Skip to primary content

Sentence | Dec 02 2001

I’m sitting in the kitchen reading a short story in the New Yorker called Polygamy though I should be in my room working and though I’m not that interested in the story, it’s just something I’m reading, when I hear the front door open and footsteps in the hall and my roommate Lisa appears in the kitchen and I say hi, trying to make the hi cheerful-sounding, only I know it isn’t cheerful-sounding because I don’t feel cheerful, I feel lousy, I have a lousy feeling, I should be in my room working, I should have been in my room working all day but instead I kept doing something else and now Lisa is here and I’m ignoring her because I haven’t anything to say nor the energy to find something to say, and Lisa takes some sort of green or rather greens from the refrigerator and places them in her wooden steamer contraption and runs some water into a pan and sticks the pan on the stove with the steamer contraption above it and it occurs to me that she’s trying just as hard as I am to think of something to say because here we are in our kitchen, the kitchen we share, and we’re not saying anything.