When I read Brandon Taylor’s critical essay brutalism of the mind I was thrilled by its brilliance. I immediately opened the google doc called “Brutalism” that I have been adding to for the past eight months and laughed. It was the laughter of having been called out. More generously, recognized.
Many of my memories of the past year are either dull or dulled. In landscape painting, the foreground is rendered more clearly than the background in order to show distance. However, the pandemic has acted as a sort of reverse landscape on my mind—memories of the past are more vivid than those of this year. This reminds me of a photographer who inverted Giorgio Morandi’s still lifes so that the horizon was more prominent than the objects pictured. “In the end, my pictures… are research into the intimate and secret horizon hidden in everyone’s existence,” she said of the project.
This is how I arrived at the word brutalism enmeshed in what Taylor calls “character vapor.” I would never force my way into a dialogue with a living writer, especially one as talented as Taylor, but reading the word brutalism applied in this way reminded me why I turned to autofiction. Yes, I am subject to “the fleeting, atomized nature of contemporary consciousness” that Taylor describes. But autofiction is an outlet for the architecture and art criticism that has become increasingly difficult to publish or monetize.
Last year my friend Eva Hagberg tweeted “anyone i know work on architecture and intimacy? besides me lol?” and I responded to say that lately it has been my only subject. I even looked up and noted the availability of brutalism.substack.com where I am writing to you now, one of a “flotilla of Substacks” (Taylor again) including the one I usually write for, Dirt.
Good criticism saves us from becoming a parody of ourselves when we are unaware of our own limitations. I know that autofiction is a way of laundering my self-confessions into places they don’t belong. Namely, the evaluation of art and architecture. And so the pandemic year becomes Morandi, becomes brutalism.
Even in a sensory void there are discoveries to be made that pull me back from the brink of coolness. The lost job at a literary review is followed by a job at a watch website and the introduction of a handful of tiny machines into my life. My husband tweets about the soft tick-rocking(sic) sounds everywhere in the apartment. “Keep thinking bombs are about to go off,” he writes.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.
I was sitting alone at a brewery in the town where I live waiting for the rain to pass. The cabs that wait at the train station only take cash and I never carry cash. At least once a month I walk a block from the station to the brewery and have a drink then call the cab company that takes electronic payments. I was reading a long article about plastic surgery by a writer many people admire, having saved it for just such a moment.
“Everyone’s on their phones these days, huh?”
I looked up at the man standing next to me. He appeared to be in his 60s with grey hair that brushed the collar of his flannel shirt. I was taken aback by his comment. It was so scripted to be the thing a Boomer says to a young woman, a David Brooksian platitude so banal it was utterly devoid of meaning. I hesitated and he sat down.
“I’m not a luddite,” he clarified. “My brother is.”
I scanned the bar. “Is he here?” I asked.
“No, he lives in Tucson,” he said.
The bartender came by and gave the man a cold look which I took to be a signal but then she gave me a cold look as well. He wasn’t a very big man. I wanted to go home but I didn’t mind listening to what he had to say either. I had already made the decision to walk to the bar and call a cab. To leave the bar because of someone else’s actions added another decision to my evening and that didn’t appeal to me. I liked the simplicity of my original plan. The interviewer in me also knew that I usually elicited the most insight about another person in my moments of passivity.
Actually, it was the fault of the cabs at the station for not taking credit cards. The reason I didn’t carry cash was so that I never had to decide whether to give someone cash or not. “Sorry, I don’t have any cash,” was a common refrain on the streets of the city. I lived just a ten minute walk from the station and wouldn’t take a cab in the first place if I hadn’t sworn to my boyfriend and my mother and also myself that I would never walk home up that hill in the dark. I lived at the top of the hill and I paid $7 for the privilege of getting there safely after sunset.
I looked at the man next to me with sudden resentment and he must have noticed because he leaned back and I softened my expression. “Have you read any good books lately?” I asked. He told me that he was reading an anonymous tell-all by a White House advisor. I told him that my friend worked for the publisher of the book and told him the identity of the advisor. His eyes lit up.
“I can’t wait to tell my brother,” he said. “It’s a shame what’s happening to this country,” he added, “I can’t imagine bringing a child into this world.”
“I’m glad I don’t have to make that decision right now,” I said.
“Are you married?” he asked.
“No, but I think I am dating the person that I will marry.”
