23×58;

Those are the dimensions, give or take, of the loft I stay in—a quaint

and open, imperfect pentagon with the fifth wall that breaks the

rectangle housing a TV mount that’s never been anything more

than an extra shelf for knickknacks—currently, rocks descending in

size, snatched from the earth on walks over the past year or so, a

Blue Jay feather (that I sanitized with dish soap), and a ceramic

model of a sunny-side up egg that my sibling made out of air-dry

clay and painted sclera white with an Arylide yolk resembling golden

mustard. Next to them, a lonely tube of chapstick that I took from a

closing at a title company’s office back in the day that, as you’d

expect in typical corporative fashion, meets the bare minimum for

being lip balm; just another miscellany to slap a logo on—in this

case, an oddly anthropomorphized lion with an embellished shield.

I’d rather dip my pursed lips into a pliable pool of unscented candle

wax, the closest comparison to smell and consistency being those

dollar store brands with caucasian Jesus seemingly telling modern

man, “I died so you could take public transportation to a deadened,

dead-end job, jerk off to photos of strangers in Celebrity Skin

magazines, and decide to blow off your therapist today.”

The chapstick is a permanent fixture for how I see this slice of time.

­

The space is less than ideal for staying warm during the winter

nights. If I’ve taken in anything over the past few years of this

sleeping arrangement it’s that it’s easier to heat yourself up than cool

yourself off. Seasons will exhaust familiar dispositions and move on,

but one thing stays the same—these three sets of sliding doors are shit

at insulating. They do fantastic work being the seldom-used egresses

that open to the rear upper-deck, but between slips in temperature,

the occasional flies that ping annoyingly between the vertical blinds

and glass like rogue satellites, and 180 degrees of neighbors who hold

the equivalent of post-retirement jobs maintaining yards to look like

putting greens, you can understand why I’d trade $15,000 worth of

sliding glass for drywall, or more board and batten planks. Or even

more mirrors. There are six in this loft with me; they remind me I’m

alive constantly. Why six mirrors? Well, your guess is as good as mine.

I’m assuming when you combine the fact that this place was built in

the 70’s with an eccentric Midwestern entertainer being the client, you

get a Carnival cruise line-style funhouse with yellow and green

raised-pattern wallpaper, six mirrors in a loft, a full second-story bar

(which was a bitch to remove, by the way), and a driveway fit for 24

vehicles that projects like a giant lightbulb off the street—I call it our

personal cul-de-sac within the cul-de-sac. The bar was replaced with

a stationary bike, and we’ll get to the jaundice & olive walls eventually.

­

Just like the lens that bends to straighten the image, I feel like I fill

this space like warm liquid meeting the brim of a tall glass, and that

this space holds me comfortably at my still. The wooden guardrails

along the staircase and spanning the balcony will likely be replaced

with wrought-iron railings sooner than later, but even then, they—

and even then, this—won’t resemble the welded-iron captivity of a

prison cell. I can hope. It certainly did at one point; it took a while to

distinguish between being hurt and just being confused. I just knew I

loved alcohol. Never in anything besides drinking have I ever said,

“the cheaper the better,” but I knew well that the less I paid, the

longer I could stay drunk; in suspension.

­

Consciousness was a nondescript circumstance that I’d pay to

consistently change—it was amorphous. And I loved tilting it.

And for a long time the loft felt like it had a price tag attached to it,

like it cost me something more than money every time I’d return with

a bottle, or crack open a can of craft brew, or sit at my desk with five or

six of those little shooters of whiskey crammed in my pocket. I’d

write… a lot, but I never was and never will be a Berryman or Dylan

Thomas or a Charles-fucking-Bukowski. All drunk and all brilliant.

And I knew it. The days would fold and slip into their slotted, month-

shaped boxes, me: meeting every pursuant morning with guttural

snores from unnecessary beer-weight and bloodshot eyes from

rest that felt like an insufficient and unearned privilege.

­

23×58—those are the dimensions, give or take, of the loft I stay in.

It includes the hindgut where I sleep and write, footprints left today

to be vacuumed away tomorrow, and a phantom familiarity; more than

a hundred factual provisions could have rendered it so.