Page 73 of Grin and Bear It

“That’s not what I want.” He was so still and quiet I felt exponentially messier in response. “I want you.” He straightened up, stirring his spoon through the chilli in his bowl. “I want to get to know you.” He nodded to the table. “This stresses you out, makes you feel ashamed.”

“Fuck…” My smile got wobbly then, my body shaky. “So bear shifters are like psychic or something?”

“No, we just can smell the shift in your scent and the bear tells us what it means.” He frowned slightly. “It’s just stuff, Ellie. I don’t give a shit either way.”

“But it's not supposed to be there.” His frown deepened as I put the bowl down on the free corner of the table. “It’s supposed to be put away and organised.”

“Says who?” he said.

“Says everyone!” I let out a huff of breath. “You’re a guy so you don’t get it. People don’t judge you based on how neat your house is.”

“I’m not judging you on anything,” he replied, capturing my gaze and holding it. “I live in a house that’s full of six men. There’s fucking shit everywhere, any day of the week.” He shrugged. “We all get sick of it by the weekend and then we get in and tidy it up, only to make a huge damn mess again the next week. You’re not some 1950s housewife. You’re a teacher, a professional.”

“And that means I should be on top of things!” I said, throwing up my hands. “But I’m not.” I grabbed a chair and sank down into it. “I’m really not.”

“Yes, you are.”

He was saying the shit that Coll always said and it made me bristle. But then two massive hands landed on my shoulders, the thumbs rubbing along the muscles to try and loosen them, but I didn’t want them to relax. I wanted them tight, tight, tight, something I could hold onto, so I straightened up, ready to push him away.

“I fucked up.”

I blinked, hearing his words, but not really understanding them until too late.

“I made you feel uncomfortable and in your own home. You’re already feeling vulnerable.”

Well, I was now. I hadn’t been before and the part of me that longed for such things mourned the loss of all that golden warmth. But the other half? I’d been expecting that wonderful sense of joy to leave. And what I knew was that when it left, it would be replaced by the opposite feeling.

I felt a sense of hopelessness every time I looked at this table. I’d heard the term ‘doom piles’ on social media and had assumed it was that dark feeling they were describing. And then I found out that it meant Didn’t Organise, Only Moved, and that hit harder. I felt stuck in this weird kind of junk shuffle, where I moved stuff, ready to put it all away and have the kind of Marie Kondo life I fantasised about, only to get part of the way through and get hit by this debilitating wave of bad feeling until I was forced to stop.

I was smart, I was rational, and this shit right here did not fit with either one of those things. And every day I woke up and saw the table, it reminded me of my failure to do the simplest of things. I let out a noisy huff, frowning as I got to my feet and then started on the closest pile.

Bills, bills, more bills were in this one, but at least they were all paid. I’d managed that at least, but I needed to shift over to digital so I didn’t get paper ones cluttering my mailbox. I stopped for a moment as I looked at my utilities bill. Sometimes they were needed for ID, so maybe I should keep this one or…? No, I didn’t need it and I’d get another, so I’d—

“Ellie.”

I glanced at Tyson, then frowned, jerking my eyes back down to the pile of documents in my hands. Fuck it, I have time to toss the lot. There couldn't be anything useful in there. I hadn’t even looked at it for months and… I pulled out one, two, three, four different superannuation letters. Dammit. I needed to compile them all into the one superannuation account because I’d seen that news report about how much money people were losing through admin fees and… I’d be one of those older women, living out of their car because I didn’t get this shit organised. Like, how was that possible? They said the other day that older women were the fastest growing group of homeless people in Australia.

“Ellie?”

“What?” I snapped that out, my tone sounding way bitchier than I had intended. I flushed at that, then stared at him, unrepentant. He’d come into in my house, asking questions and now—

“You know how I said I could pick a lot up from your scent? Well, what I’m getting now?” He wrinkled his nose as if I stank and that had me surreptitiously tipping my head towards my armpit and taking a deep breath. “I’ve made you unhappy. Real unhappy. As I said, I fucked up, and if there’s no coming back from that, I’ll go. I never meant…”

It was the hopelessness in his eyes and his tone that seemed to cut through the whirl inside my mind. I stopped then and took a deep breath in then held it. After that I breathed out for what felt like the first time since he arrived.

“It’s OK.” I used the same voice I did with the kids, which wasn’t right, but my head had switched lanes too abruptly to pitch it better. “It’s not your fault. In most homes you could reasonably expect to be able to sit down at the table for dinner and you can’t in mine. I get… busy and just leave shit everywhere and then when I come to tackle the problem later, I get completely overwhelmed, until the point that I decide enough is enough. Then I go too far the other way and want to create the perfect organisational system that will mean I never have to deal with this shit again.”

I smiled then, a real one, even if it was a little sad.

“Of course, that’s never going to be the case. If one of my students said that, I’d be telling them they had unrealistic expectations, but it's different with adults, right?”

“Sometimes.” He smiled back at me and something inside me lightened. “Look, we could sit in the lounge room or I could go or—”

“Nope.” I picked up the pile of bills and marched over to the recycling bin and dumped the lot in there. That felt strangely liberating and also really terrifying. But apparently I was gonna feel the fear and do it anyway. I moved back to the table and picked up a different pile, feeling a massive stream of thoughts build up in my brain, reminding me of what was in there and why it was there and why it needed to be separate from the others, before I dumped it on top of another pile, achieving my immediate goal.

We now had two empty places at the table. I sat down at one chair and then gestured for Tyson to take the other. He did, settling down, bowl in front of him, but he used the spoon to just circle around in his food, rather than as a means to help him eat it.

“Why did you come here?” I asked him bluntly. At some point shame had seemed to just burn away, as I accepted its presence as a constant one in my life.

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