The Creative Nest

I live in a small house. Not charming small, not cottage small. Small in the way that a hallway is small when two people meet in it and one of them has to turn sideways while holding a laundry basket. Fifteen years here. In all that time, the only furniture I have ever moved is my bed. It went from one wall to the opposite wall. That is it. The dresser did not move. The dresser has been in the same spot since the first week and has, at this point, established squatter's rights. I would need a lawyer to relocate it. Here is what the bed move revealed. Underneath, in a rectangle of carpet that had been protected from all sunlight and foot traffic, the floor was a completely different color. Bright, almost smug. Around it, fifteen years of gray. I stood there looking at the clean rectangle like an archaeologist who had discovered a very boring temple. Also under the bed: a pen cap. One hair tie. A nickel. A phone charger for a phone I have not owned since 2016. A single bobby pin, ...

Twenty years at the same company. Two decades of the same parking lot and the same break room microwave that still smells like someone's 2014 leftovers. Next year the loyalty pays out in the only currency that matters to me now: five weeks of vacation. Five. Weeks. I did the math on the back of a receipt, which is the only kind of math I trust. One week per quarter gets me to twenty days. That leaves five days floating loose in the year, like a sock in the dryer or a lizard in the kitchen. Those five days are mine to spend badly and I plan to spend them badly. Here is the thing about vacation time at my company. It accrues. It sits there in the HR portal like a very polite hostage, ticking up in fractions of an hour while I sit in a meeting about a meeting. There is a cap. There is always a cap. Someone in Benefits decided years ago that we should not be allowed to hoard our days like a dragon with a coin pile, and honestly, fair. But every December I get an email warning me abo...

The first date went fine right up until the part where he said it. We were talking about the bridge traffic, or his brother's boat, I don't remember which, and he leaned back in the booth and said, cheerful, that he hoped I wasn't the type who believed in horoscopes. I laughed. What else do you do. Then he told me about a girlfriend he had who read the newspaper one, the printed horoscope column, in the actual paper, like it was 1994. Fine. I knew his sign before I knew his last name. I want that on the record. I did the thing where you type a birth date into your phone right there at the table with your coat still on, next to a basket of breadsticks you are not going to eat. The app sent me a notification. Saturn, opposition, something. A little ring of planets spun on my screen while he was telling me about the boat, it was extremely unhelpful, and I watched all of it with my glass of water in my hand. Here is the thing about horoscopes. Nobody believes in them and e...