Ten years ago, my work bestie at the job I had and the life I had at the time, Tedrick, rubbed me down in cruelty-free coconut oil. He said, “You’re a beautiful mess.” I shone in holiday light. 

I was, in that moment, a clean young woman, newly saturated. I lengthened myself regally atop oat linens, feeling like a hairless cat or like what I was, which was a hairy lady. 

“And is this supposed to be a charming thing? Or are you saying it’s time to make a change?” I bucked involuntarily at the release of a knot in my left shoulder blade, felt warmth flow through.

“Think about it then put it away, dear. Then think about it again in a few years. You’ll know.” 

Tedrick had the safe hands of a man who had long ago owned his sins. I could feel his grin through my closed eyes as they faced the bottom sheet. It had been so long since someone had touched me without seeking sex. It was partially energetically on me, of course, but I didn’t yet understand how to control that. All my friends, all my bosses, all sorts of strangers, I felt them seeing desire in my eyes and mistaking the glisten as desire for them rather than the desire for experience’s teaching hand adorned with the glittering rings of all life’s funs and jollies. 

Christmas lights twinkled in-and-out, Scotch-taped around the mantle.

Tedrick was true. That era of my life contained a large mass of personal, stylized mess.

I looked at the yellow and blue bedroom curtains. This bedroom belonged to a cleaning client, Shawn, who’d been really bothering me for a few months, at this point. 

He had come back early when I was on a quick solo clean and he shortly charmed the pants off of me. I was covered in natural cleaning stuffs that barely cleaned but smelled un-chemical, ephemeral. A freshly baked cupcake with far too much baking soda was I. He grabbed the door frame and leaned forward. I gulped. He was one of those guys who could grab a door frame and seem like a poet which appealed to me at the time due to not knowing much about certain worldly attitudes, intelligences. Shawn kept natural wines on a rack. He opened an orange one.

That had been the peak. It wasn’t a great situationship. 

He would see other women and then act clingy and hurt that I had to be cajoled back into his company once they wised up and he felt left to his own devices. He had a habit of eating salad at night which charmed me but was never going to be enough fuel to overcome the self-pitying player vibes.  

And so it came to be that months later, I was alone in Shawn’s bed with Tedrick safely hovering above me. It was Christmas Eve. 

And Shawn? He was in Truckee, supposedly, with his mother and stepfather for the holidays. His bedroom curtains had these somewhat circular walnut designs on them that wrinkled vivaciously, in a balls manner. He told me that his stepfather held a lot of celebratory energy in regard to model trains and their motion around various, complicated tracks—all laid across the wondrous and vast landscape mimicking that of the continental United States. Rock, green, red, all of it. 

Choo-Choo!

After falling asleep near Tedrick’s silent, dusting form, I awoke to the sight of all the detritus of Shawn, gathered at the ends of the canary-shaded feathers, filth on a bloom. Tedrick kept his face still but his eyes bright, supportive and kind. He extended his hand and helped me up. We gathered the sheets and combined them with the towels, an accrual of soon-to-be-undone soiling.

We would then cook lavender pancakes in Shawn’s kitchen. We would then finish cleaning Shawn’s house. I’d do my best to remember this experience in Shawn’s bed, with Tedrick, rather than the buzzy, edgy times I’d shared in it with Shawn. I’d been cleaning this man’s house for six months, but it all felt elastically looped in something intensely repulsive yet addictively compelling, a new mode of life’s scarring applied each time. 

Tedrick was not erasing the past, but he was ensuring it would become the past. I couldn’t go back to a place of hurt once it’d healed me.

I washed Shawn’s wash. I wiped Shawn’s oven knobs. I got down in the grout, naturally. 

Tedrick had been celibate for years and we did not have sex there, either. We both cleaned houses with a bespoke agency, a new-age deal called “Godliness Adjacent.” We worked with a Dr. Bronner’s-diluted cleaning solution. We scrubbed and mopped and spoke to one another in fits of laughter, CAPS LOCK ON, HEALTH-IS-WEALTH-style. We polished with in-house frankincense essential oils. We lightly powdered food-grade, pet-safe diatomaceous earth in key areas. We recorded a sound bath in the space then sent via email. We did smudge seshes with sustainable, indigenously-grown sage, many things of this nature. 