He told me that he met his first wife in EST, a self-improvement course he took in the 70s. Some people said it was a cult, but it wasn’t too bad if you just took the initial training. It was only two weeks of his life, anyway. He was in college during Vietnam and was overwhelmed with the uselessness of academic life in the face of such violence. “I didn’t want to sign up for a war I disagreed with, but that meant someone else was fighting in my place. And that poor kid probably died for me, so that I could learn accounting.” He shook his head. Accounting.
He didn’t sleep then, he said, he was drunk practically all the time. He flunked out, but by that point the war was over. Maybe his bender could end then too. He got a summer job in a tourist town and saved his money to visit Europe. He flew to Geneva first. It was crawling with GI’s. They rounded corners in their uniforms like apparitions. He could never look straight at them. He was afraid he would see missing arms or legs or a tattoo of his own face with the word “coward” above it. Didn’t they know they could come home now?
He fought with the friends he was traveling with. They called him a homo (pardon the language, that’s just what they said at the time) when he didn’t sleep with the local women. Eventually, they parted ways in a city called Bern. Had I heard of it? A friend of his father was a prolific watch collector and he asked him to visit a specific shop there. He gave him $200, a lot of money at the time, which he had been carefully concealing from other hostel guests and his travel companions who he never really trusted.
The man in the watch shop was bent in half with age. His gnarled hands clutched each watch as he listed off its merits in perfect, accented English.
“I realized then that I had no idea what I was looking for. In that shop, or in my life,” he told me. He bought a simple gold timepiece and flew home as quickly as he could. His father’s friend wasn’t impressed. The watch was similar to many of the pieces already in his collection. It was nothing special. “He thanked me for my effort and told me to keep it for my trouble. Although, he called me a buffoon to my father behind my back.” After that he signed up for the EST course and worked at a bank for the next forty years. He put three kids through college and was now enjoying his retirement.
He flagged the bartender over to order another beer. I shook my head and cupped my hand over my glass to signal I was planning to drink the half inch of liquid at the bottom.
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a writer.”
He waited for me to elaborate but I was suddenly very tired. As if in listening to his monologue I forgot how to speak about myself. I drank the remainder of my beer.
“What do you write about?”
“Architecture.”
I could tell he was pleased with this answer. I find that when people are confronted with the topic of architecture they tend to talk about a building they glimpsed once from a train or a hotel they stayed at in a foreign city. They rarely talk about their own home. In fact, the idea of architecture is so eroded by proximity that I wondered if the average person thought of their house as architecture at all. They certainly weren’t encouraged to.
“Architecture is dangerous,” he said.
“How so?” I asked.
The university he studied accounting at was built in the Brutalist style. Each building was made of rough concrete. Crossing the campus at night the buildings seemed to suck up more light than they emitted, like black holes. In the daylight they looked like dull Escher paintings. It was hard not to associate Brutalism with his prevailing mood and over the years he wondered whether those concrete fortresses might have been the start of his downward spiral. Decades later a student would commit a horrific act of terrorism and he felt again that the architecture must have played a role.
I knew which campus he was talking about. It wasn’t far from where I grew up. I had come to appreciate the unified vision of the architect, but as a teenager it had been enough to put me off. In fact, I left halfway through the campus tour.
“What was it about your wife that stood out during the EST seminar?” I asked.
“She was the only person there that already seemed happy.”
He told me that they dated for six months and one day while she was in the shower he got down on one knee and swept aside the curtain. Cupped between his hands was the Swiss watch. “I told her we could melt it down and make her a ring,” he said. “It was a bit ironic.”
“How so?”
“Well, you’re not allowed to wear a watch during EST.”
I told him that I had some work to finish up and I was going to call a cab.
“I have to go right through the center of town, I’ll take you.” I sized him up again and shrugged. “Ok.” It had stopped raining. He had a copy of the paper opened to the books section in his backseat and I told him I was interviewing for a job at a literary review.
He took a different turn than I was used to at the top of the hill and I hugged my backpack to my lap before realizing it was only to deposit me on the correct side of the street. When he pulled up in front of my building he stuck out his hand and told me his name. “When you’re negotiating a salary, never give them an amount,” he said. “When they make the offer, tell them you were expecting more. If they come back and ask how much, just say more.” I thanked him for the advice and got out of the car.
