#353 - Kitchen Floor 7:10PM

The kitchen floor in my 200 year old house is a speckled grey linoleum. It is smooth and cold, especially tonight. The finish shows blemishes, cuts and dents and stains. Like reading the rings of a tree, I suppose you could age a floor based on how beat up it gets.

The floor is unrelenting, unmovable. It stays rigid, while other objects crash into it, leaving their mark. I guess that's what you want in a floor. Reliably stationary.

I lay my hand on the floor and run it back and forth. I think can feel a texture in the floor, maybe dimples? (The sheer depth of feeling and perception from one fingertip is amazing.) My finger finds a crevice, a small crack in the linoleum. The crack's edges raise so slightly. I rub across it while my eyes close.

The memory comes back so easily. I slipped coming up the stairs. I caught myself by landing my hand down on one of them, but not before my knee scrapped against the ground. It was a concrete stair with metal banding, ostensibly for anti-slip support, coarse against my fingers. The stairs lead up from the underground of New York City's subway. I had just left a bar where [...] and I hastily drank several beers. A rare night when I was engaged, feeling confident. Suddenly, high on the moment, I knocked myself off balance and kind of tripped, I guess. Later, alone in bed that night, I felt the scrape on my knee: a crack in the skin, raised at the edges.

In the kitchen, the floor is out of level. Hundreds of years of settling back and forth will do that to a floor. Sometimes when I walk across the floor late at night with the lights off, I am oddly disorientated. Wobbly, but amused at myself for being thrown off balance. Hovering on the precipice, knowing what's before and gliding into what's to come in the darkness ahead.