Sometimes I go to the kitchen, make tea, and forget that I did. I’ll look down an hour later and see the cup sitting there like a sad, dark eye. It reminds me of these lines from James Wright:

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Waste is a kind of sin. Isn’t it better that God strike down an apple tree – that an orchard of blind apples goes up in flames wrought by summer lightning – than that one pinkish Fuji rot in my fridge?

There is something about waste that transcends cost, that surpasses infinitely the sum of its matter. It’s a failure of love, a failure of life. The apple, ripe with its Biblical allusion, was born to be eaten. It’s the only way it can live on; an apple’s eternity – and often an idea’s – depends on such subsumption. This tea, which I am still drinking despite its tepidity, is far too close for comfort to the ennui of a late spring late evening, failing to write or to thrive.

I mean it would be that way, if it really was that way. Maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m just a little bored and in a mood to watch myself write. (Some bigtime words in this post.)

And my tea got cold, is my point.