I'm not going to clean it first. That would defeat the purpose, and also I don't have time, and also you'd know I cheated. So here is the dining table at 2:15 on a Wednesday afternoon, left to right, no edits, no staging. The table is six feet long. We have not eaten a meal on it since — I want to say mid-May. We eat at the kitchen counter now like raccoons.
Here's what's there.
One wireless microphone, disassembled. The little battery door is off and sitting next to it like a tooth. Lucas swears he knows which mic this goes to. I have asked twice. The answer both times was "the gray one," which describes every piece of equipment the church owns.
A gallon freezer bag of cables, knotted into a single organism. I genuinely could not tell you how many cables are in here. It has achieved a density where it might be one cable now. A cable singularity. Lucas reaches into it occasionally, pulls, and a different cable comes out than the one he wanted, every time, like a claw machine he keeps losing.
Three of Gracie's rocks. Not a collection. Just three, placed deliberately in a little row, for reasons known only to Gracie. I moved them once and was informed I had ruined something. They are back in the row. The row is load-bearing apparently.
A church bulletin from two Sundays ago with a wiring diagram drawn on the back in Lucas's handwriting. The front is a sermon outline. The back is the actual sermon, if you ask me.
My good scissors, which I have been looking for since Monday and which I am only now discovering have been on the table the entire time, under the bulletin, in plain sight, in the one place I refused to look because surely not.
A single sock. Joey's. No idea. Don't want to know. It's been here long enough that I've stopped seeing it as a sock and started seeing it as part of the table's natural texture, like a wood grain.
A multimeter, which is a little device that tells Lucas whether electricity is happening. The screen is on. It has been on for what I suspect is days. It is patiently reporting electrical information to an empty room, twenty-four hours a day, a tiny digital monk.
A stack of mail I am afraid of. Not opened. Not sorted. Just present, accumulating a kind of menace. Somewhere in there is something with a due date. I can feel it.
Half a roll of electrical tape and the cardboard tube of the other half, which is also somehow still on the table, because in this house we do not throw away the tube. We honor the tube.
A coffee mug from this morning that I will move to the sink the second I finish writing this, and which will be replaced by a different mug by tomorrow afternoon, in an unbroken chain of mugs stretching forward into the future as far as anyone can see.
So that's the table. Nine things, if you don't count the rock row as three separate sovereign nations, which Gracie does.
Here's the thing I notice, looking at the list. Most of it isn't mess in the way I used to mean mess. The rocks are Gracie's. The sock is a mystery but it's a small one. The real estate is mostly Lucas's job — the mic, the cables, the diagram on the bulletin, the multimeter doing its lonely work. His Sundays are landing on my table on a Wednesday. The table didn't get colonized by chaos. It got colonized by a man with too much to fix and nowhere at work to fix it.
I'm not going to make that into a whole thing today. The list is the post. I just couldn't itemize it honestly without seeing it, and now I've seen it, and that's its own kind of information.
The mug's going to the sink now. The rest of it can stay. The multimeter will keep me company.