I’m alone
The top layer of the first 21 pounds of Lego
No really, I’ve been alone for over a week now, with my partner away with family and my kid away at a camp. I’ve filled my time mostly with work, which is kind of great in its own way (no distractions) but also kind of terrible (no distractions).
My side hustle for these several weeks is cleaning my child’s room. It’s not quite like that—I told a person who bought 42 pounds of Lego from me off Craigslist (he carried it away in a single 85-liter backpack!) that I was cleaning a teen’s room for him and he looked at me like I had two heads. Fair. But I’m getting rid of his pre-teen stuff, taking down the loft with his little-kid reading nook, doing parent stuff to give him a better room for the next few years. But yes, there’s cleaning. Horrifying cleaning.
In years past I did this work with gusto, fueled by beer, until the gusto wore off and everything got shitty. Half-assed paint jobs, abandoned light-fixture wiring, everything done to the point of diminishing returns thanks to alcohol. This time I’m following through the best I can, pushing myself to clean a little better when I think it’s almost done, using my energy to do it right.
I’m also awash in memory and sentimentality. I know some people who can be ruthless about sorting through child drawings, awkwardly-written scribbles on pieces of paper, and I’m not one of those people. I have an agreement with my partner that I’ll keep some things that are questionable and we’ll go through them together.
My teen has absolutely no issue with me getting rid of almost everything. Pokemon cards, gone. Soccer sticker books painstakingly filled with scores of expensive packets, gone. Forty-two pounds of Lego (and yet I just found at least 10 more pounds under the bed) gone. I skim over how much I spent on all this stuff—it’s a sunk cost—and pause as I wiped down pieces with a microfiber rag and remember lying on the floor with my child, helping put on the stickers, divvying up pieces and coordinating who would build which part. That’s the gold. I get to keep that.
And that’s the beauty of spending all this time alone with my thoughts completely sober. Things come up, I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m indifferent, but they’re all there. As a bonus (?) I have more energy to lug stuff down the four flights of stairs to the curb. I don’t peter out early as I would have a few beers in. I can go to bed at a reasonable hour and eat the frog first thing the next morning and get the day started right.
When thinking about what I would write to you today, the thought crossed my mind that I could write about how this was a good test of my sobriety. No one would know if I were drinking. I could hide the evidence, both physical and behavioral, and no one would know. But that would be insincere because until I was brainstorming what to write about, the thought never crossed my mind that I could have been drinking, that I could have found a little crack in time. And now that I am thinking about it, all I can think is “wow, that would suck.” Not just for the obvious reasons, but also because I would have had so much less energy to do the stuff I need to get done before my family comes home.
I now know life’s too short to swallow time with booze. I have shit to do.
I love you,
David