I remembered his advice when my offer came from the publisher. I did not ask for more.
In February, my boyfriend proposed. In May, I was laid off from my job. Only then did I regret not having asked for more.
I went car shopping with my father-in-law. Buying the car was my final admission that I live in the suburbs. I resisted the idea of the suburbs because I didn’t like who I was when I lived there. I was a child, and didn’t have control over my life. That is what the suburbs represent to me: a lack of control.
I emailed my building manager to tell her that I was buying a car and would need a parking pass for the garage across the street from my apartment. She told me she would contact the city. A few days later, I drove the car home. I live a block from city hall so I walked over to see whether they could give me something to put on my car temporarily so that I wouldn’t get ticketed. They took my temperature and gave me a survey about recent travel. I left with a temporary parking permit.
The walls of the literary review I worked at were lined with caricatures of famous intellectuals. Their long, horsey faces–like Modigliani’s mistresses–kept watch over everything. When I was laid off, a friend that works in publishing suggested I apply to be a coronavirus contact tracer. I couldn’t tell if I was being insulted, but I applied anyway to prove that I didn’t find the suggestion offensive. I never heard back.
Instead, I got a part time job cataloging abuses against the press. I called up journalists and asked them a series of questions:
Were you detained?
Were you hit with any projectiles?
Was your equipment damaged?
I felt like a doctor with a clipboard. I was cataloging symptoms, but the sickness was a collective one. They said, “Rubber bullets,” and I jotted that down, moved my finger down the page, and asked, “Any teargas?” They sent me pictures of their bruises from unsaved numbers and it took me a second to comprehend them. Like oil paintings in a dark gallery.
I called the city to ask if there had been any progress on my permit. I was on my way to visit a friend further upstate. “Can you come by city hall today?”
“I can’t, I’m out of town,” I said.
“Where are you that you can’t come in?” the woman asked. I was taken aback.
“Away,” I said.
In October, my family drove to Maine. We stayed on an island not far from where I went to college. A bridge separated it from a small, picturesque town where tourists lined up for lobster rolls. One night, my brother and I got in a fight.
“You have no self-awareness,” he said.
“I have no self-awareness?” I said. I asked him to clarify what I had done to upset him.
“Just now, you insulted me. You said I have no self-awareness,” he said.
It was true, right there in the inflection of my I. I thought it was safer to use insults that had already been used. The next day my eyelid swelled up. I, eye. Is this anything?
Rembrandt painted The Senses when he was eighteen. Taste went missing from the set. When they are displayed, it is represented by an empty frame.
More time passed and the date on the temporary permit came and went. My car was ticketed two days in a row. I went to city hall and asked them to extend my temporary parking permit. They said that the delay was on the building’s end, my building said that the delay was on the city’s end. No matter. I backed my car into a parking space so I could display the extended temporary parking permit prominently on the dashboard.
My husband picked up guitar again. One afternoon, I took a nap with earplugs in. When I took the first one out, a temporary distortion made it sound as if there was a tiny guitarist beneath my pillow.
This reminded me of a man I went on several dates with. Before we met, we sent each other long, witty text messages. However, as soon as I heard his voice, I knew we would never be together. He was the first person I met who slept with earplugs in.
“This will be the best sleep you’ve ever had,” he told me. He was rolling the earplugs between his fingers before he inserted them in my ears. In the middle of the night, I woke up to my heartbeat in my left ear and an uncomfortable pressure.
I ripped the plugs out and the night came back in: the traffic brushing by outside, the bus perpetually approaching the curb, and his periodic turning and unturning. First toward me with one arm, then away with a slight chill, then almost touching—separated by the length of an exhale.
Feeling my way past the bicycle in the hall, I threw the plugs away in the bathroom trash. My nose was bleeding a little from the dryness of the air. I looked at myself in the mirror to make sure everything was ok. Everything was ok. I felt my way back down the hall.
I woke up away from him. I moved toward him with one arm. I don’t like to have any of my senses dulled. They say it can be erotic—that it sharpens the other four. But the only thing it sharpens in me is my fear of the unrecoverable.
He was a very tender person. If I could have willed myself to get past the sound of his voice I would have.
