the dishes.

No, this is not my kitchen. "Good Will Hunting" - Sean's kitchen.

The decision to let yourself buy the paper plates is a big decision.

Is there a rule about writing during depression, or whatever this is? something like it's not interesting to anyone outside your head, so you don't share it. And aren't there similar "rules" regarding writing about writing, for the same reasons? like Fight Club? First rule of Fight Club: you never talk about Fight Club. First rule of writing about writing: nobody wants you to explain Your Process, with your monocle squinched in one eye and gesturing with a snifter of brandy, as though you're holding court, like some badass itching to ramble about your ramblings. And maybe first rule of writing about sadness, whatever variety of mental illness, or general downness you're wrangling is something like you don't write about how you simply cannot make yourself deal with something like a pile of dishes in the sink. It's incredible, how quickly they pile up even when you don't eat, and equally incredible how impossible they are to deal with.

The first time I thought why not just buy paper? my immediate reaction is to tell myself no. Because be better than that. do better. that's lazy. you're one person. and your job involves sustainable this-and-that and reducing waste, and also in the back of my head is the voice of my pastor, lover of all creation, who is as human as anyone else and would be the first to tell you so, but whose passion for the earth and its health is so excellent that I wilt a little before it on a good day, and I look at my cart and imagine paper plates in it and I bargain with myself for permission, like okay, I don't use paper towels, does that count for something? or and it's not like buying a pack of paper plates puts me on par with those people who are chopping the tops off of mountains and pumping all the crap into the air, right? But then, the hard-line interjects, maybe it does put you on-par with them; how many trees for forty plates? what kind of industry am I supporting? how do they treat their workers? all for the sake of my convenience? when I have dishes sitting right there? 

And the bargaining cuts all ways, because okay, I did good here, so maybe I can get the paper plates, like maybe I took a shower today, so to balance it, I'll get the paper plates; but then again, you took a shower today, so you're doing better, so maybe you don't need the paper plates; or possibly you woke up so early and didn't wash the dishes, so you don't get paper plates, or, on the other hand, you didn't get to sleep until some VERY LITERALLY UNGODLY hour and your sink is still full of dishes, so nope, not this time. No laundry? no plates. Could've worked late, but didn't? Nope. Didn't call your mother (again)? Sucks to be you. Sorry. I don't make the rules. 

And yeah, why? the chef in the back of your head pipes up, the one who speaks in clipped, brusque Brooklyn-cadence phrases, to-the-point, bottom-line: You got plates. Why you gonna buy paper? And it's true; would I bother to spend money that I should be saving when I have a perfectly good stack of putty-blue plates above my stove? where they sit on the pale-grey-and-white quatrefoil I got specifically because the blue of the dishes is what brings it together with the teal wall color and all of it ties in perfectly together that it's so pleasant to look at (but it's all theoretical, because they now live in the sink).

A stupid set of dishes.

Seriously, it's almost funny- of all things in which to stumble across significance, that it would be a stupid set of dishes. Eventually, I start finding them in every room: one in the living room, maybe from when I was trying to organize my books; one or two in the other bedroom, probably from when I started taking down the drapes to paint the walls, but decided to wait until I bought the paint because otherwise it probably wouldn't happen and my windows will just stand there naked to the dark; one or two in my actual bedroom, and I think of the fact that I'm leaving dirty dishes lying around, and of the fact that they're not even piling up in the sink anymore, but if I were to look in the sink, there's definitely a pile in there, too; that now, they're everywhere I look, and I don't remember how they got there, and they stare back at me unblinking, like bright blue eyes, like evidence of something.

I just can't deal with them. I don't want to touch them. They hurt to look at. Because I bought them at the beginning of my identity, and I absolutely fell in love with them: simple, almost boring, and when I call them putty-blue, I mean that they're the perfect deeper-saturated shade of sky blue with undertones of rock and almost-mushroom; they are calming, and every food in the world looks beautiful against them. And they made me so happy when I was twenty-something, when they were my first set of dishes, when they signified my life and my kitchen and my shared life with you, whoever you are, reading this, who has eaten off those dishes; when I had need for twelve settings, when I made people feel at home in my home, when I trusted myself enough to trust the people to whom I passed those dishes.

I thought last week: it's time to get rid of the dishes. No matter how wasteful it feels. I don't want these dishes here anymore. And besides, they broke in the boxes, sometime in the past three years, in my mother's garage. They are no longer a set of dishes, and they really aren't "perfectly good." Four plates left, five saucers, two bowls. The survivors are hopelessly damaged; their edges betray the flat absence of color beneath the varnish, and when I pull one out of the stack and feel it bend at the crack down its middle, I imagine that the weight of what lies on the plate is just enough that it might snap in half on my hand. I want to bend it until it breaks, just to see what the break is like: if it's a cartoonish poof of ceramic dust, or if I even have the strength to break it apart, or if it'll make a clean break from itself, if its pieces will mostly maintain their shape, like some kind of putty-blue dignity, or if the entire thing will abruptly crumble in on itself and rip my skin in the process.

Today, I threw them away, and I got the paper plates. On sale. Two packs four $4. I bought one.

I feel better.