Dina Loses Dan: an Elegy

When the vacuuming from outside the door wafts in and out from your hearing, and you can't hear anymore, you can't see anymore, how did everything turn away from you, how are you already in the desert without telling me you were going? Out in the hallway of the ratty apartment complex, the elderly landlord vacuums to somehow cover up the age, her aging, her husband who passed away just a month ago and she hasn't been back to this property in just a month because it was too hard for her to manage the property without him and now he is gone and her vacuum wafts underneath the too-big-of crack under the door that we stuff old newspapers under to keep the drafts at bay because you said you did not want to put plastic over the windows, maybe tin foil, lets look like crazy people, you said.

The vacuuming used to make you crazy, as soon as it started you would have to fly out the door, no time! you would say, no time! and the landlady greets you this time and you flip your hat off and it flies towards her, it was only supposed to be a salutation and instead it ended up being a warning, no time! you say stay away! you say.

We are accustom to want, most of all, the desire of despair, the addiction of desire, the addiction to despair, if only we could actually understand what it means to despair in the face of hope. We would walk the small city, from the east side over the bridge to the west and back again in an effort to reach the desert where there was no vacuum. The vacuum held such fits of authority for you. They can't just come in here just because they are here to clean the common areas, I'd say to you. They can't just come into our apartment, its illegal. No time! you said. No time!  Hello darling miss landlord, hat's off to you, of course, hello.

Where does despair go from here? To hope? How can hope manifest despair and vice versa. You are off to another state now to find something to hold on to. I ask of you to hang on, right now. To simply know that this despair brings hope. What if it doesn't? The vacuum as no-time, no-place. To stumble around the city as utopia. I will miss you, my love, but you are never far away.