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She walked down the hallway, past her bedroom door, past the bathroom door, and opened up another room.
“Wait, you told me this was a closet,” he said. ‘Why are we looking in your closet?”
“No,” she said, flicking on the light. “No, I pay for this extra bedroom—through the nose, by the way, may I say, because of this.” This was the junk room. It was the place where she put everything that didn’t belong in the other rooms when she needed to “clean.” She knew that she needed to do something about this junk room, but the problem was that the more junk she put in the junk room, the more insurmountable it seemed to even know where to start.
She had not always had a junk room.
When she first got this apartment, she’d had a roommate. The roommate had moved out, and she’d thought she’d get another roommate, but then, she’d started throwing junk in this room and…
Well, anyway, it was like in The Cat in the Hat. This mess was so big and tall, there was no way to pick it up. No way at all.
“What is this?” said Decker, sounding amused.
“This is the junk room,” she said. “Some people have a drawer. I have a room.”
Decker laughed. “Uh, okay, so you threw everything in this room. It’s kind of cute, actually, how upset you are about this. You could clean this out in a couple hours, Essence. It’s really not even that bad.”
She gaped at him. “This. This is the problem. You do not even understand me.”
“Um?” He was still laughing. He leaned into the door jamb, looking into the room. “Why not?”
“Because I obviously can’t clean it up. If I could, I would.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t want to.”
“I do so. Take that back.” She was going to punch him.
“I mean, if you wanted to, you’d figure it out.”
“That is just ableist bullshit.” She clenched her hands in fists.
“Oh, right, because your supposed ADHD is not even diagnosed. If you really have ADHD, Essence, go to a doctor and get some fucking meds.”
Her jaw dropped. “You… you…” She gestured. “Move.”
He moved.
She shut the door.
“You don’t think you need meds?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sulky. “It’s just… you say that like it’s easy. And I think of trying to go to a doctor, and I feel ill at the unassailableness of the entire thing. How do you even do that?”
“You’ve been to doctors. You’re thirty-three years old. You know how.”
“Fuck you.” She swept down the hallway. “This is it. This is why. This is doomed. Let’s have sex a couple more times, get it out of our systems, and then pick up the pieces of our ruined lives tomorrow.”
“What did I say?” he called from behind her. He was not following her.
She was going to cry.
She went to the kitchen, got out a hard seltzer, popped it open, and began to drink it instead.
He appeared in the kitchen. “Can I have one?”
“Get it yourself.” She went to the couch.
He did. He came into the living room, but he didn’t sit down. He stood there, too big for the room, too big for the tiny can he was drinking, and he said, “So, you remember that time that my car broke down and you were like, ‘I’ll drive you to work for a few days,’ and I was like, ‘How, because there’s barely room for you in your car?’”
