I added Blockduko on my phone. It's a game that combines sudoko and Tetris. A perfect combination, that swept me off my feet. The first day was fine, but my time on it increased rapidly from each day on. Seven days later I deleted the game when I spent three and a half hours on a Saturday afternoon playing blockduko and getting fake wasted on non-alcoholic beers.
After pulling myself out of the time warp of fitting shapes into squares, I looked at the disastrous room I had yet to organize from moving, and wished I had those three and a half hours back.
A pile of clothes, no a mountain of clothes sits in the middle of my room. An island I rummage through, then decide on the same t-shirt and jeans that are in the dryer.
My daughter sees this peak of cotton, synthetics, silk and denim as an island to explore full of hidden treasures. One night, when I was working in the living room, she saunters in wearing a business suit draped over her tiny body.
Forming an archipelago, there’s smaller islands, one of shoes, another of purses. Her suit is accessorized with a pair of pumps and a beaded handbag. The shoes fall off her feet with each step, but her clinched toes, drag the them along with her.
“Stay out of my clothes!” I yell at her.
Relishing in the dazzling image of herself, she ignores what I’ve said, and says, “Pretend I am your employee, and fire me!”
I resist the urge to become enraged, and say, “Fine you’re fired!! Now go take my clothes off!”
Then she said, “I am going to find the perfect outfit for you to rehire me!” And runs off.
I do what I usually do when frustration peaks, I announce I am going to the bathroom, and it will take a while. Then I head to the place I find solitude and usually play solitaire sitting on the porcelain throne.
Plumbing is the first understanding when moving into a new place. I soon discovered the toilet in my bathroom doesn’t flush completely. It can take five flushes to clear a bowl. My friend came over, and she went in to use the toilet, and remembering this shitty quirk, I ran after her screaming, “Nooooooo.” But it was too late, she’d lifted the seat.
Profusely apologizing, I told her to use the kids bathroom. “This one’s got issues!” She suggested a plumber, and I thought, “That’s not a bad idea.”
Since this moment of solitude was a pretend-number-two, I went to my bathroom. However, I wasn’t playing my usual solitaire, I had Blockduko, and once I start the game, seconds turn to minutes. After an unknown amount of time my daughter bursts in wearing a long skirt, and a sequin dress. This time she has an entire face of make up, bright red lips and blue eyeshadow. She says, “How can you say no to this?” And fans her hand down her body showcasing her fashion choices.
Reeled back to reality, I insist on privacy, and a voice in my head that says, “One more game, Alicia!”
“No!” A second inner voice yells, and then adds “That could be another hour! And imagine all the intel China has gleaned on us from playing Blockduko 20 plus hours this week.” The first inner voice rebuttals, “Oh wow, they’ve learned were a real threat to the People’s Republic due to our incredible capabilities of procrastination and terrible time management.” I sided with the second inner voice, even though the first was right too.
I went to stand up, but my legs were numb. Like Murtagh in Lethal Weapon 2, stuck on the can from a toilet bomb, I needed Riggs to pull from bowl. Except I didn’t have a Riggs there, and had to get myself up on legs lacking any feeling.
My boyfriend moved in this week, and now I have a Riggs, although I would rather blow up on a toilet than have him pull me from my own waste. I’ve mostly kept the facets of my life disjoint; my kids, boyfriend, work, even writing. So the major overlapping that is taking place gave me anxiety that reared its head while I slept; in a string of dreams about a lion in my house, followed by murderous nightmares.
My biggest worry about us all living together was how the kids would feel, their happiness. They also won’t appreciate another person using their bathroom for the greater of the two options. Of course, I had other concerns, because it’s already a lot having to clean up after the three of us.
My kids gave me those posters in preschool with their handprints and an accompanying poem, about how their tiny handprints wouldn’t be on my walls forever, yet I am still finding their hand prints all over my freshly painted walls, reminding them they assured me this would be over by now. I’d pull out their preschool crafts as contracts, but they’re lost in the moving boxes.
When my boyfriend and I talked about the move, I confessed, “Im just worried you could be a slob.” And then we looked around at the mess, and both had a laugh. The scene of a big, happy, messy family.
The first night we were all together went better than expected. There weren’t any unravellings, or arguments, and we all went about our business in a copasetic ballet. I’m excited for this new chapter. It will be nice to have a witness to the madness. Someone to laugh with when G drinks vitamin water like he’s blowing on a trumpet, and lets the bottle suction to his lips, so he ends up with a hickey around his mouth for days, or when Kiki, at nine years old, announces to me she’s bisexual before I’ve had my first sip of morning coffee.
Last night, I was cleaning around the house and heard the kids talking to Johnny in the living room. One of them asked him, “Johnny, are you part of our family now?” My heart swelled, momentarily, because then I looked down and saw the jewelry box drawers open and earrings flung about. Before I could come out shouting, I saw a tiny sample bottle of cannabis intimacy oil in the drawer. I threw it out, organized the mess, and thought, “We’ll just let this one slide.”
My mom called me the next day, and asked, “How did the move-in go?”
I told her, it went great. She was cleaning around her yard, bear scat from bears coming to eat apples off the trees. “The bears love me, Alicia.” She said.
“You’re just like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, Mom.”
“Bears are our spirit animal,” she reminded me. Then she added, “I just don’t need to see their shit every time I come outside.”
“I know exactly what you’re talking about. But I’m tired of seeing my own shit.” Without the game distracting me, I finally cleaned all the clothes off my floor, combining all the islands in the closet. Standing back, it was a little disorganized, but it looked good.
Last night Geoffrey came into the room to sleep next to me. In the morning, Johnny was curled up in the fetal position, freezing because tiny G wrapped himself in the comforter like a taquito. After I came back from dropping the kids off at school, we had coffee, and he asked, “Remember that first night we hung out?”
Of course, I did. We were both newly single, and wanted to keep things light. Then he said, “Remember how we said we can’t fall in love with each other.”
We laughed out loud. How could we have been so naive? We go together like Tetris and Sudoku.
