Old Habits New

At least he ate sitting down. But that was because there was work to do. There wasn’t anyone across the table to talk with, no light dinner banter, no office politics or weekend plans. The work was his company. So he sat. The television flickered on his forehead, his head cast down to his meal and his work. How long would the habit of sitting down for a meal remain absent someone to talk with and once the work slowed down. How long until he was once again standing in his kitchen, cooking, eating, and cleaning at the sink, staring blindly into the television.

He finished scrubbing the last dish and began to rinse. The water began rising from the drain. With one sudsy hand he flicked on the garbage disposal. He heard switch below the sink click and then nothing. No chopping, no swirl of water and whooooosh and away. The water continued to rise. He turned off the tap and double-checked the switch making sure it was off. Then he plunged his hand in the soapy water, narrowed and shaped it like an arrowhead and pushed his fingers, hand and wrist through the narrow aorta valve of the of the drain expanding his fingers once through.

He groped around feeling for the teeth of the disposal ignoring the food and gunk from breakfast and dinner. He worked his finger around the obstacle jammed between the rivet and the metal floor of the disposal. Immovable, he yanked his hand free took a table knife from the counter and drove it into the water and into the drain. He managed his hand down alongside the knife and placed its tip at the obstruction. Small, hard and pearl shaped he educated blade to the right spot he began to twist and tork. A small muffled splash signaled success. He removed the knife, checked again to make sure the switch was off and placed his hand back into the opening.

His fingers probed gently round turning and wiggling each rotor. He thought they felt like heavy dull British pounds, a pocket full of coins in a crowded and muffled cotton pocket. Confident they were all spinning freely he then groped for the obstruction and felt the small floating bead. He got it in between his thumb and forefinger and wrested his hand from the drain and out from the brackish water. He blew the suds from his fingertip to reveal a small black olive pit.

He had been through this before. Different obstacles, different faces, meals and details but something about this felt similar, oddly recreated, familiarly new. He would have to face them all, the old ones and the new. He stood above the sink, hips resting on the tiles, holding the olive pit, dirty warm water dripping to his elbow and the television in it’s idle seizure behind him. He would re-break his new habits that had recently become old and replace them with his older habits that would now, for a time, become new again.

He placed the pit on the counter and wiped his eyes with the imprecise blunt of the back of his wet hand and wrist. He turned the water on hot, flipped the switch, and watched the sink well-up momentarily and then collapse. The sink ran clean. He began to rinse. He knew what he was doing, knew the where, knew the how, the when. The why eluded him.