I was, myself, a young, if also, at times, an unconventional type of beauty radiating the frank sexuality of the aughts and the safety of a waning Obama-era sureness surrounding queerness, surrounding reproductive rights, surrounding free speech, surrounding optimism— toward a more open umbrella regarding dignity and forward motion, most generally. In other words, I had an under-cut and round eyeglasses. I had a septum ring. I trended toward tapered, cropped, frayed.

There’s something most cleanly cauterized about that time with Shawn and that time shortly following Shawn, from where I sit reflecting today, overlooking a flat, unending sky. The wind turbines wink and shudder from afar. Some hills, even further afar. The prairie light plays no tricks. We only really feel it when it hurts. We re-contextualize our pasts a little each day, quietly shedding some bits, feeling others embed themselves ever further inward. All that Shawn pain appeared again when I moved to Kansas, began to try business classes for the first time in a real long time, felt all sorts of ways about everyone I encountered that first year here. It shaded and shadowed the forefront of my mind for weeks after I’d witnessed my friend’s dog snap her neck. A car window.

That night, as I fell asleep, too fast, I saw the dog and the car, spinning Oz-ward.

But anyway, this was 2015 in a nice house off Albina, painted darkly Scandinavian. Tons of herbs hugged its planks around the butt of it all and rabbits would munch about in the dew, cold. 

Before I’d gotten into maid-ing and thus tending to the innards of many nice houses, I’d been a door-to-door for various political campaigns and had fallen into a sort of intense community that could manipulate the pants off anyone and the signed checks out of many.

This was outside-of-the-house work. This was outdoors. This was work where a twenty-second window with someone who came to the door would tell you if getting invited in or if politely staying out would lead you to that sweet, sweet signature or that nasty, rotten bank routing number.

All those houses had faces. The small ranches, smiling. The big ones, wearing painted-on masks. 

As I sat at Shawn’s kitchen island on Christmas Eve drinking mushroom CBD tea from a mug adorned with roses, reading: “The City that Twerks,” I thought naturally of the waning 2015. I had no idea what next year would be, but I knew I would not be cleaning houses much longer. 

Looking back at 2015 from 2025? 2015 stretched as a bridge between earnestly seeking connection, awkward obsessions borne of the death of the internet-nouveau, to this un-veiled time today. A brave new world full of ring lights, tokens, ubiquitous ghosting, the gnashing of teeth, and the worse, less fun modes of disassociating. Drugs; no longer desired and likely also no longer ever safe again. I sigh and look up at the flight of a plane, blinking most placidly into growing night.

Or is this all simple summarization, bound by rhythm, signifying nothing? I know, I know. 

But—let’s pretend it’s 2005, for just one moment. Let’s have the patience of last century’s death throes. An age rife with scattershot of somewhat hard-to-find but totally doable, downloadable, free music. Emo age. Emo reaching clammily toward indie, beginning to clap, stomp. Let’s get cliche—why not? Wasn’t it fun to find ourselves in Journey lyrics? To layer some belts?

Even as I long for earnestness, I toss that sad language salad of today: shame-faced, self-awareness. Beet-red. At times, pickled. I’d never redo those age-old mistakes, but there’s something so freeing about the nature of mistakes back then, generally. 

There’s a thing I remember Tedrick saying, not on Christmas Eve, 2015 inside of Shawn’s house, but on New Year’s Eve, 2015 inside of Miss Hechlun’s house, a brick colonial situated most ideally in the Southwest Hills. We treated her house with the utmost care, as if we might break the very walls by introducing any chemical compounds or getting into even the lightest mischief.

We pinched rose sachets prior to placing them underneath a duvet cover. Our hands brushed then clasped. A moment of incidental, accidental, but longed-for connection across two tired maids. 

He said, “For so many, life is pain.” That night, as fireworks rose, bloomed, squealed, and died, we saw the maw of chaos as she slowly, thoughtfully, unhinged her jaw.