Accept These Things
By Lydia CopelandAccept that you will lose your house keys four times in one afternoon. Accept that there is mold growing in your kitchen sink and that your house smells like sour milk. Accept that everything you touch turns dull or gets up and leaves, or ignores your conversations for a poorly scripted sit-com. Accept the fact that there is no reason for you to have an answering machine. Accept that you will never be happy as long as your estranged husband is living with his Hawaiian girlfriend. You drive a shitty car that won’t start in the rain--accept that too. Accept that you are jealous of teenagers in-love and that your cat doesn’t like you; accept that she prefers the laps of strangers to your own familiar lap. Accept that the Hawaiian girlfriend is probably wild in bed, that each of her breasts are the size of your face, that she and your husband fall asleep each night in a nice new house in an exclusive subdivision. Accept that you somehow misplaced all three of your vibrators and that not a scrap of your clothing is insensible. Accept that you work a low paying job in the mall selling eyeglasses to myopic children and even with your employee discount can’t afford quality lenses for yourself. Accept that your hands have wrinkles, that your skin has been looking a bit gray lately. Accept that you will never spit out the window of your car, that you’ll never run crying half-way across a city to a lover’s apartment. Accept that you will never ride roller coasters. Accept that you could have a liver condition, and that you are afraid of everything: the mailman, the neighbor’s dogs, the flu, and men on motorcycles.
Learn to have hate in your heart. Learn to hate nature, sonnets, and songbirds, and thin-faced old ladies with good intentions. Learn to hate the whole state of Hawaii, the volcanoes, the luaus, and leis, the Petrel Seabird and Hawksbill Turtle. Learn not to recognize your husband’s car in the grocery store parking lot. Do not walk through the house sniffing for leftover traces of him. Put away his broken wristwatch, his stack of true crime novels, the one dress shirt still hanging in the closet. Forget Christmases past, forget Thanksgiving. Call in sick on Valentine’s Day. Learn to slouch. Hunch yourself over the steering wheel in your car, over the coffee pot in the morning. Learn to put your nose in other people’s business. Eat the yogurt in the staff room refrigerator. Drink all of your boss’s expensive ice tea in one long swallow. Learn to coax the cat into your lap with special cheeses and meats. Learn to sleep curled into a tight, hard ball. Learn to grind your teeth. Learn to love witches, to cast spells, to slip silently in and out of fancy subdivisions, leaving a trail of lice and vermin in your wake. Learn how to hold your liquor. Visit seedy bars and challenge large men to games of quarters. Fall asleep in someone else’s bathroom with your cheek on the lip of someone else‘s toilet bowl. Learn to leave the lights on and the doors unlocked. Let your house fall into a state of decay. Let the dishes grow into little hills and the trash fall to the floor. Learn to have bad credit. Stop paying your bills, leave faucets stringing water endlessly into the drain. Let the utilities slowly disappear from your life. Forget what time to wake up in the morning, forget to brush your hair, forget to feel touched by the kindness of strangers. Let the love fall out of your life.
Lydia Copeland lives in East Tennessee with her soon-to-be husband and their three pets (a cat, a dog, and a california newt). She teaches English and works in a library and is also the occasional fiction editor of Dicey Brown. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Monkey Bicycle, Opium, and others.