My apartment smells like victory—if victory is stale beer soaked into carpet and the metallic tang of a radiator leaking rust. I don’t own a sponge. I own a crusted-over dish brush that I use for everything: scrubbing the bathtub ring, scraping the burnt eggs off the pan, and occasionally scratching my back. The line between clean and dirty died in this apartment six years ago, and I didn't go to the funeral.
The Grime Underneath
My POV is a cracked lens. A greasy thumbprint smeared across the camera of the world. When I look at your white tablecloth, I don’t see elegance. I see the last hundred sweaty palms that touched it before the busboy wiped it down with a rag he hasn't washed in three shifts. When I shake your hand, I’m not feeling a greeting. I’m feeling the dead skin cells flaking off your knuckles, the microscopic mites nesting in your cuticles, the ghost of the bathroom door handle you didn’t wash after.
You want to know what filthy is? Filthy isn’t the mud on a boot. Filthy isn’t even the rot in a dumpster behind a restaurant in August.
And honestly?
You walk through the world trying to stay clean. You hold your breath near dumpsters. You use a paper towel to touch the gas pump.
It’s the only way to live without going crazy.
Give me the sticky floor of a dive bar. Give me the mystery stain on the bus seat. Give me the gummy residue on a library book cover. That’s texture. That’s history.
