Story

i used to sit on the front steps of my house. i started doing this when i was twelve years old and i would look at the people walking by and start to think of what sort of things would make them cry. With Mr. Gary, the only thing I could think of was if his cat died.

Mr. Gary had no children and no wife, but he did have a cat, named Crinkle and he would yell her name in the middle of the night if she went missing. And she always went missing on trash night. If my dad heard Mr. Gary yelling Crinkle, he would ask me if I had taken the garbage out. I almost always had, but even if I said I did, my dad made me draw the purple curtains open and show him the trash bags sitting on the curb. And it would make me mad, because I hated those purple curtains more than anything. To touch them made me feel sick.

In any case, one day, of course, Mr. Gary went screaming Crinkle up and down the street. Except that on this particular night, he didn't stop. He just kept yelling. My dad kept asking me to open up the curtains and see the trash bag. It was very strange because my dad was not too old at the time, but he kept acting as if he had no idea I had already thrown that bag out there.

I slowly realized that my father was going crazy at a very young age. There are a number of factors I could think of to explain this. It might have been the fact that my mom had decided she would make spaghetti every single day and then switch over to say, meatloaf, and then make that every single day for a week... It might have been Mr. Gary's screaming and screaming.
If I were less fair, I would say it was the doing of those purple curtains, but that is wishful thinking.

I think it's just the way things go. You go on auto-pilot. You wake up in the morning, you brush your teeth. You hear your alarm, you hit the snooze button. My dad heard crinkle and he wanted to see the garbage out on the curb.

Since that night I have been wary of how I wake up in the morning. Of what makes me cry. Of purple. Of missing pets. Of patterns. Or fathers. Of love. Of sitting down. I have been wary of being awake.