Do you know the show’s premise? A real estate agent, interior designer, and a couple with a checklist of needs who must choose between a new house and their old remodeled. Pull up stakes? Or reframe the past and forego a never-inhabited future? I’ve been trying to let go of habits that linger like garage-sale remains: the need to patch your roof, fix your flashing. As though we could fool the rain. Some rooms are unlovable. I could redecorate (call this hunger “fasting”) or move somewhere with an open floor plan, no wall between how I’m feeling and what you’re seeing. Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need. Every time your face says “stop talking,” and I want to leave—how do I decide if I don’t even have a list of boxes to tick? One partner on Love It or List It always asks for a giant laundry room, where the systole and diastole whoosh of the washer-dryer masks any sound, a gentle sac for the release of secretions, where I can float among the folded piles, warm and soothing as a mother’s voice muffled by viscera.
Brandel France de Bravo is the author of two poetry collections, co-author of a parenting book, and the editor of a bilingual anthology of Mexican poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in various publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Green Mountains Review, and Gulf Coast. She is a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training,© a program developed at Stanford University.
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