Kneel.

Lately my clothes have been wrinkled in the drawer. Each pant leg like an old person’s neck that spoke too many words about themselves in the past fifty-fifty years. I’m afraid to wear wrinkled clothes.

The sitting and doing nothing gives them wrinkles. It’s because I come down at midnight to do my laundry and then I put all the clothes in the dryer in the morning. In between I fall asleep after hour long-phone calls. And I spend the night doing nothing.

On free sprint to sprint I worry in the silences about things on my end that on the other end she can’t hear and won’t hear.

When I don’t speak she senses it like one senses the silences of a wall. Walls know not what they hide, and neither do I.

“That was delayed.” She says.

We are okay. We are working hard. Just late at night we struggle with things we’ve lost and can’t find. The rest of the time we are fine.

It’s just always very late at night. It’s always very, very late at night.

In the morning after I lather and rinse the night into steam my pants are still wrinkly in the drawer. I wear them, they are just the same as all of my pants. I would buy new pants, but they go in the same loads of laundry. I make money and I buy new pants and they go in those same loads of laundry. Before I go to work I try to smooth them with my hands. They cling to my ankles. I watch them while I walk.

Announcement: “My shirt is too small.”

“I know I saw you pulling it down.”

I’ll wear my coat from now on.

Five hours of sleep. That will give me time to get better at what I do.

The FLU

Ginger tea.

Charcoal tablets.

Gatorade x2.

Throwing up five hours of sleep, throwing up progress. Throwing up from inside my belly-button to my sternum liquid guilt and courage and liquid fountains of excellence and future fame.

But the arms that pull my navel through my spine are warm and warm is enough to comfort pain. I am smart. Sterile. Safe. Under the influence of fivehoursofsleep. Control. I know what I eat. I know what I do, even what I do wrong. I know it and I do it and I do it and I do it.

But not to make me sick. To fix, to mend, to un-wrinkle wrinkled pants.

Which I wear throwing up.

It’s something to have warm arms cleansing your body next to the toilet in the fluorescent bathroom on your knees with your head pointed down, studying the weave of your pants.

and not wearing a coat.

It’s something to kneel and have invisible warm arms choke your bacteria belly and Heimlich the sweat and tears you love out of your throat.

And clean you.

j.m. betz. february 2007.