The girl had a messy childhood. It was littered with loud noises and tons of shouting. Sometimes these were happy sounds: the scream of excitement tumbling down the staircase, or the jubilation waltzing through the front door. Other times, these would be displays of anger: hurled insults and words that crossed the rubicon and never looked back. It was in these moments when the girl would begin to clean. First, she’d wipe down all surfaces until she scrubbed away the last of the emotional debris. Then, her hand-held vacuum would zap away despair with a sharp inhale – anything could disappear at any second: dust bunnies, scraps of paper, the tornado that, at times, seized her with full force. She never felt like she had a handle on anything and for most of her young life, she was just a piece of sea kelp flailing inside a gale storm. She swore that as a grown-up, things would be different, and they are… and they’re not. These days, she has an Amazon subscription for weekly deliveries of Lysol wipes and bleach. For her birthday she asked for a $400 mop. She balks at the idea of hiring a house cleaner or splurging on a Rumba. “What are they going to do that I can’t do better?” And she’s not wrong, I suppose. I’ve seen the way she can eviscerate a red wine stain from a pair of white jeans, the way her eyes dart around the carpet, scanning for domestic tumbleweeds. She wants nothing more than to spend her Friday evenings on her hands and knees buffing the oak floors of her apartment. For this reason, her living space is cleaner than a sterilized echo chamber that’s never seen the light of day… it’s also why she doesn’t really have guests over… come to think of it, she doesn’t really have friends, it’s kind of impossible to be anything more than penpals with her. On a  Zoom call I mentioned that she didn’t have to pick up every single follicle of hair, sweep up each speck of dust within her reach, but she was too busy lint rolling the computer screen. Once she told me her wet dream was for a man to roll up his sleeves, and actually hand wash the dirty dishes. “That would be so hot,” she admitted with a wistful smile… then she was silent. We both knew she was thinking about how it would still be necessary for her to do a second wash, after the fact.