To: Organization

From: You Know Who

Re: The Course of True Love

07 • 10 • 06

Dear Organization:

I thought, once, that we might marry. You know well that I loved you, and pursued you with the zeal of the truly besotted. When you were around, life was not just tidy, but purposeful and sane. Progress was real and measurable. My days carried me, like a monarch in a cushioned litter, toward accomplishments and satisfactions. Time was not only linear and comprehensible, but downright friendly! (I could tell this from the way my watch and I would wink at each other before each appointment. "Hot dog--early again! Shall we find ourselves a coffee, friend?") As the lovers say, I didn't just love you; I loved me when I was with you.

I felt very deeply that we were meant to be together, and that it was only a matter of time until you saw it too. I sensed that if I could get it all right just for a second--if I could line up all the corners of the bedsheet of my life and snap the middle into place--you and I could settle down. Oh, and then. Then, we would spend our unhurried days in pressed garments and unscuffed shoes, running our hands over empty desktops, staring through streakless windows onto tidy gardens, nodding, always nodding. And when we had sealed a thousand envelopes, eased shut a thousand tidy drawers, and capped a thousand pens--click!--we would fall into crisp sheets to dream of the sweetest symmetries.

This isn't news. You know how much you always pleased me, but what you may not know was how much I suffered when you were away. My heart slumped, my energy flagged, my confidence evaporated. When you would leave me, even for a short time, the world became a psychic gauntlet: everywhere my eyes rested, my mind winced. First thing in the morning, I reeled and gagged at the grisly sight of the toothpaste tube beheaded. Last thing at night, I felt the sad defeat of slouching into an unmade bed. I was like a pitcher who's given up four quick runs in the top of the first, returning to the dugout and just lying down there, on a floor dense with sunflower shells and spit.

With you away, the little activities I usually delighted in sharing with you seemed not just pointless, but bitterly arbitrary. Why recap the toothpaste with the sink full of dishes? Why wash the dishes when last weekend's Arts section is still splayed on the floor like a spurned starlet? Why make the bed when it will be, as it always is, the first casualty of indefatigable entropy? With you away, the futility of the war against chaos was just too palpable, and the weary future seemed to stretch on and on, even unto my dank, messy death. And when I finally perished, what would I be? Another heap. Someone else's clean-up job: to be swept up, put away, catalogued. It is adolescent but it is true: when I imagined a life without you, I wanted no part of it.

Like any affair of this intensity, I knew ours couldn't last forever.

It's not that I was upset to learn that there were others. Please--I was never so naïve as to imagine I was the only one. I knew that others wanted you too. I didn't even mind seeing them touch you. I understood. I even smiled at their sweet, sad gestures of devotion. This one with an expensive electronic agenda, that one with a label maker. This one cutting out a chore wheel, that one with a device for rolling coin. (My God--it plugs in!) I could sympathize with these earnest groupies, but I knew they wouldn't last. They couldn't keep you satisfied. They would slip up, get lazy, cut corners. You would get huffy and restless and one dark day, they would find the note. Not from you, of course, but from a utility they had forgotten to pay. (The neglected bill would have been there for weeks--under that stack of take-out menus.) As they scanned through the sternly worded letter threatening the involvement of a collection agency, they would feel it all at once somewhere deep in the chest: you were gone.

At the other end of the spectrum, I knew there were those who would never let you out of their sight. You know the type: grabby, insecure, volatile. It was not enough for you to just live with them. It was not enough for them to have orderly medicine cabinets or to make efficient use of vertical space in the kitchen. No, these grim souls longed to wield you like some fiery sceptre--to organize the world! Minds! Families! Gene pools! Oh, they would never let you just slip away. But obsession is as tedious as neglect, and you are too wise to be smothered; you withhold your subtle delights from those who imagine they possess you. I knew these desperate people, too, would lose you eventually.

You and me, though, that was something else. We were special. We were right. The rightness of it went beyond stacking containers, beyond action lists and crisp file folders, beyond alphabetization, even! You were all of those things to me, but you were more. You were connected to my breathing and my heart rate and the willful muscles of my neck and jaw. You would see me looking out the window on a sunny Saturday and say, "Go. I've got things under control here." You would hold things up where I could see them. You would hang onto things I didn't want to lose. When I felt overwhelmed by all there was to do you'd give me a prioritized list and, tousling my hair, say, "Just start at number one and do as much as you can." (Then you'd put my hair back where it was before.) You really were very good to me.

By now, though, all this past tense must be very conspicuous. So here goes. Organization, this isn't going to be easy, but I have something to say. As you probably know, I'm moving. I say you probably know because you haven't been here in a while; you don't come around at times like this. But I am here, in the middle of it, alone. There are boxes everywhere. The kitchen is not empty enough to be clean, not full enough to facilitate the preparation of the food that needs eating. The walls look ragged and naked. The plants are nervous. The floor looks like a Civil War battlefield would have looked, if the Civil War had been fought by books. Can't you see? I miss you! I need you! But you know there's no way I can chase after you at a time like this. I wish you would just come on your own.

And you see, then it occurs to me: when I need you most, you are never, ever here. The minute I get a little off balance, you're gone. Does my weakness disgust you? I think of all the times I've been sad or overwhelmed; you have never once stayed, never ridden out one single squall with me. Where do you go? Where do you go when my heart longs for you, but my body is too tired and my mind too addled to seek you out? Are you in the library? The army? Scandinavia? Where?

I will admit that you're always game to meet me in a hotel; that is a constant. The room door swings open and there you are: on every surface, all over the bathroom, returning again and again to the bed. But it feels so cheap when we need to go away to be together. I want you here. Living with me. All the time. And if you can't commit to that kind of a life...well, I'm not sure this can go on.

But I'm not sure I can walk away.

Organization, you make me so crazy!

Ok. Sorry. I'm calm now. Tell you what. Maybe it's good that we're taking a little time apart right now. I'm not at my best, and I know you require space. Let's do it this way: I'm going to get this stuff packed up, and bring it on over to my new place. When the dust has settled, and I start sleeping a little better--say a week, maybe two--what say then you come over and tell me what you think of the place. Don't worry: we can take it slow. No pressure. Nice and easy.

Ok?

You Know Who

P.S. I'll pick up a label maker and some big Rubbermaid containers in case you decide to stay.