A woman called from the city. “My name is Caitlin,” she said. “Ok,” I said. “I’ll call back later,” she said. She never did. I called my building manager. “An email came in just this morning, you’ve been approved,” she said. She told me to pick up a card at city hall. I went to city hall. They took my temperature and gave me a survey about recent travel. “We don’t give out parking passes,” they said. “Ok, is there something I need to put in my car in order to park?” I asked. They told me that I needed a magnetic card to get into the upper levels of the garage. “Ok, can I have one please?” It cost me $15.00. The parking tickets cost $60.00.
I drove to the supermarket and they were out of thyme. This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it’s true. Almost as bad a joke as the museum without taste. In honor of Rembrandt, this essay is tasteless.
After the fight with my brother, I walked back across the bridge. My husband came with me. I locked the door that led from our bedroom to the living room and the door that led from our bathroom to the front hall. My husband watched me walk back and forth between the doors, feeling the knob, double checking.
I turned the shower dial to its hottest setting and sat in the tub until my skin turned the color of the lobster we’d just eaten. When I came out, I asked if we could put on CNN. The president was in the hospital. Watching the television reminded me of a man I knew who moved away from New York but came back periodically on business.
We would go out while he was in town and that is how I became familiar with several of the moderately priced hotels in Brooklyn. One night we watched the news together in his hotel room and I realized I liked that better than the other things we did together. I never wanted it to end.
Being married is like that feeling all of the time.
The next morning in Maine, my mother knocked once and walked in. I couldn’t understand why the door was open. “Please let your brother apologize,” she said. There was a cereal bowl on the kitchen counter. I followed the thread of the cereal bowl back to my husband leaving the room for a snack in the middle of the night.
The president’s condition was a consequence of his psychological condition, one which several members of my family share. In coping with a narcissist, one becomes rigid about their own reality. I refuse to live in the doubt that arises when one questions their own senses, not even for the sake of my art. Instead, I am Morandi’s horizon, forced into focus. “I’m glad you saw that fight,” I told my husband. “Now you understand why I am the way I am.”
When I moved into my apartment building I took an immediate dislike to my neighbor, who yelled often and loudly at her three cats—but none more than Oliver. They followed her down the hallway of our floor when she used the shared laundry machines, their tails held high. Many a nap was disrupted by a sharp “Oliver!” from the other side of the wall.
In a move that reveals my own capacity for pettiness, I named my WiFi network, justiceforoliver.
In 2015, I fainted on the L train. I could feel the darkness coming over me but I waited for the next stop, not wanting to make everyone late for work. I recognized the smell of an ex-boyfriend’s designer cologne in the air and I would have laughed if I wasn’t also fainting. As my vision went dark I said, “Can someone please help me, I am going to pass out.” By this point I was blind but I felt hands lifting me up and then out the door. I blinked the 1st Ave platform into focus. I was sitting on the damp concrete and a British woman was crouched next to me. “Drink some tea,” she suggested.
In 2021, I went to the apartment of another ex-boyfriend. I had some questions, such as, “Do you ever think about me at all?” The smell of his workout clothes hung in the air: familiar and estranged. It was the smell of the pain of a past self. I found his business card in the bottom of my makeup bag with a ceramic cigarette, 500 Mexican pesos and a rape whistle. I have never been to Mexico. There was a perfume roller in there too that I used to wear on my wrists when I dated a man that lived with his uncle. His uncle had a real Matisse drawing on the wall.
“Here it is,” I thought. “The smell of looking up at a Matisse from your knees.”
The other day I hesitated in front of another perfume bottle. Who was this for? I can’t smell it through my mask—can anyone else? I watched a movie recently that credited a fictitious perfumer in the credits. The film was about a lesbian couple that studies moths and butterflies. It’s called Duke of Burgundy, after a small brown butterfly with tortoiseshell wings.
A studio that works with journalists to produce stories for adaptation reached out to me. They asked me what I was working on. I told them I was researching the death of an anonymous woman who died in a hotel room in Oslo in 1995. One of her only personal effects was a bottle of men’s cologne. I told the woman on the phone that I thought about ordering the cologne from ebay, as if the scent could bring a revelation. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” I said. (Women carrying on affairs are like assassins.)
When we say a film is stylish, we mean it livens the senses. The film Marie Antoinette was notable for its New Wave and post-punk soundtrack in the same gesture toward sense for sense’s sake that the Duke of Burgundy credits evoked. “The simulacra-perfume acts as a natural, simulated, pervasive and imperceptible pheromone upon the audience,” writes Monika Lemke in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.
