Quotidian

Latin gave French, Spanish and even English this lovely word, of which I’m quite fond; quotidien makes the prosaic sound romantic. But it’s German–as so often in English–that cuts to the heart of the matter.  It’s the Alltäglichkeit, the everyday-ness, that means home to me. It’s the way you never stop listening for that special footstep on the stairs, the way your heart jumps a little, even after all those years, when you hear his key in the door. It’s cutting carrots for the salad while he rinses the lettuce, without words, by your side, within reach, but without touching, not for the first or second or hundredth time, but for the thousandth time. It’s the way the air moves when he’s breathing it across the room. It’s the careless sliding of skin against skin, or not, because there will always be another chance, a whole lifetime, really, that is home.

And once it’s gone, the only way to forget it is to keep running because each new sublet takes you further from those footsteps, to a place you think you can forget that key in the door. Then eventually that T-shirt or pillowcase that you had surreptitiously set aside loses all traces of his smell and after he’s weeks or months away, you find the pillowcase has somehow made its way into the weekly wash. It’s moving yet again, until that shirt gets left behind in some place you hardly remember and the skin you touch from time to time when the need grows too strong is so many times removed from his that you can tell yourself that you can forget even the idea of home, because you think that home is for the young, who don’t ask themselves how they could possibly live through losing such a thing again, no, love is something for those who don’t think too much and know even less, who don’t realize it’s better to just keep moving, until you forget it all, your language, the way you felt when he looked at you, the last time you made love, even your own name.