Breadcrumb #465
CHARLES CONLEY
In purgatory, every day is the first day of spring.
You wear your light jacket—it’s all you can ever seem to find—and in the very middle of your walk, snow starts to fall. The puddle in your path is deeper than you thought and, on the far side, the mud a lot more slippery.
All your other pants are in the washing machine, which is always falling off the brick that keeps the left side level, leaving it filled with a soapy lukewarm soup of semi-clean clothes that need to be run through the wash again, which you can only do after you tweak your lower back trying to put the brick under the leg of the machine where it belongs. You toss your filthy, soaking pants in, add a little more soap, and hustle yourself gingerly back to your apartment.
The attractive woman from the unit down the hall who’s never home at this hour sees you from behind, and you can guess what she thinks that mud on the back of your boxers is. You turn around to explain what happened, but she’s constantly on the phone. You hear her say, “Remember that guy I was telling you about?” as you shut the door.
It’s perpetually the day the landlord turned off the heat, and you never remember in time that the only thing you have to wear are those exercise shorts you really should’ve gotten rid of fifteen pounds ago. There’s a pull in your favorite sweater, and, no matter how careful you are, you never walk past the dining room chair without the sweater catching on it somehow.
You burn the bacon, break the yolks of your fried eggs, and only have the heels of the loaf to make toast with. You use too much salt. The coffeemaker stops working halfway through, and that was the last of your coffee grounds.
“You burn the bacon, break the yolks of your fried eggs, and only have the heels of the loaf to make toast with.”
When the UPS guy comes, he always needs you to come downstairs to sign for the package. The package is never for you. You get locked out of the apartment because you forgot to put your keys in your pocket when you changed out of your dirty pants. Not only does the super always give you a hard time when you ask him to let you in, he also makes fun of your shorts. He’s not wrong to.
You get that phone call you’ve been waiting for, but the phone dies, and the charger isn’t where it belongs. When you find the charger and plug in the phone, its operating system automatically updates. After the update, your passcode inexplicably fails to work.
You’d take care of that hangnail but seem to have misplaced your nail clippers. You only have two inches of floss to work with. The hot water runs out before you’ve even finished rubbing the shampoo into your hair. Your bath towel, of course, is in the laundry, and you have to dry your whole body with a hand towel.
There’s always a big game to look forward to watching that night, but you never remember to put the beer in the fridge. The pizza guy is always getting lost. Right after every national anthem, the news cuts away to a press conference with President George W. Bush.
When you go to bed, you comfort yourself with the thought that tomorrow has to be better. It never is.