What lives within the cracks in the floor?
I spill a few grains every time I wash rice—mostly in the sink, but some spring from my hands, tumbling down the cupboard and to the edge where the drawer meets the floorboard, a place my vacuum can’t reach. I lose a sock now and then, even though I swear I tossed every one right into the laundry basket. When I eat, I might drop a crumb of roasted seaweed, never to be found again. A hair in the bathroom. A price tag. A nut and bolt. A wrapper.
When you live, you lose things.
They float up to the sky. They dissolve into the air. And sometimes, they sink beneath, into the cracks of the floor, where they dwell, waiting to resurface.
A tear rolls down my cheek, collecting a speck of eyeliner, specks of dust, the death of my skin, the microtears in my clothes. And it seeps past me, into the chair, down the legs, drowning in the wood. Through the cracks, it waits, joined by others, waiting for another day, another week, waiting for me to say everything is okay and to drop more the next day. Regret settles on the floor like cockroaches, skittering along the boards and hiding in the shadows, infesting everything, coming in waves, appearing now and then to remind me of their existence.
Memories haunt me—everything I’ve lost, rotting in the floorboards. They taint the good, glorify the ugly, worsen the worst, and plague the boards, the brain. The rice, the clothes, the tote bag from third grade, the orphaned chalk, the laptop stickers, the dirt-path leaves. The time I spent with them—with him—in there, in here, laughing, crying. They’re all over. Dead. Scattered in the cracks of the floor. Yet the places I’ve been, the things I’ve held—they’re all somehow living, beneath my feet, waiting to come up at just the right moment.
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Revision from Daily Themes Week 13: Make It Strange.
Original from Daily Themes Week 8: Character
A Portrait in Objects, 2025-03-04
I left two Ziploc bags full of rice in the top wardrobe drawer of my freshman dorm room. By the time I remembered, I was still in town, but I’d returned my keys, and the building locked. The things I have lost dwell deep in my memory for decades. The tote bag that the third-grade class president took from me on the last day of school and never gave back. The charger I left in my boarding school dining hall. A bundle of clothes I forgot underneath the plane seat. The feeling of the dirt path and leaves crunching underneath my late and hurried feet, the empty basketball courts with missing nets and rusted rims, the friends I hung out with every lunch at Redwood Middle School—all lost—with no excuse to ever visit from across the country again.
I didn’t lose, but voluntarily tossed away, my old red backpack that I used for twelve years until high school. With a black backpack passed down from my sister, I hobble along the ridged stone blocks of Hillhouse Avenue, hike up to chemistry labs, sit in century-old classrooms in their scratched and peeling wood seats with the tiniest of desks. The blackboards are always smudged from orphaned chalk. When I open my bag to work, I’m met with the same cracked red Expo marker and expired mint that I’ve forgotten to throw away four semesters ago. But the pockets of the inner lining of my bag also have my favorite pens collected from birthdays, laptop stickers I can never bear to put on, bookmarks that are unused because I don’t read books. I wish I had a larger backpack, a larger room, maybe an off-campus house. Next year, I’ll live downtown, filled with all the stuffed animals and things I treasure. I’ll take my laptop and my iPad to do homework. And I’ll take my lost memories, too.