Fucking Carpet.

I turned my head and saw my friend staring back a me, a wide smile across his face. His large body was sprawled across the love seat like an overside animal in a cage much too small, a ridiculously bad and dull mousy brown wig covering his shaved head. It reminded me of the theme they chose for the night. A theme I would have rather not written about and rather not thought about, but one that I eventually agreed to participate in - fucking carpet.

It was that brown fucking wig and that dumb fucking theme that made me think of the ugly carpet at my old house. Yeah, the house I first lived in with my ex-husband before things went so fucking south, that one day I woke up married, hating my life, and feeling more alone being with him, than I would have ever felt actually being alone. 

The ceilings were too low and made me claustrophobic. Walking through the door felt the equivalent to wrapping a plastic bag around my head. The large windows in the front of the house faced North, never allowing enough light in to rid the dreadful gloom that loomed like a dark cloud. The sun could rise and fall without ever being detected, never spilling through the windows in our shriveling orchid of a home that begged for sunlight. And the fucking carpet. It had a permanent wrinkle that ran from the front door all the way to the hallway, and the dark and dirty shade of brown was the last color in the world I would have chosen, but represented the theme of my life at the time - grim. No matter what I did, the house was always cold. The walls held in the darkest mold of what I felt in my heart when I lived there. And I lived there for 3 years. 3 fucking years with that cold, dampened darkness surrounding me in an unwelcome hug. Even after I’ve moved on, the thought of that place haunts me to the point of wanting to vomit.

I remember a sweltering day one summer when I woke up and questioned how long it had been since I had seen my neighbor. He was a grumpy old man who I had only spoken with once, but I thought about him often. It was a rare time I had decided to do yard work in the front and he had appeared outside. Without saying hello, he peered over the picket fence between our yards and made an odd but friendly comment on my hard work. 

And then I remember standing outside and feeling the sadness radiating from his house. I wanted to bake him a pie. I wanted to start a friendly conversation next time I saw him working in his yard or pulling out the ladder to clean his gutters. I wanted to ask him about his life and ask him his name. It had been months since we moved in, yet I had never seen a visitor and noticed his truck gone only an hour or two each week. But that day, heat stroking my face with a disgusting and moist hand that smelled of death, I had gone into the front yard and left my own front door open. My dog laid obediately on the lenoliyn just inside the door where it met that disgusting brown fucking carpet.

I stood on the tree stump that was left carelessly in the front yard and turned my attention to the energy that pulled me. I had already made a call to non-emergency for a wellness check on the kind old man that lived next to me whose name I didn’t know. The flies buzzed silently, caking the window like black paint. The crow atop his house sang an eery song of death, but it wasn’t until I realized those flies that covered the window were on the inside, that I knew he was already dead. A gun shot wound to the head, almost a week after the fact, left nothing but a radiation of loneliness and pain that covered my own home, brown fucking carpet and all.