Bad Things #8

I can only remember the bad things, how seven years of my life suddenly after the breakup dwindled down to memories of his drunk over protective mother and his father, which I remember him telling in a proud humorous voice, the story of when he was first married and threw his dinner at the wall because he didn't like it. I remember the wallpaper at his parent's house; stained and sticky to the touch from cooking oils and cigarettes, the overlapped seams peeled away from each other. A large flap of wallpaper hung down in the corner nearest the bathroom. The tiles on the kitchen floor; a dull brown from corner to corner with the occasional missing tile exposing ecru grout with gashes of scores from an underpaid laborer. How I could feel the porous texture of my bones when my stockings would snag static as I walked across the tiles where the corners were eaten away. How his mother used to ask that I only ash in the ashtray and not grind out the cigarette butts because she ate the ashes. There was something disturbing beyond the fact that she ate ashes, the fact that she ate my ashes. That in some removed way she was consuming me, that my blood was mixing with hers, that she was inside me, that I could in some way be remotely like her.

His bedroom was painted a screaming blue color. He took pride in the cobwebs that took up residence in the corners of his bedroom. The dust on the cobwebs made them even more elaborate. The dust hung low off the webs like smoke filled crystals that hung loosely off chandeliers. The room was small and in the center of the ceiling there was an exposed light bulb with a chain elongated by a string that was soiled from sweaty fingers.