I am taking this huge chewy bite from my cinnamon raisin bagel while watching this cocker spaniel leapfrog through the snow when she comes up behind me. I can smell her wet, shampooed hair before anything else: so refreshingly non-floral, so purely clean.
"Thank you for making me second guess myself,” she says, her palm quickly spreading across my back like a butter knife.
I just finished reading the Tomine comic in this week's New Yorker (they really love this guy) and, for some unknown reason, I have moved on to the Pottery Barn catalog below it.
Free shipping. Special Price. No Surcharge. Delivery Discount. Closeout. They must really be hurting.
Moments earlier, we had been in bed, below the immense weight of our down comforter, watching the snow lazily pile onto the tree branches level with our second floor window. The curtains were completely parted and this vertical rectangle of pure white had cast its simplicity onto our bed like a geometric stagelight.
“I don’t want to go to class today,” she had sighed in complete seriousness.
I had rolled over and looked at her. Her face had been awash in a snowy paleness, catapulted across her features by the woody boughs.
She had just looked at me, waiting for a response. We could have read, we could have gone back to sleep, we could have fucked, we could have got up and made Belgian waffles with strawberries.
“You will just regret it later. You will just hate yourself for it,” I had frowned, all to myself.
Now, I am watching her brush her teeth while simultaneously, somehow, shoving a Gala apple and an individually wrapped cylinder of flaccid string cheese into her backpack. I was up and out of bed, sitting at the kitchen table scowling at the sharp black edge of my bagel—this toaster could be so hit-or-miss. Below this window I can see the neighbor’s spaniel bolting after a tennis ball, which burns with this ridiculously fake neon against the new snowfall.
“You’re the best,” she kisses my neck while already heading for the door. She smells like wool. I look at the clock: she wouldn’t be that late, if at all.
I thumb a few more pages of Pottery Barn’s absurd offerings. Special Prices on all Dining Tables—Purchase before January 8th and receive four chairs free! They must really be hurting. But then again, so are all of us.
I watch the lock turn from her twisting key on the other side as she seals me inside. By the time I turn back to the kitchen table window, the dog is gone and the flakes are beginning to sprinkle down again.
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