Nothing in Common

We have nothing in common.

Her closet looks like the last day of a jumble sale. She selects what she's going to wear seemingly at random. A pair of man's camouflage fatigue trousers, an ultra-suede blouse the color of raw liver, a scarf apparently woven out of discarded dish towels, a pale pink coat with a faux fur collar that looks like the bedraggled corpse of a drowned civet cat, and a lime green bag that would be visible to the space shuttle even on a cloudy day.

She owns two semi-dogs. Two. One wasn't enough. Two. Tiny, inquisitive, clever, yappy beasties that, if field-dressed, would barely provide enough meat for a sandwich. Surprisingly aggressive, persistent near-canines with needle-like teeth sharp enough to penetrate through my best leather shoes. Feral robo-dogs who've never forgiven me for moving in and who have a secret, malevolent plan to murder me in my sleep, but who still manage to present themselves as sweet, defenseless, cutie pies when she's in the room.

She puts salsa on everything.

She is incapable of throwing away a magazine. She refuses to own a watch, claims she doesn't want her life to be regulated by mechanical concepts of time, but doesn't think it at all incongruous to ask me what time it is fifteen times a day. She wants to spend a summer herding cattle on a ranch. She farts...not delicate, tiny, feminine gaseous emissions, but silent acid farts that would burn off your eyebrows. Farts that could scorch the paint off a battleship. She'll try to claim it was one of the dogs and then chastizes me for feeding them french fries, which I've never in my entire life done.

She believes in ghosts. She reads medical thrillers. She doesn't separate her colors from her whites when she does her laundry. She calls herself a painter and buys antique frames at flea markets for her work, but she hasn't put brush to oil in nearly two years. We have almost three dozen ornate, empty frames stacked in a slowly collapsing pile in a corner of the bedroom. The leaning stack of frames is the only thing in life capable of frighening the dogs.

She thinks recycling is a scam. She cried during the scene in Harvey when Jimmy Stewart agrees to take the medicine that will cure him of seeing the giant white rabbit. She thinks Michael Jackson is actually innocent. She would eat pizza five nights a week if I wasn't around, and she'd put salsa on it. She calls me 'Spoon' and won't tell me why.

We have nothing in common.

posted by greg @ 12:53 PM