Here is your mother, see how she loves you. See how you make her beautiful things and how she finds ways to make the strange and the beautiful sneak its way into the every day. See how you used to fear the night because of her wanderings and what poison she might ingest. Hear the creak in the floorboards by your room. See your large grey eyes wide and myopic, staring out the dotted swiss curtained window at the night; it ended eventually. Those nights still come back now and then, when you wander through the culmination of all the places you’ve lived or been in. Your dreams collage everything, and promise feelings of home and peace. Those feelings are finally starting to creep into your waking hours. Is that why you enjoyed being a maid? You saw hundreds of homes, all like dollhouses, all decorated just so. You saw what lotion women used and what cologne men squirted onto their very rich necks before they left the house? Some homes were calm, some were tumult, and some are now blips on your memory radar. When you’d pop into the posh market near the homes that you scrubbed and toiled in the cashiers couldn’t believe that you were a maid. Your hair a bit mussed but glossy, your makeup high end (thanks to your moonlights as a makeup artist), your legs tanned and toned (thanks to your walking habits, yoga, cleaning all day, and all the sex you partook in), and your intelligent inflection. Someone who’s been to college and waxed literary should not be a maid, someone who looks like you should not be a maid.

And why not? The Zen like movements of waxing an old floor to shine, the gentle whir of the vaccum, all my thoughts were mine, I didn’t have to speak much to anyone, and I worked with my hands to a definitive end-result. I was calm, I was poor, I had lots of stories to share.