Your Fear of Looking Stupid Is

In you, I see myself, and we can hold each other; stupidly, madly, deeply. Endlessly.

In “Beetlejuice”, Barbara deftly rebukes her husband Adam’s suggestion that “maybe this is Heaven.” She purses her lips and lets out a terse puff of air, flicks her eyes upwards at the wooden, dormered ceiling of their attic and replies, “In Heaven there wouldn’t be dust on everything.”

There is dust on everything.

Where I live, where we live, there is dust on everything. We’re not dirty people, but dust finds its way onto surfaces; my desk, in particular. I’m exceedingly well aware of the fact that my desk and my house isn’t Heaven, but the perpetual existence of dust is a salient and welcomed reminder. I don’t know what to do about the dust, or about the fact that we need to eat every day, or about my torn PT tendon that I shredded back in 2022 and haven’t done anything about. I mean, I know what to do about it, I’m just not doing it.

Yet.

Maybe this year. Maybe next year. Maybe when the medical examiner does my autopsy s’/he’ll shake their head and wonder why I didn’t ever do anything about it. I won’t care. I’ll be too busy dusting off picture frames in Heaven.

I hope there is dust on everything in Heaven. I hope there’s pork fried rice, too.