> tapioca world tour

We cleaned out her late grandfather’s late wife’s apartment in the Prudential all day Saturday. The whole place was filled with dust mites and trash and furniture from the 60s. We put on rubber gloves and bug repellent and went to work, dissecting the life of a secretive old woman who left behind salad tongs and silver platters and china teacups and who left no one behind to appreciate it. Some stuff was her husband’s, and now one of his modern art prints hangs in my kitchen, his blown-glass orange vase lives on my table, a French thermostat dice-shaped pen holder made of amber sits on my desk at work. “I don’t want any of this stuff,” my roommate said. “It’s dead peoples’ things. It creeps me out.”

“At least we kind of know who these people were,” I said. “It’s better than buying dead peoples’ things at a thrift shop, not knowing where they came from.” What’s fascinating is how quickly life comes and goes and how fiercely we hold on to the things we acquire, even when they gather dust. By the time I’m 90, if I live that long, I don’t want to own anything. Maybe a bed, some eccentric rings, some colorful boots. Maybe an ice cream scoop, but that’s it.

And now it’s El Dia del Amor, not that every day isn’t full of love. The kids gave me extra Valentines they’d made. I put their paper affection in my back pocket and forgot about it. That’s a metaphor, people.

Now that the moon is boiling
like the blood where it swims

the claw marks of those
who preceded us across this burning floor

- John Yau, from Borrowed Love Poems