Broke

Tomorrow a truck will come and take my job north packed up neatly in brown shipping boxes and I will still be here, gathering together the meager pile of my personal effects. 

The passing years of my life summarized in a handful of stale tea bags, wool desk slippers, and a stained and chipped mug. If I’m lucky I’ll get the folding card table and the potted rubber tree but regardless I know I will be leaving with a pocketful of rubber bands, a wealth of sticky notes and juicy, smooth flowing pens that write like waltzing.

I wait for the inevitable, searching the classifieds in a daze as I throw resumes and inquiries like so many twigs in the river current swirling. Prospects are as slim as our checking account and the bill pile grows unsteady and wobbling. 

I’ve stopped eating mostly, stretching out days on coffee and scraps grazed and gleaned till dinner comes. I’ve become a brave lie, wane and grey, staring down disaster with a whispered defiance in my heart. I understand.

It will be awhile still before the food stamps kick in. The application was twelve pages long and took several weeks and countless hours waiting on hold to process. The woman at the counter photocopied and stamped my total worth with obvious annoyance. A handwritten sign on the glass that separated us said that if you were scared they would let you wait in a different room.

I find myself dreaming elaborate fantasies of food and decadence, chocolate cake ebony dark and rich with thick swirls of bittersweet fudge and pink hued raspberry buttercream, golden sweet and dry sparkling wine sweating crystal glasses in the sun, red skinned pears so soft and ripe on the windowsill your thumb sinks deep in the warm, syrupy flesh like sex.