The most ironic part of not being able to find my iPhone, again

Sometimes I feel like this blog should have a warning: for mature audiences only. There's a reason comments aren't enabled. This is selfish, cathartic, personal blogging when it seems like you've tried everything else. So yes, that's your warning. You can read a million better, happier blogs, and probably should.

As I sit on my living room floor sneezing and wheezing, surrounded by cardboard boxes, purses, clothes, cords, postcards, magazines, VHS tapes, a white board, a suitcase with a broken handle I've kept on using, there are seemingly a million ironies, though the biggest one, for me, is that after posting what's below, which seeming so pressing, so urgent, I am once again where I have been way too many times for one person: looking for my iPhone. Looking for either one, actually, the one in the hot pink case with the phone number of my allergies whose name I can't remember, the one with all those texts I seem to have memorized, that I lost last February right before that crazy trip to Oregon and Seattle, or the one I last saw on Sunday night when I was at the Chinese takeout place next door, the one I think I heard beep on Monday morning.

A smaller irony is that the last thing I want to do is talk to anyone. What for? I feel like I have less and less to say, and see less and less reason why anyone would want to talk to a girl who could so easily let her phone vanish into the pit. Then I wonder if I hired a personal organizer again, if it should be someone new, with all the attendant risk of a stranger judging me, or the last person, and face her disappointment in what I turned her work into.

I did have the rare pleasure of doing some manual labor, the kind that was more vigorous than even the toughest workout because it wasn't designed for that purpose like the weight machines. I tore apart with my bare hands an Ikea bed. It wasn't the cause of this particular problem, but something I'd been meaning to get rid of since it was just in the way, a huge symbol of wasted space. I saw it and knew that even though my phone couldn't possibly be lurking under it, it had to go, one in the morning or not. I couldn't tear it all apart, and though I wished for a saw, would've loved to satisfyingly buzz my way through the entire thing, but alas, my hands had to do. I twisted and stomped and pulled and finally it was destroyed, in a few big but movable parts which I lugged down the stairs, wondering if the wood taped together could be some cool new musical instrument. That part was pretty enough to be some twisted kind of wind chime. That act I think is what saved me from the darkness. To feel like I was physically doing something, to twist and sever and attack it the way I only wish I could do to myself, was healing. And it left a giant space that hasn't been used in years free for me to, in the immediate future, use as temporary storage, and in the slightly more far off future, use for a dresser or other such things I know nothing about. I wish there were more to destroy, and I find myself tearing papers in half, quarters.

I think I'm too chicken to ever really do it, but I keep going back to this allure cutting has for me. Trust me, I'm way too squeamish to do it but the physical release part of it is what I envy. I have my own vices, thank you very much. The focus on something other than what's in my head. Destroying that bed served the same function, and getting the mattreses that were on it down two flights of stairs will serve the same. There's plenty of physical exertion left here, and maybe that is what I need. Fuck cell phones, even though in a few days I very well may have to return to the Apple Store for another hefty payout and more irony bludgeoning me directly in the head. Oh, you're so funny, irony, you. I'm laughing silently, didn't you know? I've resigned myself to that dreaded worst case scenario, though if I do, I think it'll be a while before I can care about any of the associated minutiae of it again. Life will go on, but the part where I make the same mistakes ad nauseam? I hope that I can move on to new kinds of mistakes, new experiences, maybe even things like a new home. First I have to dismantle all the parts of this one that are in my way.