I briefly dated the older brother of one of the post-punk band members on the soundtrack. One day we were walking down Fifth Avenue when he pulled me into a perfume store to share his favorite scent. I let him spray it on me—it smelled like oranges.
When I was younger, I didn’t like hotels. The appeal of a hotel is that you can pretend to be someone else, but when you’re a child you believe every possible future is available to you. The appeal of the hotel doesn’t snap into focus until your life has been set on its course.
The police in Oslo didn’t adequately investigate the death of the woman in the hotel room. The room was double locked from the inside, and her death was quickly ruled a suicide. In the years since, there have been attempts to identify her by her watch. But we don’t know that it was her watch or her cologne. What is the opposite of a crime scene? A woman alive. The real Duke of Burgundy hosted a feast in 1454 that featured a statue dispensing wine from her breast. The statue was guarded by a chained lion.
I once sat next to a college student on a cheap flight to Stockholm. She was wearing flip flops and had drawn her knees up under her sweatshirt so she could run her bare feet together for warmth. I could feel her discomfort in my own body, the futility of it. “Do you want a pair of socks?” I asked. I found some in my bag, mismatched, maybe even they belonged to my boyfriend. She gave them back to me at the end of the flight and I wore them again without washing them.
Marie Antoinette kept perfumed sheep.
There is a man whose touch I remember. I loved him for ten years, starting when we were children, at summer camp in Maine. I loved him but he didn’t love me. He loved motorcycles and airplanes. He had freckles on the back of his hands and thick knuckles with scars on them from tinkering.
In college, I saw a silver airplane at a flea market that I thought he would like. I didn’t have enough cash and offered to trade the vendor my rain boots. “I don’t want your rain boots,” he said. He set it aside for the next weekend.
I woke up early that Saturday and sat in the parking lot of Tim Horton’s with my hot chocolate until the flea market opened, then I bought the airplane. I miss unrequited love like that. It feels realer, because it’s the love we feel for being in love. He’s a pilot now.
The lesbian couple in The Duke of Burgundy practice dominance and submission, but it’s the submissive partner who actually dictates the script. This is called topping from the bottom. The soundtrack to the film uses recordings from mating silkworm moths. Moth-fucking has to be the dryest humping there is. It’s the sound of misophonia, the fragile edge of a power dynamic written out on cue cards.
The hotel my husband proposed to me in has a distinct smell. They sell room spray in the lobby. When he began to practice guitar in our apartment again, I asked if I could check into a hotel for a few days to write. I thought this would be a blessing for him as well as he had recently noted how loudly I type on my keyboard and also on my phone, as my nails click against the screen.
There comes a point in quarantine, as well as a marriage, when you realize you don’t like the sounds you yourself are producing. Still, when I told him I was checking in to our engagement hotel it felt like a betrayal.
“Maybe I can visit you,” he said.
“It’s only three days,” I said.
I am sitting in my hotel room now. Sofia Coppola made a movie largely set in a hotel. It’s a movie I like remembering better than I like watching. Just like I felt a warmth toward the sparse clusters of suited men still gathered on Park Avenue this morning. The only employees who volunteered to go back to my husband’s office work in the finance department.
I am here to cut through the dullness of the dread that is always there. I wake up feeling guilty about writing but I still haven’t learned how to do the work I dread most in the morning. If I was able to do it first, it wouldn’t be the thing I dread most, would it?
I go to a French cafe that feels more like France because Midtown doesn’t feel like Midtown. It’s something about the way the smell of dairy lingers in the air. The barista asks me if I want my milk heated up but I say no, because I am eager to get back to writing. Maybe she’s thinking this American doesn’t know how to live.
Recently, I heard someone say that America heals itself quickly. Like a cut inside the mouth. I don’t think that’s the case. At summer camp, someone stole my perfume—the perfume was called Happy. Stolen happiness (again with the bad jokes!) reminds me of the cottage industry that has risen up around climate grief. Rarely do we hear from those who have lost everything.
How many people are actually grieving their social position? We measure everything we’ve lost in proportion to what we’ve lost before. When you’re healthy, losing happiness feels like a lot.
I’ve watched hours of footage of police brutalizing journalists and protesters and it’s still hard to predict which videos will make me cry. This week it was a video of three protesters holding hands and running away from a wall of teargas. Something about the tenderness and intimacy of the gesture. What is more intimate than survival? I squeezed my eyes shut and looked up until the emotion passed.
