeing. Open houses have always fascinated me, you see. They’re like dollhouses for real people. Everything is so perfect it hurts. You buy the house thinking that surely, even if you buy the staging too, you can have that perfectness forever. But it never works like that.
Recently when I was out for a walk I passed by the house. I felt the same temptation to peer into its windows even now that it had sold, but the gate had a lock on it. As I backed away from the house a car came screeching around the blind curve and stopped inches from my feet. I looked at it, and the driver looked back at me guiltily, although it was my fault after all.
My last boyfriend drove a stupid little car. I don’t know what I wanted, surely not a screaming Ford truck, but every time I saw that stupid little car it made me feel as if I too still lived in a dollhouse, but not the good and perfect kind I saw in the open house.
When we finally broke up last spring I felt above all relief that I would never have to sit in that car again, sit next to him while he went 50 miles an hour on the freeway, foot thumping to some folksy song I tried to pretend to like for him. I did love him, I think, in the way you love a pet someone else has had before you were born, but is old by the time you get to catch up to loving them. When we broke up it was like he died, but I knew it was coming anyways, so what was the point in lamenting it anyways?
this is going nowhere 