21 going on 14.

I wrote this in 1999. I found it tonight. Just put a [sic] after every sentence and know that I was fourteen and had liberty spikes. It really gets pathetic towards the end. The "boy of my dreams" type of juicy stuff. Sadly, boys don't seemed to have changed all that much since ninth grade.

Enjoy.

There's a room in my house that I call - fondly - The Yellow Room. It's a bathroom, actually, so-named because of the rather obscure decorating habits of the people who lived in the house before me. It's more of a lemon-yellow than any other kind of yellow. The lemon-yellow covers the bathtub, the toilet, the sink, and the tiles running up the wall around the shower. It's not, though, the color of the tiles on the floor. They are instead a putrid mixture of the most horrid tans and browns and sepias. It was that kind of patternless tile floor where the white and brown and sepia are arbitrarily strewn about the dirty tan. There's one place, though, where the tan just ceases to be altogether and looks awful, as though whoever the tiler (tile-buyer? tiler-person?) was just forgot to bring enough tan-colored tiles that day. But the patch without the tan happens to sit right in front of the doorway and surely the residents at the time must have noticed this and even more surely they must have objected.

This I've often contemplated whilst sitting cross-legged on the yellow lid of the yellow toilet or sitting - legs dangling this time - on the yellow counter of the yellow sink.

This particular morning I was sitting on the edge of the yellow bathtub wondering about the tanless patch when I realized - I'm of the habit of being dreadfully late - that I was about to be dreadfully late. I really could, I thought, wear my pajamas out today, Really, they're just pants with fireworks on them and a t-shirt protesting McDonalds's plowing down of the rainforests to graze the cattle they don't bother to use in their hamburgers anyway. This was fine, and I slept in my shoes again, so all was well.

I had to step over a few people to get to my keys. Try the bed next time, Kari.

"There were, like, four heads in that bed when I got in last night."

"Did I say that out loud?"

"No, but you were thinking in." She rolls over.

"Oh." Spooky.

"Spooky." A muffled reply.

"Okay, get out of my head. Who's in the bed right now?"

"Danny Boy, JJ, Adam, and Tristen."

"What's that asshole doing here?"

She rolls onto her back and stretches. "They're all assholes."

"You know what I mean."

"How should I know? They probably found him under a box or near Penn Station or something? Are you going to work?"

"Going. See you. Tell them I get the bed the second I get home and I want him out of here before that."

I guess not would be a good time to tell you that Tristen is my ex. He's British, gorgeous, and fickle asshole. Let me elaborate. We spent eighteen months together before he decided that we had started too early, never got to know each other before we started dating.

It doesn't make sense to me either. In any case. he's just some typical non-conformist, completely driven around by his cock.

• • • • • (This next part was a few pages afterward, probably days later) • • • • •

I grabbed my coat with the keys and stepped outside. It's a great coat, really; black with that very obviously faux fur around the collar and cuffing the sleeves. Being the only one of us with a steady job, I'm (also) the only one who's awake early enough to get anything done. Like buying food. The contents of our refrigerator are embarrassing, really. Nearly everything's week-old take-out except the macaroni and cheese, which someone-or-other makes daily.


• • • • •

And that's all there is. I didn't realize I'd be describing my field work term housing, but then again I didn't realize how many times I used the word "really" either. Nor how much I loved commas. ,,,,,,,,, There. Now it's out of my system, really, for good.