Brutalism comes from béton brut, meaning raw concrete, and art brut, meaning raw art. A thing that dulls the senses; a thing that livens the senses. And yet, people react to it with violent hatred, as if it’s the metaphorical cave their ancestors crawled out of.
If you think about it, Plato’s Cave is humankind’s shared bad ex. I’ve thought about it.
I talked to a journalist who has lost hearing in one ear because of a flashbang thrown by a federal agent. He called it one of the more horrific things that has happened to him since he began covering the uprising. I have seen the other things that happened to him and they were disturbing but impermanent.
“There’s only so much you can ask of yourself, and every person wants to do their part to be a witness to history or to be a part of it but you only have one life and you deserve to be happy, and you deserve to be healthy,” I said. Was I saying these things to comfort him, or myself?
There was a long pause on the other end of line. “Well thanks for that,” he said.
One day in college I was leaving class when a friend asked if I would show a young Chinese man around. He had come alone to see the school. I took him to the top of a tower at the edge of campus and we looked at the church spires and pine trees stretching as far as the eye could see.
I told the admissions office that I recommended they admit him. I think my reasoning was how badly he wanted to be there. At that time in my life, I believed that desire was my only credential because of how badly I worked for the things that I wanted. I still believe that sometimes. After he was admitted, the man and I were always friendly when we saw each other around campus.
My senior year, I lived in the tower at the edge of campus with a group of close friends. The mid-century building looks brutal when compared to its surroundings. The concrete roof caps off the building like a fuse and recessed windows hang back in their zipper-shaped shadows.
The night after graduation I drove my friends to an off-campus party as the designated driver. There was some misunderstanding about when we would leave. One friend didn’t want the eleventh hour romance that had blossomed for her in the last week to end.
She lashed out at me on the ride home. I went into my bedroom and locked the door. My friends took turns knocking on my door, imploring me to let her apologize. If you lock the door to physical violence you’re smart. If you lock the door to emotional violence you are the aggressor.
On my second date with the kind man whose voice I couldn’t get past we went to a Russian bathhouse in the East Village. I wore my old lifeguard bathing suit, a red one piece. We moved from the hottest steam room to the outdoor deck. A light snow was falling. The flakes landed on my skin and I felt nothing.
I admit that I made up part of the story about the man in the bar. There was a man who interrupted me reading and he told me a story about proposing to his first wife with a watch. He drove me home and told me how to negotiate my salary offer. Those facts are true, the others just felt true.
I watched the manhunt for the Boston bomber unfold on Twitter from my dorm room in the tower. It was the first night I chose the news over sleep—later, this would be a job requirement. The boy I loved (who didn’t love me) went to school in Boston. Earlier in the day I made sure that he was safe. The terrorists intended maximum harm by loading their pressure cooker bombs with nails.
I told the story of the deafened journalist to a man who had just had surgery for cataracts. It doesn’t matter how many nails your life contains, even one is enough to harm you.
My first date with my husband lasted three days. The first night was spent at his apartment, the second in a hotel and the third at his apartment again—the small bedroom with one window, one electrical outlet, no closet. The hotel is the same type I had recently been praised for writing critically about. The shared amenities were numerous: rooftop bar, bicycles, co-working, but the rooms were small and cubby-like. The bed took up the majority of the room, like a cloud wedged into a mountain cave. And that’s where we spent all of our time.
I was on my period, but I showed him how to scrub the stains out of the sheets with cold water, the way I learned at eleven years old, we all did. (Even in my awkward years I was shrewd and thin and I knew that this was as good as the world would get for me.) In the morning the sheets were white again and all that was left was a bloody handprint on the wall. I’m still not sure whose hand it was.
Shortly after I started my job at the literary review, he told me to reserve the last weekend in February. I knew then that he was going to propose. On February 28th he texted me an address. It was the address of the hotel from our first date. I asked the front desk for the room key. When I opened the door he was sitting in a chair facing me. Next to him was a ring and a bouquet of flowers. He got down on one knee. I began to cry. I trained my whole life to be loved this deeply.
The other day I opened the door of my apartment to see a tuxedo cat with big, green eyes looking up at me.
“Hello Oliver,” I thought.