The apartment is too large for itself. What’s more, there’s two of them, too far apart. What an embarrassment of riches, what an embarrassment, to be so richly apart. Still, we know things. There are forty pine floorplanks from the window to the wall. There are fifty-six rows of asphalt tiles on the roof beyond the window. There are three desks and four chairs. The piano has no chair, but the plant (the spider cactus) has a chair of its own. The piano can borrow a chair, when it needs one, but the table has no chairs anymore. Dinner is on the couch, anyway, in light of the screens.
These are things we can count on. Each day.
Somehow all of the mugs are dirty. I don’t know how many mugs there are, and I refuse to count. In the same vein, I am uninterested in knowing the number of days since, in a fright, I got on my bike and rode to the next state. I think it was forty miles, or fifty-six. And then, I came back. I was very thirsty, so I rinsed the coffee from a mug. Of course, first I washed my hands very thoroughly. I counted to…
You asked me how many doors were in the apartment and I said I couldn’t count. You told me there were eight and I asked about the windows. There are eight as well.
dan j ruppel 