1yulSVC

Leslie Pietrzyk
I’m grateful that I have so much more time to myself now, and by
this, I mean specifically the hour between 4 AM and 5 AM when the world
is asleep, and yet I am awake, compiling mental lists of animals in alphabetical
order because an online article on nowyoureanoldlady.com assured
me that lists create order and order brings restful sleep, and during
this hour I’m also grateful to be reading long, endnote-heavy biographies
about important men who ruled the world and had affairs with
passionate, lusty women and who are memorialized with enormous tombstones
where their names are engraved deep into the heart of somber granite,
and during this hour I’m also imagining a blank white wall, a blank
white wall, built brick by brick, higher and higher, all white, brick by brick,
white like drifts of snow, like billows of clouds, streams of milk, a white
wall, soothing, calming, soothing, a fucking white goddamn wall, and then
I’m flipping through channels on the TV, grateful that I’m not a celebrity
drug addict in rehab for the second, third, or tenth time, speaking “candidly”
about the “important” lessons learned about “forgiveness” and “redemption,”
grateful that I do not have a fancy high-def TV that would
make plastic surgery appear as a pathetic horror show instead of maybe
a worthy option and a good use of 401K money, and also grateful the 401K
got hammered in the last stock thing which means the decision was basically
made for me. It’s also during this hour—TV remote still clicking—
that I’m grateful that I am not a professional athlete of any caliber or ilk
who is tearfully breaking down in a press conference or on a field and
grateful that my poker skills are limited to knowing that a bra does not
under any circumstance equal a man’s boxer shorts. I’m grateful that when
I’m back in bed, not sleeping, often I hear the echo of my own heartbeat,
that hypnotic pounding, and I feel the rise and fall of my chest as my lungs
pump oxygen, and what I’m thinking then is that each breath, each beat,
might be the very last, and understanding that reality makes me, yes, grateful.
I’m grateful men blatantly and shamelessly lie on their online dating
profiles. Otherwise, I’d be wasting my time meeting men who actually
are six feet tall and who actually do have a job as an “executive” (or
even a “job”) and who actually do like animals and who actually are not
three hundred pounds, give or take fifty. I’m grateful for the lawyers who
are still bitter that their ex-wives ended up with the dog by claiming in
court that the dog was for the kids when it was really that “the bitch knew
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