Home Alone

I remember those afternoons when I was home alone after school when I was 9 or 10. I'd heat up the food my mom had prepared for me in the morning. Then I climbed onto the shelf to get a volume of my favorite picture books, lay them all out on the floor, and read while I ate. I drew, I painted, and I wrote. I made up stories, tried on my mom's clothes, and sometimes I'd go to the living room and bang around the piano for a while, imagining myself performing in a big concert hall in a foreign country. Most of the time, though, I wrapped myself in the center of a world the size of an arm-length radius made of all my favorite things. I spent a lot of time in my head when I was young.

When Bill left for Hong Kong for the weekend, I went into my own world and I was gone for 24 hours. I can't remember exactly what I did. What I found after I came to my senses this morning was that it was evident I tried to establish a life on the couch. The coffee table is jammed with "stuff": an empty sports drink bottle, an empty water glass, my medicine, a bottle of Folic Acid, 3 DVDs that I rented yesterday, all the remote controls and Wii controllers, Nuenue's brush, my cell phone. and my Nintendo DS. One sock that I took off during my sleep was receovered under the couch (I woke up in bed with the other one on my foot this morning), and my glasses were dangerously lying on the floor by a leg of the couch.

Even Nuenue was fed up with the mess. He spent half an hour in front of the window this morning, weighing his options for a better home.