Prosperous broke.
/I’m lying on the floor in the kitchen, half napping beside my old dog who’s been declining for months and does little anymore but sleep and pee. For the past few weeks, I keep watching him out of the corner of my eye, making sure he’s still breathing, checking for signs of I don’t know what but something to let me know for absolute sure that this life isn’t big enough for him anymore. And then this morning he starts peeing blood, and I guess that must be the sign, because here I am, following him around the house, lying down next to him on the kitchen floor and stroking the bony top of his big old head until he gets tired of me groping him and shifts his body.
I fall into one of those slumbers that I find when I’m lying on the wood floor in the kitchen, or the tile floor in the bathroom, or the concrete floor of the old loft where we lived before we moved here, all those times I lie on the floor when my someone I love is sick and I just want to be wherever they are and let them know that I am. There. Wherever they are.
Out of my floor slumber, lying on my side with one arm underneath me, in that way that I know it’s gonna hurt when I finally get up but I do it anyway because it’s how I can stay close, I speak the words aloud that start from my dream-lips and finish in the waking world.
Prosperous broke.
And it’s not the words themselves so much as the knowing that I have when I’m in a dream about what the words mean, and all the concentric circles of my consciousness and unconsciousness that the dream-words embody fill my very being with deep understanding of what I just dream-said-into-mouth-said. And I realize, That’s ME, prosperous broke. That’s me.
When I open my eyes, the words are still there but without the knowingness, and my brain kicks in and rejoices in this new hashtag my dream-self has created to describe perfectly the essence of my existence, and it (my brain, that is) begins its machinations and mastications and takes the new catch phrase through its paces, as brain does. And it settles with great satisfaction on the oxymoron-as-synopsis of all that is both wrong and right, of all that is neither wrong nor right, of all that is, and of all that is not. The ouroboros and the lemniscate. The dead end and the nowhere.
And suddenly, I shit you not, a hummingbird appears in the house, flying back and forth across the highest point of the a-frame ceiling and tweeting in confusion or maybe omniscience as we sit here, my old dog and I, together on the wood floor, my hand gently stroking his grey muzzle. So I catapult into action, having done this many times before (as visiting hummingbirds are known to occasionally float in through the front door with the tinkle of the wind chimes in the Autumn when the weather cools softly). Then I’m climbing the tall ladder with three fresh gardenias that I pick from the front garden and a red spatula that I pick from the container on the counter, all stuck into the end of a plastic Swiffer duster, looking up at the hummingbird and down at my old dog, and I teeter in the space between, heavy heart, Swiffer extended. And it’s all perfect. And it’s all completely out of my control. And still I am here. Here I am.
