Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,66

reminded of it every time I go visit a friend who’s, oh, you know, just doing a DIY remodel of the guest bathroom. LOL, WHAT. How did you learn to make a wall? We learned colors and shapes at the same time in elementary school! When between Elmer’s Glue and yesterday did you figure out how to do a baseboard? (I’m still over here hoping beyond hope that no one will notice that I don’t actually wash those.) Life was so much simpler when I could look at all my possessions at the same time from my bed, when my kitchen touched both my bedroom and the closet, and I didn’t have to worry about a beeping noise coming from the basement after I’d already climbed all the way to the top of the second-floor staircase to go to bed. I like it when the wiring is someone else’s problem, when I can submit a maintenance request through the management company’s website and come home at the end of the workday to a faucet that doesn’t drip anymore. I don’t have “Turn the Broom Closet into a Home Office in Seven Easy Steps” money just lying around! And even if I did, who is going to tell me which pliers to get? When am I going to have time to learn how to use a level or pour my own concrete? Girl, I am not Bob Vila. I don’t know shit about crown molding. And I’m not building a temperature-controlled cellar for this cheap-ass Costco wine.

we almost got a fucking dog

Helen died and immediately began haunting me from cat hell.

So I don’t know what I actually believe about ghosts. Basically, I believe in them when it works in my favor, and the thought of them doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. For example, if I feel an odd breeze in a windowless place and can’t immediately locate a silent fan or heating vent, I am willing to believe that maybe a ghost is blowing on me. If I’m home alone and feel a little prickle on my scalp and can determine that there aren’t any bugs crawling on me…Okay, sure! Maybe there is a benevolent spirit floating around reading that Atlantic article I’m pretending to understand over my shoulder! But if you were to suggest that my dead mother might be looming, invisible, overhead, disgustedly judging what I eat and choose to masturbate to, then I would confidently inform you that Ghost Dad isn’t a real movie and that most of the clips with “mature” tags on Pornhub that I have bookmarked on my phone are very tastefully shot.

The morning after my cat Helen was euthanized, I was in the kitchen performing some well-deserved self-care by making myself a delicious and nourishing meal (microwaving something from the Hot Pockets family of products) while drinking a diet water and minding my own fucking business, when I felt the air around my swollen ankles grow cold. I looked around, shuddering as I waited for the thing that had obviously come to kill me to show its evil face. Sunlight poured through the window over the sink, heat radiated from the hot oven, Peabo Bryson warbled warmly from the countertop speaker that doesn’t really work: all in all, I was in a downright pastoral setting, straight out of a ’50s-era sitcom, and definitely not in the kind of place you’d expect some rotten, rapidly decomposing corpse to come shambling into. I mean, do ghosts even like Crystal Light?

For weeks after that, I’d walk into a room and see a clinically obese gray shadow lurking ominously in a corner near the floor, or catch a whiff of off-brand tuna in the air where I’d least expect it. Could a pair of my moldy underpants that had accidentally fallen behind the hamper and been lodged there for days be the cause of the fish-market smell wafting from my bedroom? Of course! But is it also completely plausible that it might be the stench left behind by a rancid cat ghost? Absolutely.

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An aside:

Years ago, right after I moved into my last apartment in Chicago, the one I expected to die alone in to the soundtrack of an NCIS marathon, I thought I had a ghost. Several nights a week, I would be awakened from a dead sleep by this—I don’t