The Destroyer Is Forced to Confront His Inner Hoarder
The Destroyer does not want to sort through his things but his lease is up and he does not have rent control. If you didn’t use it in the last year then no need to keep it. Solid advice from his second wife. Maybe this is what happened to his sense of humor. The Destroyer’s problems began when he met a woman whose clothes covered the floor in her bedroom and unpaid bills poked up like the bones of former boyfriends. He remembered the Christmas tree they kept until July and the vines that grew into their bedroom before yellowing, golden strands in the endless morass. The challenge of a second marriage is how to lose clutter in the mind and heart. The Destroyer’s wife wonders why there is a drawer with a frayed Blackberry cord and a dream book that he never filled even when it had once sat next to his bed and he awoke with a hollow head. The Destroyer’s sadness spans closets with too-small clothes and too-big expectation that decades with better music will come. His new love makes him believe they could travel the earth in a hatchback, then a suitcase. His music and books in a satchel, and less is more in his heart. Why did the Destroyer need to keep a bookmark from a long-closed bookstore or a hand-painted Russian doll that had jumped in his things and watched over him from a shelf? Losing inches in the waist is one thing but losing the trappings of grief is a mystery in belief. Love is invisible vines joining partners in crime. His dream book is now filled with many such scenes.
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The Destroyer Packs Peanut Butter Sandwiches in His Daughter’s Lunch
The Destroyer doesn’t care about grade school bans or peanut allergies, the rules protecting idiocy mean to be broken purely on principle. He wonders if he is a creature of habit or merely a creature. The Destroyer spent enough years brokering complex deals on what would be eaten from the high chair to the supermarket to ignore the tantrums and tears. There are parents’ complaints and a rumor that he told them to suck it. The Destroyer ruminates how this is not his first trip to the principal’s office, how the time spent in tiny chairs getting a finger shaken from afar comforts him somehow. Bread and jam. In a jam, no bread. He volunteers to be on the board of the fundraising committee. Peanut butter cannot hold the mouth of the universe shut. The Destroyer coughs up the funds to replace much of the concrete playground with sod and plant trees to provide shade. The void is there if he remains in entropy. The dishes are stacked in the sink. This is another reckoning. The Destroyer will do nearly anything for dangerous sandwiches and a daughter’s smile.