Alright so if you walk in to my bedroom
Pressed in the far corner is my bed
The headboard against the left wall
And, if you’re lying in it, the left side against an interior wall of the house
On that wall, the one on the left side of the bed, is a painting that came with the house
It is a long rectangle
I would describe its artistic value to be
Obligatory-Motel-Room-Painting
Blocks of color and weird squiggly bits
Not a picture of anything as much as a tool to bring the end table and the drapes together with the sheets
It’s on canvas stretched around a wooden frame
Nailed into the top bar of that wooden frame, dead center, is a jagged piece of metal
Normally you’d just put a nail in the wall and center that bit on the nail there you go
But this house has those paper thin walls that a nail with an ant on would tear through like Robin Hood sliding down a royal banner out a castle window with Maid Marion under his arm
So you can’t just hang the painting on the wall
But the room has crown molding
So instead of a nail in the wall
There is a string tied to the jagged piece of metal that extends up the center of the wall to the top
Where the string is tied to a fishing hook that is clipped into the crown molding
All this is to say is that sometimes when I lie in bed alone in my thoughts or otherwise
I reach my hand up and push the painting
Like a brother in the backseat being told not to touch his little sister I just kind of give it a poke
And I watch it swing from side to side
Or rather I expect to watch it swing like a marble on a string in a pendulum prop at a CEO’s desk
Side to side
Evenly
But it doesn’t
It wobbles while it sways
Like how at Disneyland
The Tea Cup Ride
The cups spin in circles while they go in circles
The painting wobbles while it sways back and forth
And I just don’t get it
Like I don’t understand at all
See I’m a smart conceited man so this gets on my nerves
And I know that if I spent my junior year of high school, first trimester, third period paying attention to Mrs. Whatever’s physics class instead of eating turkey sandwiches in the back with Sean then falling asleep that I’d be able to tell you exactly why this happens
But I got hungry at like 9am back then and I can’t help that I didn’t give a **** so I can’t explain it
And all of that was to say that I spend most of my daily energy trying to feel normal
Trying to be a sane person
Waking up all five days of the work week on time
Showering and brushing my teeth
Taking my kid to school and not forgetting to pick him back up after work
Not taking shots on my lunch breaks
And we all have the internet
And we all like poetry
So we’ve all heard the phrase “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting diff…and you know where I’m going
I’ve been in therapy since I was eight
Been on all the medications
Kept myself alive even when I didn’t want to
Worked a job long enough to get promoted a couple times
Live a real life, with real consequences
And every once in a while if I’m not looking too hard
I start to feel like a normal
Like a sane person
Like someone who is of his right mind
And then all of it gets undone by a ****** painting hanging on a string in my bedroom
Because I know what it means about me to push that painting and expect it swing every time and to every time watch in shock as it wobbles while it sways