The Vanishment of the Fayerye Glamour

I’m cleaning.

At the beginning of the next decade, I want everything to be shiny, bright, and organized.

Of course, it’s one of the quirks of cleaning that the more you clean, the dirtier everything looks. Your eye gets sensitized to the smallest specks of grime. Or something.

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I’m optimistic about the new decade.

True, the world is a big mess, and I’m among the marginalized: I have very little in the way of actual protection; so, if —or, as is far more likely, when—the shit hits the fan, I’m toast.

Nevertheless.

At the beginning of the last decade, I’d just lost my business and my house. I was deeply in debt. Had been picked up and transplanted 3000 miles away from anyone who cared whether I lived or died.

And then, Ben ditched me. I could no longer support him in the style to which he wished to stay accustomed, you see. In any style at all, in fact.

But it’s ten years after, and here I still am. I’ve worked my way back up the rungs of the middle class! I’ve never had a home in the sense that other people have homes, so I remain basically rootless. But the Hudson Valley is a pleasant enough place. I’m content here.

I’m alive, and Ben is dead. No, God didn’t smite him in retribution for his bad behavior toward me. All that is is a fact.

The spell broke quickly after Ben died. The fayerye glamour vanished. Poof!

I hardly think of him at all anymore except in the context of the Work in Progress: He’s the template for the Henry Miller character, so for those few hours I pound away in the afternoons, I cast my mind back over past conversations. Try to harvest them.

I behaved well.

He behaved badly.

If there was any kind of karmic indebtedness on my part, it’s been worked off.